Today, while private, for-profit US companies perfect a space taxi that may replace the shuttle program, our uneasy partner Russia ferries America’s astronauts to and from the International Space Station for a steep fee: about $71 million per seat for a round trip through 2016, increasing to $82 million under the next contract.45 Since Russia is, for the time being, the only game in town, that price increase is not a shock. Just supply and demand at work.
Today, unless they’re lucky enough to have been hired there or to have European collaborators, American particle physicists wistfully gaze across the Atlantic Ocean and over the Alps at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland—the most powerful accelerator ever built, in which controlled conditions that rival the earliest high-energy moments of the Big Bang have yielded evidence of the long-sought subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. They’re wistful because Europe’s collider is only a fifth as powerful as America’s Superconducting Super Collider would have been, had Congress not cut the entire project in 1993, a few short years after peace broke out between the United States and the Soviet Union. A tale worth telling.
In the 1970s, astrophysicists came to realize that the dense, hot conditions of the infant universe, fourteen billion years in the past, could be recreated within a particle accelerator. The higher the energy attained by the accelerator, the closer scientists could get to the Big Bang itself.
The key to attaining ever-higher energies is to generate ever-stronger magnetic fields, which accelerate charged particles to stupendously high speeds. The ring of the accelerator becomes a particle racetrack. Slam the particles into one another from opposite directions, and brand-new particles are birthed—some predicted, others unimagined. By the 1980s, the introduction of superconducting materials enabled accelerators to generate significantly stronger magnetic fields and thus even more wildly energetic collisions.
Currently the US Department of Energy controls seventeen national science laboratories. Often aligned with universities, some have particle accelerators, each more powerful than its predecessors. Notable labs on this list include Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Lab in California and the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois, as well as Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, managed by the University of California; Oak Ridge National Lab, managed by the University of Tennessee; and Brookhaven National Lab in New York, associated with Stony Brook University. These institutions employ bevies of engineers and teams of high-energy particle physicists hunting for the fundamental structure of matter.
Has the United States funded and engaged in this kind of research purely for the sake of discovery? Hardly. Most American accelerators were built during the Cold War, when the particle physicist was a vital resource for increasing the lethality of nuclear weapons. That’s how astrophysics—specifically astro-particle physics, a branch of cosmology—became an auxiliary beneficiary of Cold War science priorities. Astrophysics and the military are conjoined whether their shared buoy bobs up or down in the tidewaters of politics.
In the fall of 1987, past the midway point of his second term, President Ronald Reagan approved construction of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), which the chair of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee called “the biggest public works project in the history of the United States.” Fifty-four miles in circumference, the SSC needed a big enough state with large swaths of relatively unpopulated areas whose deep-down geology would tolerate tunneling. Texas—specifically, the town of Waxahachie, situated above the geological formation known as the Austin Chalk—won the eight-state competition. At twenty times the energy of any previous or planned collider in the world, the SSC would be an engineering marvel, assuring American leadership in particle physics for decades to come. And with an initial price tag of $4.4 billion, it would be the most expensive accelerator ever built.46
Two years later, the Berlin Wall came down; two years after that, the Soviet Union dissolved. Cold War funding enthusiasm evaporated. By February 1993 the US General Accounting Office had prepared a document for Congress titled simply “Super Collider Is Over Budget and Behind Schedule.”47 In June 1993, project managers were called in front of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, not to defend the value of the collider in terms of its contributions to the frontier of physics but, much more important to the members of the subcommittee, to defend it against detailed charges of mismanagement.48 In peacetime, cost overruns and poor administration were seen as fatal blows to the project rather than as the normal speed bumps of creating something never before created.
Congress’s October 1993 decision to cancel funding for the SSC, two years after construction began, did not explicitly say, “We won the Cold War, so we don’t need physicists and their expensive toys anymore.” Rather, the grounds cited were cost overruns and shifting national priorities. Besides, at a comparable price tag, Texas was getting the new space station, headquartered at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Two major, congressionally approved projects in one state during peacetime was a hard sell.49
Pushed aside during all this oversight were the cosmologists—hidden casualties of peace. Our species’ understanding of the greatest explosion ever, the event that created the universe itself, was thwarted because a half-century-long standoff that held humanity hostage to the world’s most explosive weapons had ended.
