The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
Neil DeGrasse Tyson & Avis Lang WW Norton £19.99 HB
Astrophysicist and Cosmos host DeGrasse Tyson explains that this book’s inspiration came from attending the National Space Symposium in 2003, where he encountered anti-war protestors who denounced the event as a ‘weapons bazaar’. He wrote them off as naïve, until the event displayed live CNN updates of the Iraq invasion, and symposium participants applauded as their corporate military products were name-checked on air. At which point Tyson had to concede that maybe he was the naïve one.
The result is this wide-ranging and very readable history of the overlap between science and the military, penned with editor Avis Lang. History is the right word, because the link goes back a very long way. The idea for radar came from back-of-theenvelope calculations about how much radio energy would be required to boil the blood of enemy aviators. Accurate clocks resulted from an 18th-century challenge by the British Admiralty to better measure longitude so its warships could more reliably navigate the globe. And while Galileo gets the credit for turning the telescope skyward, it was first promoted by 17th-century glass maker Hans Lipperhey as a means of verifying a newly forged peace settlement between Dutch and Spanish forces. This relationship has only strengthened through recent eras of rocketry, nuclear weapons and killer drones for one compelling reason: it works. Powers possessing greater scientific knowledge tend to win wars. But where does it go next? With the US president announcing a new Space Force, Tyson and Lang consider what war in space might actually mean. With key orbits left unusable by debris, a space war resembles a nuclear war in that it would have no winners, only losers. The book is a fascinating exploration of humanity’s capacity to combine discovery with destruction, but the authors would have us take heart. The single largest artificial object in space remains the explicitly peaceful, low-orbiting International Space Station – and the logic of conflict grows weaker the higher we go.