TEHRAN - Kazem Gharib Abadi, Iran’s representative to the Vienna-based international organizations, announced on Saturday that Tehran is against any kind of arms race in the space.

“Iran is strongly against any kind of arms race in the space or deployment of weapons including conventional and mass killing ones. Iran is strongly against militarization of space,” he said in a meeting with Director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) Simonetta Di Pippo in Vienna on Saturday.

Gharib Abadi said Iran attaches great importance to international cooperation for a peaceful use of the space.

Space should be used for discovery and peaceful purposes by the UN member states, he noted.

The militarization of space is the placement and development of weaponry and military technology in outer space. The early exploration of space in the mid-20th century had, in part, a military motivation, as the United States and the Soviet Union used it as an opportunity to demonstrate ballistic missile technology and other technologies having the potential for military application, according to Wikipedia.

Reportedly, the U.S. plans to create a “Space Force” as the sixth branch of the U.S. military were announced on Thursday.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence called for the establishment of a Space Force by 2020.

He said that the first steps the Pentagon will take to stand up a separate Space Force is to codify an elite group of troops to provide “space expertise in times of crisis”, Politico reported.

“The time has come to write the next great chapter in the history of our armed forces, to prepare for the next battlefield where America's best and bravest will be called to deter and defeat a new generation of threats to our people, to our nation,” Press TV quoted him as saying.

NA/PA