Accessory to War

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  If a conflict occurs in the next five to 10 years, the long acquisition process for space systems and limited space-launch schedules will confine the main space systems involved to those now fielded. . . .

  Many works about space weapons quickly move from what the United States and its adversaries can do now to what they could possibly do soon, principally because few fielded terrestrial weapons can attack space assets and because no declared space-based attack assets exist. We could probably field a few promising technologies rapidly in wartime conditions, but as former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld commented, “You have to go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.” Fielded weapons include only the ones tested and turned over to military forces trained to employ them as an integrated part of battlefield forces. . . .

  The United States has just one counterspace weapon—an electronic countercommunication system specifically designed and fielded with the intent of disrupting enemy satellite communications. . . .

  After all the hype about space warfare and space weapons, an examination of currently fielded forces capable of direct counterspace operations against satellites clearly shows that few countries can conduct this type of warfare. Most threats envisioned in the US military’s space doctrine simply do not exist in an operationally deployed form.14

  That last contention apparently still holds.

  The opening sentence of an eight-page white paper produced by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security in September 2015 reads: “Today’s space architectures, designed and deployed under conditions more reflective of nuclear warfighting deterrence than conventional warfighting sustainability, lack, in general, the robustness that would normally be considered mandatory in such vital warfighting services.”15 Recast into everyday English, this is a complaint that America can’t readily wage a space war.

  Deep within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2017, we discover that Congress’s findings as of December 2016 included:

  “The advantages of the United States in national security space are now threatened to an unprecedented degree by growing and serious counterspace capabilities of potential foreign adversaries, and the space advantages of the United States must be protected.”

  “The Department of Defense has recognized the threat and has taken initial steps necessary to defend space, however the organization and management may not be strategically postured to fully address this changed domain of operations over the long term.”

  “Space elements provide critical capabilities to all of the Armed Forces in the joint fight, however the disparate activities throughout the Department have no single leader that is empowered to make decisions affecting the space forces of the Department.”16

  Again, in everyday English: US dominance in space is a thing of the past, and the future defense of US space assets will require restructuring of the military.

  Following the high point of the Apollo program’s Moon landings, there’s been an enduring chasm between rhetoric and realization, between grandiose mandate and inadequate follow-through—a lot of PR and not much implementation. For more than a decade, US space policy was shaped by the combative tone of the Rumsfeld Commission’s final report, which crystallized a view of outer space as a potential battleground. Notwithstanding some twenty occurrences of the words “peace” or “peaceful” in the report, its stance is anything but:

  “The Commissioners believe the U.S. Government should vigorously pursue the capabilities . . . to ensure that the President will have the option to deploy weapons in space to deter threats to and, if necessary, defend against attacks on U.S. interests.”

  “In the coming period, the U.S. will conduct operations to, from, in and through space in support of its national interests both on earth and in space.”

  “Unlike weapons from aircraft, land forces or ships, space missions initiated from earth or space could be carried out with little transit, information or weather delay. Having this capability would give the U.S. a much stronger deterrent and, in a conflict, an extraordinary military advantage.”17

  This report, followed a few weeks later by the start of Rumsfeld’s stint as President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, sounded the alarm bell abroad in somewhat the same way as have the campaign comments, acerbic tweets, and unrestrained threats of nuclear escalation made more recently by President Donald J. Trump.18 The director of the Arms Control Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, for instance, noted in 2003, “We have seen some explicit moves in the United States in recent years in preparing for space wars,” including directives to the military “to engage in organization, training and equipment for swift, continuous, offensive and defensive space operations” and initiatives for the corporate development of “weapons for offensive space operations.” He concluded that “US decision makers prefer war preparation in space rather than peaceful approaches” and “may believe that the US can certainly win a space war.”19

  Nobody can certainly win a space war, just as nobody can certainly win a war fought with nuclear weapons. Do you declare victory after all nukes have reached their targets, and you’ve got fewer incinerated cities than your enemy does? After almost two decades of the proliferation of both civilian and military space efforts by a number of countries, Rumsfeldian–Trumpian truculence on the part of the United States seems misplaced.20 As national security specialist Joan Johnson-Freese has written, “If technology could offer the United States a way to ‘control’ space, then pursuing that course would make sense. But it does not. Politicians do not want to hear that because they want to believe otherwise.”21 Nor do defense corporations want them to believe otherwise. As mandates, “space situational awareness,” “freedom of action in space,” “maintaining space superiority,” and “resilience of space architecture” yield reliable profits.

