Accessory to War

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  Small problem: deterrence based simply on armaments may not succeed with every adversary. Some leaders may be undeterrable. Some may be smitten with fantasies of supremacy. No matter how lethal and savage the weapons, at least a few people envision circumstances in which they would be ready to use them. In fact, being seen as ready and willing to use those weapons might serve as an important component of deterrence.

  Most analysts concede that an all-out space war is a remote possibility. Most of the weapons to conduct it don’t yet exist, and the dangers to one’s own territory, population, and satellites are colossal. Nevertheless, argues a former science and technology specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, putting a few weaponized vehicles into low Earth orbit would be an exquisitely effective deterrent:

  Space-based weapons would . . . provid[e] the ability to exercise gunboat-style diplomatic pressure anywhere on the globe, continuously and instantly. Currently grossly underappreciated, but no doubt soon to be realized, is the fact that space weapons will afford countries an omnipresent ability to influence the politics of other states by the mere possibility of force application.193

  What about diplomacy not of the gunboat variety? Very iffy, even though indispensable. Diplomatic negotiations are never easy and are rarely a guarantee of lasting peace. Existing international agreements on outer space can be ignored. Diplomats can have too little room to maneuver and too few carrots to offer. Adversaries can be driven by fervor, enmity, or denial to the point of extreme inflexibility. Countries retain the right to renounce a treaty if and when its provisions come into conflict with the safeguarding of its national security.194 There’s also the option of just not ratifying a treaty, even if everyone else in the world has done so.

  On the other hand, while the exercise of national sovereignty may seem relatively straightforward down here on the surface of our planet, it’s almost unachievable in space. Space cannot (yet) be physically controlled by the military the way other battlespaces can. So nations don’t have much choice. When it comes to space, they must resort to diplomacy.195

  Another level of the diplomacy problem is that the Outer Space Treaty doesn’t cover every possible weapon or intervention. That’s one of the reasons so many countries and analysts have pushed for the broadening and clarification of its mandates and for a comprehensive definition of “space weapon.” The orbiting of conventional weapons (kinetic-energy or directed-energy) is not explicitly forbidden by the Outer Space Treaty. Electronic interference, including interference with ground-based control of spacecraft, is not forbidden. Ballistic missiles that merely pass through space but don’t achieve orbit are not forbidden. Antisatellite weapons launched from land, sea, or air are not forbidden. Space-based ballistic missile defense systems are not forbidden. The testing of antisatellite weapons in space is not forbidden. Orbital weapons based on cutting-edge physical principles (quantum entanglement, particle beams) would be permissible as long as they couldn’t be characterized as weapons of mass destruction. Parasitic microsatellites and space mines would not be forbidden. Vehicles that would descend from orbit to attack terrestrial targets would not be forbidden. Short-term “pop-up maneuvers” in space would be permissible. On top of all this, verification and inspection remain thorny issues.196

  All these omissions and limitations cause one to wonder how conducive to personal, national, or global security the Outer Space Treaty can be. Consider the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. The CTBT was an international diplomatic effort to extend and strengthen the watershed 1963 Limited Test-Ban Treaty. What the CTBT obligates its signatories to do is “not to carry out,” “to prohibit and prevent,” and “to refrain from causing, encouraging, or in any way participating in the carrying out” of “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.” It sounds comprehensive, especially given the phrase “any other nuclear explosion.” But this is a ban on testing, not on weapons. It focuses on monitoring, on-site inspection, and verification, and there are several giant loopholes. One is simply the term “explosion.” Preparations for an explosion are perfectly acceptable, just not an actual explosion, and experiments don’t necessarily include explosions. Another loophole is that, under the oft-invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter, the use of weapons for purposes of self-defense is perfectly reasonable (“the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs”), so the use of “defensive” nuclear weapons is not explicitly prohibited by the CTBT. A third loophole is that countries are perfectly free to keep a stockpile of nuclear weapons, and many do.197 In any case, before the CTBT can become a tenet of international law, forty-four specified countries must not only sign but also ratify it. Of those forty-four, three have not even signed it, and another five—including the United States and China—have signed but not ratified it.198

  By comparison, the Outer Space Treaty has wide support: a hundred-plus states have ratified it or confirmed support through an equivalent process, and twenty-plus have signed but not ratified it. Might this be in part because weapons of mass destruction continually circling Earth a thousand miles above our planet’s residents are—and are seen as—so much more dangerous to everybody and everything than such weapons sitting on Earth’s surface?

  The political options going forward are not numerous. We can have continued diplomatic efforts, unceasing military escalation, unceasing public protests, actual violence, or a state of permanent, paralyzing fear—mostly the same options envisioned in NSC 68 seventy years ago.

