Accessory to War Read online

  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

  In 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

  On 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 unstable American assets that had collapsed the global economy. Civil engineers announced that 70 percent of the salt applied to icy roads in the Twin Cities ended up in the watershed. An environmental physicist announced that a third of the top-selling laser printers form large numbers of lung-damaging ultrafine particles from vapors emitted when the printed image is heat-fused to the paper. Climatologists announced that the flowering ranges of almost a hundred plant species had crept uphill in Arizona’s Santa Catalina Mountains over a twenty-year period, in lockstep with the rise in summer temperatures.

  The world, in other words, was in flux and under threat, as it so often is.

  Ten days later, an international group of distinguished economists, officials, and academics met under the auspices of Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society to discuss how the world might manage to emerge from its worse-than-usual financial crisis. The center’s director, Nobel laureate in economics Edmund Phelps, argued that some financial re-regulation was called for but stressed that it must not “discourag[e] funding for investment in innovation in the non-financial business sector, which has been the main source of dynamism in the U.S. economy.” What’s the non-financial business sector? Military spending, medical equipment, aerospace, computers, Hollywood films, music, and more military spending. For Phelps, dynamism and innovation went hand in hand with capitalism—and with war. Asked by a BBC interviewer for a “big thought” on the crisis and whether it constituted “a permanent indictment of capitalism,” he responded, “My big thought is, we desperately need capitalism in order to create interesting work to be done, for ordinary people—unless maybe we can go to war against Mars or something as an alternative.”1

  A vibrant economy, in other words, depends on at least one of the following: the profit motive, war on the ground, or war in space.

  On September 14, 2009, just a few months after the satellite smashup and a few blocks from where the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers had stood eight years and four days earlier, President Barack Obama spoke to Wall Street movers and shakers to mark the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the investment firm whose bankruptcy is often presented as having triggered the avalanche of financial failures in 2008–2009. That same morning, China laid the cornerstone for its fourth space center on an island close to the equator—the latitude of choice for exploiting Earth’s rotation speed, thereby minimizing the fuel necessary for a launch and maximizing the potential payloa
d. By late 2014 construction was finished, well before the World Trade Center site would be fully rebuilt. An Associated Press reporter spoke of China’s “soaring space ambitions” and, after presenting a daunting list of Chinese space achievements and ambitions, stated that “China says its space program is purely for peaceful ends, although its military background and Beijing’s development of anti-satellite weapons have prompted some to question that.”2

  Much the same could be said of the background and backing of the lavishly funded space programs created by the Cold War superpowers.

  Were he alive today, the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer and mathematician Christiaan Huygens might tell us we’d be fools to think that ambitious undertakings in space can be achieved without massive military support. Back in the 1690s, as Huygens thought about life on Mars and the other planets then known to populate the night sky, he pondered how best to foster inventiveness. For him and his era, profit was a powerful incentive (capitalism was as yet unnamed), and conflict was a divinely endorsed stimulant of creativity:

  It has so pleased God to order the Earth . . . that this mixture of bad Men with good, and the Consequents of such a mixture as Misfortunes, Wars, Afflictions, Poverty and the like, were given us for this very good end, viz. the exercising our Wits and Sharpening our Inventions; by forcing us to provide for our own necessary defence against our Enemies.

  Yes, waging war requires clever thinking and promotes technical innovation. Not controversial. But Huygens can’t resist linking the absence of armed conflict with intellectual stagnation:

  And if Men were to lead their whole Lives in an undisturb’d continual Peace, in no fear of Poverty, no danger of War, I don’t doubt they would live little better than Brutes, without all knowledge or enjoyment of those Advantages that make our Lives pass on with pleasure and profit. We should want the wonderful Art of Writing if its great use and necessity in Commerce and war had not forc’d out the Invention. ’Tis to these we owe our Art of Sailing, our Art of Sowing, and most of those Discoveries of which we are Masters; and almost all the secrets in experimental Knowledge.3

  So it’s simple: no war equals no intellectual ferment. Arm in arm with trade, says Huygens, war has served as the catalyst for literacy, exploration, agriculture, and science.

  Were Phelps and Huygens right? Must war and profit be what drive both civilization on Earth and the investigation of other worlds? History, including last week’s history, makes it hard to answer no. Across the millennia, space studies and war planning have been business partners in the perennial quest of rulers to obtain and sustain power over others. Star charts, calendars, chronometers, telescopes, maps, compasses, rockets, satellites, drones—these were not inspirational civilian endeavors. Dominance was their goal; increase of knowledge was incidental.

  But history needn’t be destiny. Maybe the present calls for something different. Today we face “Enemies and Misfortunes” that Huygens never dreamed of. Surely the “exercising [of] our Wits” could be directed toward the betterment of all rather than the triumph of the few. Surely it’s not too radical to suggest that capitalism won’t have much to work with if several hundred million species vanish for lack of potable water, breathable air, or perhaps the aftereffects of a plummeting asteroid or an assault by cosmic rays.

  Looking down at Earth from an orbiting spacecraft, a rational person could certainly feel that “necessary defence” may have more to do with the vulnerability of our beautiful blue planet, exposed to all the vicissitudes of the cosmos, than with the transient power of a single country’s weapons, policymakers, nationalists, and ideologues, however virulent. From hundreds of kilometers above the surface of the globe, “Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Men” might sound less like a standard line on a Christmas card and more like an essential step toward a viable future, in which all of humankind cooperates in protecting Earth from the enemies among us and the threats above us.

