I write in response to:
"The 2014 PPWT: a new draft but with the same and different problems" by Michael Listner and Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan.
I wholeheartedly concur with the authors. If a grad student handed in a treaty like the Sino-Russian draft outer space prevention of the placement of weapons treaty (PPWT), I would give it a grade of "C." Given that it is the collective product of two foreign minsitries, I give it an "F." It is very far from being a proposal that would receive serious consideration; rather, it is a facile propaganda ploy that plays to a credulous disarmament community.
I think it is useful to look at Russo-American strategic offensive weapons treaties as models for the sort of detail and complexity that we should expect to find in a credible space weapons treaty proposal. Here is my rough cut at what I think such a treaty would look like:
Draft Treaty on the Prohibition of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects
The Sino-Russian PPWT is little more than five pages of vague language without any protocol or annex to provide necessary specificity. My draft treaty runs 17 pages; its protocol, which is a work in progress, runs 315 pages, most of which is boilerplate in which the states parties would provide required information:
Draft Protocol to the Treaty on the Prohibition of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects
A fully fleshed out protocol might well run more than a thousand pages. This is of course a purely academic exercise, as there is zero probability that China would ever agree to the intrusive inspection and verification regime that is sine qua non to any arms control treaty (although Russia has agreed to such a regime in the 2010 New START treaty). It's really nothing more than my way of telling China (and Russia) to, as Arthur Goldberg once indelicately put it in the UN Security Council, "put up or shut up."
Please be advised that I wrote this draft treaty as a trilateral agreement among China, Russia, and the United States. Adding to the treaty the other dozen or so states that are also capable of developing space weapons would further increase the length of the protocol.
Now that I have made your head ache, for a good laugh see:
Outer Space Security and Development Treaty
This one would get a "mercy D minus" in my undergraduate class.
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