  Diplomacy is a state-sanctioned, elaborate version of talking. It’s how one approaches adversaries, rivals, neighbors, rogues, and bullies. As East Asia historian Bruce Cumings has said, “It’s not something you do among friends.”199 If every person thought, felt, believed, and wanted exactly the same things, if individual, corporate, and national interests were always completely congruent, if priorities never shifted, if there were no such thing as a conflict of interest or a thirst for power, then diplomacy would be unnecessary. But when conflict looms, survival demands decades-long, on-again-off-again efforts at diplomacy, even if successes are sporadic and outcomes amount to little more than a few brief ceasefires or slightly fewer weapons in Earth orbit.

  In 1935, best-selling author Sinclair Lewis wrote the dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here, which depicts the US presidential election of 1936—an election that transforms the nation into a repressive, heavily militarized dictatorship. Most of Lewis’s characters are bigoted, small-minded, small-town Real Americans. Very early in the novel the reader meets Brigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways, U.S.A. (ret.), who is delivering after-dinner remarks at a Rotary Club fête in the town of Fort Beulah, Vermont, on a spring evening half a year before the election. His topic is “Peace through Defense.”

  “For the first time in all history,” proclaims General Edgeways, “a great nation must go on arming itself more and more, not for conquest—not for jealousy—not for war—but for peace!” However, urged by the other after-dinner speaker, an indefatigable Daughter of the American Revolution, to “ ’fess up!” and admit that “a war might be a good thing,” the general answers,

  I better confess that while I do abhor war, yet there are worse things. Ah, my friends, far worse! A state of so-called peace, in which labor organizations are riddled, as by plague germs, with insane notions out of anarchistic Red Russia! A state in which college professors, newspapermen, and notorious authors are secretly promulgating these same seditious attacks on the grand old Constitution! A state in which, as a result of being fed with these mental drugs, the People are flabby, cowardly, grasping, and lacking in the fierce pride of the warrior! No, such a state is far worse than war at its most monstrous!

  . . . What I’d really like us to do would be to come out and tell the whole world: “Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own excuse!”200

  Back in 1935, power was less powerful than it is today. It had fewer weapons at i
ts disposal. It could do less damage. Today we have both megalomaniacs and megaweapons. We have elected officials who invoke the pro-armaments motto “Peace through strength” and talk about “not taking any cards off the table.”

  Fortunately, we also have spacefarers from many nations living, talking, and investigating biology and chemistry and medical research and astrophysics cheek by jowl on the International Space Station for months at a time—a test case for peace through cohabitation and collaboration. The space station is their little world. Unlike their mobile contemporaries down here on Earth, they can’t up and leave at a moment’s notice. And when spacefarers look at Earth, the separate countries of the schoolroom globe are nowhere to be found. All they see are blue seas, green and tan landmasses, and the white of cloud tops and glaciers: one world, indivisible, humanity’s only home thus far.

  Some of us may be waiting for the chance to colonize Mars. Not happening tomorrow. In the meantime, maybe we could try pretending we’re astronauts—because in fact, considered in terms of the galaxy, not to mention the universe, we are.

  8

  SPACE POWER

  Power is the capacity to achieve a specified outcome. Its sources, trappings, abuses, and allure can be detected everywhere. Sometimes power itself is the goal. “Power is not a means, it is an end,” the mastermind of the Inner Party in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 tells his prisoner, a former skilled falsifier at the Ministry of Truth who has begun to exhibit a dangerous allegiance to facts. “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”1

  Whatever else power may be, it is not mysterious. Space, on the other hand, is. Its vastness challenges measurement and comprehension. Most of what drives it remains a puzzle, yet it contains everything we can ever hope to verify. It is unaffected by humankind. Ceaselessly in motion, space is the ultimate stage, presenting continual cycles of creation and destruction.

  Space power is about having the knowledge, the material capability, and the will to take strong, daring actions far beyond the limits of Earth’s atmosphere. When politicians talk about space power, they’re referencing nations that belong to the small but influential spacefarers club. When warfighters talk about it, they’re referencing the means to deter, defend, and destroy and also, if warranted, to deny adversaries access to space for their own military or even civil purposes.

  Space power enables communication, intimidation, surveillance, dominance, threat assessment, and, yes, scientific research in ways and at distances never before possible. It’s the prime agent of remote control and instant action. The space update of Mao Zedong’s aphorism “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” might be “political power grows out of the high ground of space.” Just as an eighteen-pound iron cannonball emboldened a dozen or so of General Washington’s revolutionary troops to attack a line of British soldiers from a clump of trees a mile away, so has the satellite enabled a fighter drone operated by an American pilot sitting in a shed near Las Vegas to attack insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan.

