Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military PDF
Preview Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
ACCESSORY TO WAR THE UNSPOKEN ALLIANCE BETWEEN ASTROPHYSICS AND THE MILITARY NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON AND AVIS LANG To everybody who has ever wondered why astrophysicists have jobs at all Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends? —Abraham Lincoln CONTENTS Prologue SITUATIONAL AWARENESS 1. A Time to Kill 2. Star Power 3. Sea Power 4. Arming the Eye THE ULTIMATE HIGH GROUND 5. Unseen, Undetected, Unspoken 6. Detection Stories 7. Making War, Seeking Peace 8. Space Power 9. A Time to Heal Acknowledgments Notes Selected Sources Index PROLOGUE I n matters of battle, the role of science and technology often proves decisive, providing an asymmetric advantage whenever one side exploits this knowledge while the other side does not. The biologist, when enlisted for the war effort, may consider weaponizing bacteria and viruses; a rotting animal carcass catapulted over a castle wall during a siege may have been one of the first acts of biowarfare. The chemist, too, contributes—from the poisoned water-wells of antiquity, to mustard and chlorine gas during World War I, to defoliants and incendiary bombs in Vietnam and nerve agents in more contemporary conflicts. The physicist at war is an expert in matter, motion, and energy, and has one simple task: to take energy from here and put it over there. The strongest expressions of this role have been the atomic bombs of World War II and the more decisively deadly hydrogen fusion bombs that followed during the Cold War. Lastly, we have the engineer, who makes all things possible—enabling science to facilitate warfare. The astrophysicist, however, does not make the missiles or the bombs. Astrophysicists make no weapons at all. Instead, we and the military happen to care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion, access to space. The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions. Astrophysicists as a community, like most academics, are overwhelmingly liberal and antiwar, yet we are curiously complicit in this alliance. Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military explores this relationship from the earliest times of celestial navigation in the service of conquest and hegemony to the latest exploitations of satellite-enabled warfare. The idea for this book germinated in the early 2000s during my tour of duty serving on President George W. Bush’s twelve-member Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry. That exposure to members of Congress, Air Force generals, captains of industry, and political advisors from both sides of the aisle was a baptism on the inner workings of science, technology, and power within the US government. My experiences led me to imagine what such encounters might have been like over the centuries in whatever country happened to be leading the world in cosmic discovery and in war. Co-author Avis Lang is my longtime editor, from my days of contributing monthly essays to Natural History magazine. An art historian by training, Avis is a consummate researcher and an avid writer, with a deep interest in the universe. This book is a collaboration, a fusion of our talents. We each compensate for the weaknesses of the other. But the book got done because of Avis’s sustained commitment to examining the role of science in society, as expressed in the printed word. The reader will notice that in certain passages, such as here, first-person singular pronouns appear, primarily when I tell personal stories. But in no way does the occasional “I” or “my” deny Avis’s co-authorship of every page in this book. —Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang New York City, January 2018 SITUATIONAL AWARENESS 1 A TIME TO KILL O n February 10, 2009, two communications satellites—one Russian, the other American—smashed into each other five hundred miles above Siberia, at a closing speed of more than 25,000 miles an hour. Although the impetus for building their forerunners was war, this collision was a purely peacetime accident, the first of its kind. Someday, one of the hundreds of chunks of resulting debris might smash into another satellite or cripple a spaceship with people on board. Down on the ground that same winter’s day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 7888—respectably above the decade’s dip to 6440 in March 2009 but not much more than half its high of 14,198 in October 2007. In other news of the day, Muzak Holdings, the eponymous provider of elevator music, filed for bankruptcy; General Motors announced a cut of ten thousand white- collar jobs; federal investigators raided the offices of a Washington lobbying firm whose clients were major campaign contributors to the head of the House subcommittee on defense spending; the inflammatory Iranian president declared at a rally celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his nation’s Islamic Revolution that Iran was “ready to hold talks based on mutual respect and in a fair atmosphere”; and the brand-new American president’s brand-new secretary of the Treasury presented a $2 trillion plan to lure speculators into buying the
The list of books you might like