  Eventually, though, in one form or another, reality will intervene: economic, political, environmental, social, physical. When that happens, the United States will almost certainly be forced to adopt a more peaceable persona, simply because it cannot—nor can any other country—achieve the degree of space superiority, let alone space control, regularly envisioned by its military strategists not so very long ago.22 America in the foreseeable future is unlikely to satisfy such aspirations, and many in the military already acknowledge this.23 As a result, mastering the intricacies of calm coexistence will probably show up on the agenda well before the fruits of extractive forays to comets and asteroids succeed in quelling some of the salient sources of international tension.

  In the meantime, as you’d expect, people who are convinced that militarism does not promote national security or a safer world are not sitting on their hands waiting for a spontaneously generated peace or optimal conditions for a multilateral treaty on space weapons. Brian Weeden, a former Air Force officer with the US Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center, has been pushing for more easily achievable moves—the demilitarization and internationalization of space situational awareness, for instance. The Council of the European Union has come up with a code of space conduct that stresses safety and sustainability. A Canadian–Australian–Chinese–American partnership has been publishing an annual Space Security Index since 2004. A raft of civil society organizations are each doing their bit to keep space from becoming another combat zone.24

  Laudable goals. But at present we’re uncomfortably close to open season up there in near-Earth space. The old two-superpower spacescape is long gone. So, too, is the vision of America as the space hegemon. Multiple smaller nations and private companies are becoming spacefarers. New projects and problems keep presenting themselves: potentially profitable mining ventures, lucrative space tourism, an increasingly crowded geostationary Earth orbit for communications satellites, maneuverable satellites that could conceivably be used as attack vehicles, launch services for sale by competing countries, insufficient coverage in the five existing UN space treaties of issues releva
nt to private ventures, frequent but legally mushy invocation of the “global commons,” the reawakened nightmare of nuclear escalation and proliferation, everybody’s growing reliance on satellite capabilities. Space law does not enshrine a single firm definition of “space weapon.” There are no recognized borders marking territories in space. There’s no single entity, governmental or otherwise, that holds the mandate to keep order in space. The potential for both unprecedented conflict and unprecedented cooperation is considerable. Some of those who diagnose the state of national security advise diplomacy first, technology next, and a big dose of proactive prevention. Others point out that true space security is not about foregrounding the interests of particular countries or corporations, but the security and sustainability of outer space for all.25

  Among the three zones of Earth orbit—low, medium, and geosynchronous—you’ll find most space telescopes, Hubble included, circling in the low zone, LEO, between 250 and 400 miles above Earth’s surface. At these accessible altitudes, treasured orbital assets are vulnerable to attack by adversaries. But low Earth orbit is hardly the only zone of exploration available to the modern astrophysicist. The nature of the universe also reveals itself to the telescopes and probes we launch into the uncrowded, uncontested regions of deep space. And this is where full-spectrum collaboration abounds.

  Modern astrophysics is unlike most other sciences. The collective objects of astrophysical affection sail far above everyone’s head. They do not sit within the borders of one or even several countries—at least not until nations claim ownership of planets. Multiple researchers, scattered across the globe and hailing from historically conflicting nation-states, can study the same object at the same time with similar or complementary tools and telescopes, whether those instruments are based on the ground, circling a few hundred miles above Earth, or orbiting in deep space. Scientists’ urge to collaborate transcends religion, culture, and politics, because in space there is no religion, culture, or politics—only the receding boundary of our ignorance and the advancing frontier of our cosmic discovery.

  One of our chief tools has been the Hubble Space Telescope, by far the most fertile scientific instrument ever built. Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has yielded more than fifteen thousand research papers, written by collaborators in nearly every country of the world where astrophysicists reside, and those papers have generated three-quarters of a million (and counting) citations in peer-reviewed journals.26 Today Hubble has many extraordinary cousins, each hosting international collaborators.

  What things wondrous and strange have these astrophysicists discovered?

  Researchers from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States have found a colossal wave of hot gas—200,000 light-years wide, twice the width of the Milky Way, and so torrid it glows copiously in X-rays—that has been barreling through the supermassive Perseus cluster of galaxies for several billion years, caused by gravitational discombobulations from a smaller cluster grazing Perseus as it journeyed through space.

  A team of two dozen researchers—from Australia, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, led by an astrophysicist from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—has identified a promising exoplanetary candidate for alien life: LHS 1140B, a rocky, metal-cored planet a bit bigger than Earth that orbits in the habitable zone of a cool star and quite possibly has retained its atmosphere.

  The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)—a collaboration of more than a thousand scientists from more than a hundred institutions dispersed across eighteen countries—has detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes billions of light-years away.

  A huge team from Belgium, France, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, led by an astrophysicist from the University of Liège in Belgium, has identified a system of seven Earth-sized, probably rocky exoplanets—TRAPPIST-1—closely orbiting a single star whose surface temperature is less than half that of our Sun. Three of those exoplanets live in the habitable zone.