  The path to multi-spectrum space power is long, difficult, and costly. First comes science, then investigation, engineering, multiple failures, and eventual mastery. Finally the aspirants arrive at control and, if sought, occupation and exploitation. Contemporary China understands this sequence and has been willing to pay the tab. Today China boasts four spacecraft launch facilities, compared with three each in Russia and the United States, and for some years it has been chalking up about the same number of successful launches as the other two space powers. In the fall of 2016 China put its second space station into orbit and plans to assemble a large, multi-module station in orbit by the early 2020s. It also expects to land on the far side of the Moon and launch a probe to orbit and sample Mars.

  “Nations aspiring to global leadership in the 21st century must be space-faring,” says the 2002 report of the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry (on which I served).2 China obviously agrees with this assertion. In 2013 President Xi Jinping declared that “the space dream is an important component of realizing the Chinese people’s mighty dream of national rejuvenation.” Two ideas coalesce in Xi’s declaration: first, space power is key, not incidental, to overall power, and second, restoration of China’s former greatness is key to the greatness of its future and therefore its power.

  In that spirit, China released a series of twenty-first-century white papers announcing its intentions and accomplishments, so that the rest of the world could know how regularly the former turns into the latter. Before launching into its stunning portrayal of both progress and upcoming tasks, the 2006 white paper on space adopts a determined tone: “China has set the strategic goal of building itself into a well-off society in an all-round way, ranking it among the countries with the best innovative capabilities in the first 20 years of the 21st century.” The 2011 white paper on space again includes a roster of achievements and agenda items but states up front that “[t]he Chinese government makes the space industry an important part of the nation’s overall development strategy, and adheres to exploration and utilization of outer space for peaceful purposes” and that, having created the right conditions for rapid development of its space industry, “China [now] ranks among the world’s leading countries in certain major areas of space technology.” The 2015 white paper on military strategy characterizes space and cyberspace as “new commanding heights in strategic competition among all parties,” so that “[l]ong-range, precise, smart, stealthy and unmanned weapons and equipment are becoming increasingly sophisticated” and “[t]he form of war is accelerating its evolution to informationization.” The December 2016 white paper on space declares: “To explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is a dream we pursue unremittingly.” All these public statements stress that space—without which there would be no cyberspace—offers a coveted path toward comprehensive national power, a path China has been following at top speed in recent years.3

  Back in the USA in the 1960s, President Kennedy sent America along the same arc, at a similar speed and with resonant goals. In September 1962, after vowing that his nation would neither “founder in the backwash” of the space age nor tolerate space being “governed by a hostile flag of conquest,” he told the throngs at the Rice University stadium in Houston,

  [S]pace science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of preeminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.4

  A couple of months later, Kennedy met with a few top NASA officials at the White House to tell them in less soaring language why an American lunar landing had to happen without delay. To achieve American “preeminence in space,” he emphasized, going to the Moon had to become NASA’s “top priority project”:

  This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the Moon it’s nice but it’s like being second any time. . . .

  I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good, I think we ought to know about it, we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it in my opinion to do it in this time or fashion is because we hope to beat them [the Soviet Union] and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.5

  Kennedy’s demand couldn’t have been clearer: the United States must become nothing less than the supreme space power. And yes, the expenditures were fantastic.

  Less than seven years and $16 billion of Project Apollo spending later, Americans set their boots down in the Moon’s dusty regolith just as the US troop presence in Vietnam was hitting its all-time high of more than half a million. In 1965 and 1966, while NASA’s costly Moo
n-shot infrastructure was being built, total NASA spending exceeded 4 percent of total federal spending. Following the US lunar triumphs of 1969 through 1972, NASA’s share of federal spending has hovered around (and mostly below) 1 percent.6

  Plenty of US government expenditures on space don’t show up in NASA budgets, however. As you might suspect, the Department of Defense also has a space budget. In 2012 it was $27.5 billion—half again as much as NASA’s budget; in 2015 it was $23.6 billion—a third more. Far and away the world’s most lavish military spender overall, the United States is also the most lavish spender on military space. In 2008 America shelled out almost ten times as much as the rest of the world combined. And that doesn’t include spending on dual-use technology, which includes anything that can, with equal aplomb, carry out a nonmilitary task today and a military task tomorrow.7 By 2016, America’s military-space spending had fallen to twice that of all other countries combined. American spending dominance may level off further as other countries establish a stronger space presence, a recalibration likely to reverberate through international politics and investment.