Authorising Planetary Defence

ARGUS-PD/POD-7K Paper II defers the civil-authorisation questions raised by a hypothetical fixed seven-kilometre electromagnetic planetary-defence research system to a companion legal paper that the series did not yet contain. This paper is that companion. It characterises the hypothetical system under Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty: a conventional-kinetic research device sits outside the weapons-of-mass-destruction prohibition of Article IV(1), while Article IV(2) excludes emplacement or testing on the Moon and other celestial bodies regardless of civil labelling. The operative regime is Article VI authorisation and continuing supervision, with registration and liability analysed for the unsettled case of objects launched from an orbiting platform, where liability is fault-based in space but absolute for damage on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft in flight. The paper engages the strongest counter-position — Koplow's argument that existing law already prohibits debris-creating destructive testing — and shows the design is robust to either resolution. Its principal contribution is an independent-oversight model in which authorisation advances only through the technical series' own evidence gates: licence stages keyed to published numeric falsification thresholds; executed uncertainty quantification and the sharpest independently identified physical screens as the evidence standard; a verifiable reproducibility deposit; and published gate outcomes. The model is offered as policy consistent with existing law, not as existing law; the executed technical analysis it would consume is planned future work in the technical series. Working draft v0.3.0 — circulated for comment. Not yet submitted for peer review.