  Various permutations of astrophysicists from Canada, Chile, France, Israel, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States have been studying the quantum effects of the intense magnetic field surrounding a neutron star; a vast intergalactic void that is helping to propel our galaxy through space by repelling it; an as-yet-unexplained cool region in the cosmic microwave background (imprint from the Big Bang) that may offer the first evidence of the multiverse. They’ve found a large, dim, relatively nearby spheroidal galaxy, similar in total mass to the Milky Way, that was only recently discovered because 99.99 percent of it consists of dark matter. They’ve witnessed an interstellar asteroid, the solar system’s first visitor from elsewhere in the Milky Way, which plunged past the Sun and onward toward Mars at 300,000 kilometers per hour in the fall of 2017.

  Besides making discoveries, astrophysicists have speculated that aliens might use lasers to broadcast obviously purposeful signals of their existence that would be picked up by skywatchers carefully monitoring known and suspected exoplanets. Some of us also speculate that aliens may power their interstellar probes with continuous beams from gigantic star-powered radio transmitters, which might explain the brief, otherwise unexplained flashes of radio waves that have been picked up by Earth’s largest radio telescopes and that appear to come from billions of light-years away.

  True, some of our mind-altering discoveries and speculations may pique the interest of warfighters and weapons developers. But others may undermine any notion that such a thing as long-term space superiority would ever be possible.

  One mind-altering discovery that predates Hubble and all of its spaceborne cousins by decades was the origin of elements in the universe.

  Key atoms of our biochemistry and of all life on Earth are traceable to thermonuclear fusion in the hearts of stars. We exist in the universe, and the universe exists within us. This insight, this almost spiritual gift from twentieth-century research to modern civilization, did not arise from a lone, sleepless researcher’s eureka moment but rather from a seminal collaboration of four scientists during the 1950s.

  The origin and abundance of the chemical elements had been a long-standing mystery in modern astrophysics. Research into radioactivity—the natural transmutation of elements—led to strong suspicions that some kind of natural nuclear process lurked behind it all, perhaps the same nuclear process that liberated sufficient energy to keep the stars shining.

  In 1920, with the carnage of the Great War freshly ended, the English astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington offered prescient reflections on the source of stellar energy at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science:

  A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the subatomic energy which, it is known, exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service. The store is well-nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped. . . .

  If, indeed, the subatomic energy in the stars is being freely used to maintain their great furnaces, it seems to bring a little nearer to fulfillment our dream of controlling this latent power for the well-being of the human race—or for its suicide.27

  Major advances in quantum physics unfolded in the 1920s and continued through to 1932 with British physicist James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, a new subatomic particle. Until then, everything known about stellar structure had told us that, in spite of the extreme temperature and pressure in a star’s core, elements could not be forged there. But that didn’t stop Eddington from engaging in rational speculation or from commenting in his 1926 book The Internal Constitution of the Stars, “We do not argue with the critic who urges that the stars are not hot enough for this process; we tell him to go and find a hotter place.”28 Might he have been telling his detractors to go to hell?

  In any case, quant
um physics as it stood in the 1930s accounted for the basics of how the Sun converts hydrogen into helium, generating energy as a by-product. But the origin of all the heavier elements remained elusive. Nuclear weapons—developed by the Manhattan Project, in which Chadwick participated—would yield answers.

  The only way to know how atomic nuclei combine to make heavy nuclei under high temperatures and pressures, such as the state of affairs you’d find within the core of a star, is to study all the ways, all the places, and all the chances that one specified nucleus can slam into another specified nucleus. These so-called collision cross-sections can be theoretically estimated but, ideally, are measured directly in laboratory experiments.

  Fresh access to declassified nuclear physics data from World War II and from the flurry of nuclear bomb tests that followed (underground, on the ground, in the water, and in the air) became just the kind of laboratory needed. By the mid-1950s, enough data was available on what subatomic particles and atomic nuclei do when they collide for Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle to figure out how and why the life and explosive death of a star makes heavy elements.

  In a preview of that work, published early in 1957, Fowler reflects on the value of access to declassified data:

  [W]e think that [the element] californium-254 is produced in supernova explosions and that its especially energetic decay with a conveniently observable lifetime makes its presence stand out, but presumably other heavy elements are produced in a similar manner. . . . This highly unclassified result came to light within less than 4 weeks after the publication of the Bikini test results after a lapse of almost 4 years.29

  Twenty-three nuclear bombs were detonated by the United States at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific between 1946 and 1958.30 Displaced people. Radioactive terrain. Incinerated flora and fauna. A steep price to pay for data.