Just because America pulls the plug on a scientific project doesn’t mean research, planning, and hoping come to a screeching halt elsewhere in the world. Other nations, developed and developing, have begun to pick up where the United States has left off. Leading the way is China, contributing more than 31 percent between 2000 and 2015 to the growth of worldwide research and development spending, while the United States contributed 19 percent.50
Buffed by the ambitions, creativity, and war-inspired innovations of the twentieth century, America’s high-gloss technological and scientific self-image blinds us to the Dorian Gray reality of our times. Hierarchies have been reordered before. It’s happened in art, in commerce, in exploration, in sports. Why shouldn’t it happen in space? Some commentators presume it’s already happened, and that henceforth America will aim no higher than the creation and aggressive marketing of minor consumer products that replace similar, and perfectly satisfactory, consumer products. “America may be losing a competitive edge in many enterprises, from cars to space,” riffed National Public Radio host Scott Simon in the summer of 2010, “but as long as we can devise a five-bladed, mineral-oil-saturated razor, we face the future well-shaved.”51
That the United States could someday be a secondary, supplicant nation, begging for a seat at Europe’s or China’s decision table, is not the America that most Americans want. To the patriot, the thought is repellent.52 To the policymaker, it’s frightening. To the student, it’s deflating. The February 2001 report of the Hart–Rudman Commission on national security, for instance, minces no words on the matter:
Second only to a weapon of mass destruction detonating in an American city, we can think of nothing more dangerous than a failure to manage properly science, technology, and education for the common good over the next quarter century. . . . America’s international reputation, and therefore a significant aspect of its global influence, depends on its reputation for excellence in these areas. U.S. performance is not keeping up with its reputation. Other countries are striving hard, and with discipline they will outstrip us.
This is not a matter merely of national pride or international image. It is an issue of fundamental importance to national security. . . . Complacency with our current achievement of national wealth and international power will put all of this at risk.53
Half a decade later, the Competitiveness Index: Where America Stands, a twenty-year overview published by the Council on Competitiveness, also sounded the alarm. While noting America’s position as the world’s largest economy and its responsibility for one-third of global economic growth from 1986 to 2005, among other achievements, the report
marshals reams of statistics showing that the future might not be so bright as the past. “America Still Leads the World in Science and Technology, But That Lead Is Narrowing,” reads one heading. Underneath it, bar graphs track the two-decade decline in the US share of total global activity in many categories, ranging from degrees awarded in science and engineering—a ten-point drop in bachelor’s degrees, a thirty-point drop in doctoral degrees—to the twelve-point drop in scientific researchers.54
As for the prospect of enduring American dominance in space, Joan Johnson-Freese, professor of national security studies at the US Naval War College, foresees only uncertainty. “There is no magic solution, no sudden discovery of warp drives or phaser beams or ion cannons, that will get us to such a secure future.”55
No question, America’s space program has had some major recent successes. But so have the space programs of China, India, Canada, and South Korea. The European Space Agency, Russia’s Roskosmos, and Japan’s JAXA are central to the collective space endeavor. Space programs have been operating for several decades in Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Egypt, Israel, Indonesia, North Korea, Pakistan, Peru, Turkey, Uruguay, and most countries in Western Europe. Bahrain, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, Turkmenistan, and the United Arab Emirates joined the list during the second decade of the current century. Australia and Sri Lanka will soon join as well. Altogether there are now more than seventy government-run space agencies. Some four dozen countries operate satellites. More than a dozen have launch facilities.
Intensive and successful, the Chinese space program is readily comparable to those of the United States and the Soviet Union in their better years. On January 11, 2007, when it sent a kinetic-kill vehicle more than eight hundred kilometers into space to destroy one of its own aged weather satellites in a direct hit, China in effect announced its status as a space power with potentially lethal capabilities. It could now deny another country freedom of operation in space.
The hit put tens of thousands of long-lived fragments into high Earth orbit, adding to the already considerable dangers posed by debris previously generated by other countries, notably ours. China was roundly criticized by other spacefaring nations for making such a mess; twelve days later, its foreign ministry declared that the action “was not directed at any country and does not constitute a threat to any country.” Hmm. That’s a little like saying the Soviet Union’s launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957 was not a threat—even though Sputnik’s booster rocket was an intercontinental ballistic missile, even though Cold Warriors had been thirsting for a space-based reconnaissance vehicle since the end of World War II, even though postwar Soviet rocket research had been focusing on the delivery of a nuclear bomb across the Pacific, and even though Sputnik’s peacefully pulsing radio transmitter was sitting where a nuclear warhead would otherwise have been.
Of course, among the many implications of China’s successful kill, one seemed unmissable: a US spy satellite or a bit of US missile-defense hardware orbiting at the same altitude could just as easily have been the target. General T. Michael Moseley, the US Air Force Chief of Staff, called the Chinese achievement a “strategically dislocating event.” If you can hit a six-foot-long object at five hundred miles, he said, you can “certainly hit something out beyond 20,000 miles. It’s just a physics problem.”56
Since then, space has only become more crowded, militarized, and globalized. More dislocation seems inevitable, and more cooperation essential.