  On the chill evening of January 16, 1991, a thousand or so space scientists, myself included, tipped our wineglasses and schmoozed about our latest research projects at the closing banquet of the 177th semi-annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Philadelphia. Sometime after the entrée but before the dessert, the organization’s president, John Bahcall, stood up to announce that the United States was at war. Operation Desert Storm, the bombing blitz that launched the first US-led war in the Persian Gulf, had begun at about half past six—the middle of the night in Baghdad. CNN journalists were reporting the aerial assault live and uncensored from the ninth floor of the Al-Rashid Hotel as the cloudless, starry desert skies filled with flashes of light. For the first time in warfare, America was showcasing its stealth bombers, virtually invisible to enemy radar and unseeable in the absence of moonlight. Not a cosmic accident. The attack was timed to coincide with the new Moon, the only phase not visible at any time of the day or night.

  Our after-banquet speaker would not be coming, said Bahcall. No witticisms would accompany the coffee. The festivities would be cut short so that we could turn our attention to CNN or go home to be with our loved ones. The hall fell silent. The collective pall was no surprise. Fewer than twenty years had passed since the end of the Vietnam War, and memories of the US involvement in Southeast Asia still haunted many people in that room, myself included.

  While most of my colleagues spent the rest of the night in Philadelphia glued to the tube, I strolled from the hotel alone to walk off some confused energy. Everywhere I went, TVs were tuned to CNN. Passing an auto repair shop, I shouted to a twenty-something mechanic working late, a fellow likely in kindergarten while Vietnam was becoming an American nightmare, “Did you hear we went in?”

  I’d expected to hear a word or two of regret. Instead, the guy gleefully shouted back, “Yup!” And with a fist pump in the air and a giddy pride I’d never before associated with warfare, he chanted, “Fuckin’ A! We’re at war!”

  Probably I should have seen that coming, considering the patriotic enthusiasm so visible at Memorial Day parades and Fourth of July fireworks, with their backstory of war, bombs, rockets, and bloodshed. Like every other American, I’d sung the national anthem’s soaring passage about rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air. I was aware of the many wartime generals who subsequently became president, and the many public war memorials where statues portray, if not a solitary cannon, then one or more uniformed soldiers standing tall, standing brave, standing proud, occasionally astride a war horse, the statues’ immobilized warriors brandishing the weapon of their time: saber, musket, carbine, assault rifle.

  But none of those expressions of national pride and militarism meshed with my sense of armed conflict. I didn’t understand how they fit together. That twenty-something grease monkey did, though. He was plugged into a primal passion that has energized so many wars across the millennia. Just not the war I’d grown up with.

  The US engagement in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia triggered a vehement antiwar movement, its strength and visibility without precedent and its numbers swelled by tens of thousands of returning American vets and active-duty GIs revolted by the war they helped wage. During the first few years following the 1973 peace accord and the departure of combat troops, the war’s opponents may have expected that the US military budget would stage a retreat. Yet Office of Management and Budget figures show only a brief pause before a renewed escalation in spending—an escalation that became dramatic during the next administration.4 Soon, promised the soon-to-be president, Ronald Reagan, it would be “morning again in America.”5 Reagan’s first inaugural address, in 1981, officially heralded the era of ubiquitous heroism and insistent patriotism—heroes, whose “patriotism is quiet but deep,” were to be met “every day . . . across a counter.”6 People hung the Stars and Stripes from their porches. Explicit signals of respect for the military and love of the homeland multiplied. Jingoism was in the air. Once again, war was glory.

  Like the vast majority of my fellow astrophysicists, I recoil at the pros
pect of war—the death, the destruction, the disillusionment. My revulsion, like the patriotism of Reagan’s heroes, runs quiet but deep. In the early days of the Vietnam War, I heard the entire mainstream American political spectrum declare that we had to defeat communism because communism represented all that was evil and bad while we represented all that was God-fearing and good. Back then, I was old enough to listen but too young to understand. But by the time the lists and photos of dead GIs were being published weekly, I’d begun to have the occasional thought about world events, and to me the message came through loud and clear. Vietnamese were dying. Americans were dying. American soldiers were strafing rice paddies and villages. The images of suffering embedded themselves in my mind. Some lingered for decades.

  Fast-forward to the summer of 2005, three decades after the end of the Vietnam War and days before my daughter’s ninth birthday. Miranda is running from the shower to her room. She’s naked, because she’s accidentally left her bath towel there. As she scampers past me, arms extended from her sides and elbows slightly bent, time freezes. The 1972 Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl flashes into my mind. You know the one. She’s escaping along a road after American jets have drenched her village in a firestorm of napalm.7 She has the body development and proportions of an eight- or nine-year-old girl. She has the body development and proportions of my daughter. In that fleeting moment they were one and the same.

  During the first Gulf War (1990–91), the United States offered itself and its coalition of willing nations as defenders of a helpless Kuwait against an invading Iraq. As often as not, demonstrators on the streets of America were there to express well-mannered objections to the war rather than to denounce it outright. The rage of the Vietnam era had dissipated. Many antiwar activists adopted the expedient stance of differentiating the war from the warriors. Their placards were likelier to display a slogan such as “SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME” than “NO BLOOD FOR OIL.” The song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” dating back to the Civil War, made another hurrah. The yellow ribbons of faithfulness and welcome reappeared.