Nearly three thousand years ago, architects, stonemasons, sculptors, and slaves built a breathtaking palace complex for the Assyrian ruler Ashurnasirpal II in the ancient city of Kalhu, some three hundred kilometers north of modern-day Baghdad. Wall panels from the Northwest Palace now hang in the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Carved in bas-relief on the panels are muscled archers, charging chariots, stricken lions, supplicants bearing tribute, and other iterations of victory. Across the center of each panel in the British Museum runs a cuneiform text, the so-called Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal, proclaiming the ruler’s invincibility:
. . . the great King, the mighty King, King of Assyria; the valiant man, who acts with the support of Ashur, his lord, and has no equal among the princes of the four quarters of the world; . . . the King who makes those who are not subject to him submissive; who has subjugated all mankind; the mighty warrior who treads on the neck of his enemies, tramples down all foes, and shatters the forces of the proud; the King who acts with the support of the great gods, and whose hand has conquered all lands, who has subjugated all the mountains and received their tribute, taking hostages and establishing his power over all countries . . .57
Invincibility does have its limits, however. Ashurnasirpal II’s kin ruled northern Mesopotamia for two centuries. The Assyrian empire and the great palaces at Kalhu, later called Nimrud, endured for a century more. Today Nimrud’s glory exists only within the walls of Western museums. In 2007, with the onset of the US “troop surge,” the Iraqi city of Mosul, Nimrud’s nearest neighbor, became a place where gunmen would fire on a wedding procession and nine unidentified bodies could be delivered to the morgue in a single day. In 2014, with the advance of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, Mosul became a ruin from which the inhabitants had to flee and where the US-trained Iraqi army scattered like powder in the wind. By July 2017, when Iraq’s prime minister arrived in the broken city to declare victory over ISIS, New York Times headlines were announcing, “Civilians Emerge from Mosul’s Rubble Starving, Injured and Traumatized” and “Basic Infrastructure Repair in Mosul Will Cost Over $1 Billion: U.N.” And the archaeological treasures that ISIS had not already looted had mostly been smashed to bits.
The praise of Ashurnasirpal was praise of empire. The inscription paints him as “an uncommanded commander,” to borrow a phrase from John Horace Parry, the distinguished British historian of European empire. In 1971 Parry noted that in the second half of the twentieth century, “some major western states, notably the United States of America, whose political traditions included a profound suspicion of imperialism, found themselves drawn, with much misgiving, into widespread ventures and responsibilities of a quasi-imperial kind.”58 Yet as the century drew to a close, many political thinkers and commanders relinquished their misgivings, in effect dropping the “quasi-” from “imperial.” They acquired the habit of proclaiming America’s capacity to subjugate its foes on Earth and broadcasting its intentions to suppress them in space. Parry might have applied the word “dominion,” the original meaning of imperium.
Today it is mostly fantasists who praise empire, and video gamers who hunger for it. The late American political essayist and novelist Gore Vidal, a witty lefty patrician, made American empire a prime target, evidenced in titles such as The Last Empire (2001) and Imperial America: Reflections of the United States of Amnesia (2004). The late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an East Asia specialist who gave us the useful term “blowback,” is another writer whose works evinced disillusionment with the course of US foreign policy: The Sorrows of Empire (2004), Dismantling the Empire (2010). J. M. Coetzee, a South African writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, presented an especially tragic view of empire in his 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians. Near the end of the novel the main character, a discredited petty functionary who once oversaw a nameless walled outpost, accuses empire of preoccupation with a single thought: “how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.”59
In a less literary portrayal of the workings of empire, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ron Suskind recounted his meeting in 2002 with a senior advisor to George W. Bush, who upbraided the author for a recent article and then dismissed his work in a way that, as Suskind realized only later, captured “the very heart of the Bush presidency”:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe th
at solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” 60
Despite the bluster, Americans might be going the way of the Assyrians, not to speak of the Romans or the Maya or the Ottomans. By the end of the twenty-first century’s opening decade, references to the disappearing American empire had become commonplace in platforms across much of the political spectrum. New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd colorfully observed on October 11, 2008, following the Dow’s worst week of its life till then: “With modernity crumbling, our thoughts turn to antiquity. The decline and fall of the American Empire echoes the experience of the Romans, who also tumbled into the trap of becoming overleveraged empire hussies.”61 Long before the word “empire” began popping up in the Times, journalists, scholars, Baghdad bureau chiefs, former CIA higher-ups, counterterrorism experts, historians, and political commentators of every stripe began to sprinkle their writing and their titles with it, occasionally linking it with “hubris.” So pervasive had these terms become that in mid-2008, a Yahoo! stock blog depicted investors as wondering “if the dollar’s swoon signals a much longer-term displacing of the global American empire” and proposed “Portfolio Adjustments for the End of the American Empire.”62
Accessory to War Page 4
