Accessory to War

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are not clothed. . . . We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.101

  At the beginning of his second term, in his State of the Union address of 1957, Eisenhower described the nation’s military as “the most powerful in our peacetime history” and “a major deterrent to war,” warning that it could “punish heavily any enemy who undertakes to attack us.” But he also proclaimed the nation’s quest for peace:

  A sound and safeguarded agreement for open skies, unarmed aerial sentinels, and reduced armament would provide a valuable contribution toward a durable peace in the years ahead. And we have been persistent in our effort to reach such an agreement. We are willing to enter any reliable agreement which would reverse the trend toward ever more devastating nuclear weapons; reciprocally provide against the possibility of surprise attack; mutually control the outer space missile and satellite development; and make feasible a lower level of armaments and armed forces and an easier burden of military expenditures.102

  President Eisenhower’s preferred agenda may have been peace, but the National Security Council’s was preparedness. In early 1955, in answer to the NSC’s concerns, forty-two prominent scientists, engineers, corporate CEOs, and university presidents—the Science Advisory Committee’s Technological Capabilities Panel—produced the top-secret document known as the Killian report, “Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack.” They examined the likely timetable for increases in both US and Soviet capabilities in multimegaton weapons, jet bombers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, the latter two being the delivery systems for the former. In addition, they recommended a slew of measures to fortify America’s arsenal. Foremost among them was the immediate funding of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 5,500 nautical miles, which would put Moscow within striking range of launch locations in the continental United States. Other measures urged by the panel: convince Canada to give the United States “authority for instant use of atomic warheads” over Canadian territory; extend radar coverage hundreds of miles northward and seaward from US continental boundaries; develop “interceptor aircraft” to conduct air-to-air combat at very high altitudes, including the launch of guided missiles; design an “artificial satellite transmission system” for stronger and safer communication of critical strategic-warning data; and develop advanced technology for intelligence acquisition. That last-listed task was soon turned over to Lockheed Aircraft’s aerospace futurists, Skunk Works, who swiftly devised the U-2, a stratospheric photoreconnaissance plane that would fly beyond the range of contemporary anti-aircraft measures.103

  By late 1957, many of the panel’s recommendations were being implemented. In a radio and television address on science and national security, broadcast one month after the triumph of Sputnik, Eisenhower assured his listeners that the United States “has today, and has had for some years, enough power in its strategic retaliatory forces to bring near annihilation to the war-making capabilities of any other country.” He spoke about the US arsenal in some detail and painted a picture of a militaristic Soviet Union, but then switched to his preferred theme, now framed in terms of space: “What the world needs today even more than a giant leap into outer space, is a giant step toward peace.” In January of the following year, he sent a letter to the Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin (Nikita Khrushchev’s predecessor) proposing that “we agree that outer space be used only for peaceful purposes”; another détente-seeking letter, sent in February, suggested “wholly eliminating the newest types of weapons which use outer space for human destruction.”104

  The dual-track approach of regularly calling for peace while intensively preparing for war was firmly established by the time Congress passed the cornerstone of America’s space program, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958. Its opening paragraph, Sec. 102(a), declares that “activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.” Sec. 102(b) then expends many more words declaring space activities to be the provenance of a civilian agency . . . except when they are not:

  [A]ctivities peculiar to or primarily associated with the development of weapons systems, military operations, or the defense of the United States (including the research and development necessary to make effective provision for the defense of the United States) shall be the responsibility of, and shall be directed by, the Department of Defense.105

  Note that “the development of weapons systems” is listed first—separately from “defense of the United States.” While giving a diplomatic nod to “peaceful purposes,” Congress leaves no doubt that the militarization and weaponization of space are inevitable.

  President Eisenhower maneuvered through the war/peace/diplomacy minefield in the usual way: back and forth, periodically invoking the benefits of peace as well as the drawbacks and high costs of the arms race. All the while, he presided over a swift post-Sputnik expansion of the nation’s intercontinental and intermediate-range ballistic-missile programs as well as initiatives dedicated to military and dual-use space hardware. Reconnaissance satellites remained high on the agenda.106

  Besides BAMBI and Project Defender’s other costly, top-secret initiatives, Eisenhower-era military space efforts included the WS-117L (“WS” for “weapons system”) reconnaissance satellite; the MIDAS (Missile Defense Alarm System) missile-detection satellite, intended to provide a thirty-minute advance warning of an incoming Soviet ICBM attack rather than the fifteen-minute warning available through ground-based early-warning systems; the SAMOS (Satellite and Missile Observation System) photographic and electromagnetic data-collection satellite; and Project Corona, a joint effort of the CIA and the Air Force that superseded both the WS-117L and SAMOS and that largely took over reconnaissance tasks previously performed by the CIA’s U-2 spy planes. Among the dual-use systems—valuable to both military and nonmilitary users—were TIROS (Television Infrared Observation Satellite), a weather satellite jointly developed by NASA and the Army Materiel Command, and the Navy’s Transit navigation satellites. Both began as strictly military programs but were eventually made available to civilians, as would later happen with the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS), whose value to the US economy will soon be upward of $100 billion a year.

  Other militarily important initiatives from the Eisenhower years included first-generation communications satellites: Echo, an inflatable Mylar sphere that could serve as a passive relay for radio signals; SCORE, which could transmit a prerecorded message; and Courier, which could both store and transmit data. Almost all communication satellites circle Earth in a geostationary orbit (GEO), synchronized with Earth’s rotation. Just like Earth, they take exactly one day to complete one orbit, so they appear to hover over a selected spot. The idea that GEO would be a good place for communication satellites to live and work was first explored in 1945 by the futurist Arthur C. Clarke, in a detailed article that posed the question, “Can rocket stations give world-wide radio coverage?” Yes, they can. And yes, they do.107

  Ways to intercept enemy satellites and ballistic missiles also began in earnest under Eisenhower, as did the idea of putting constellations of bombardment satellites into orbit. The Air Force, hoping to displace NASA as the leading edge of America’s space exploits, independently designed a crewed, reusable surveillance and bombing spaceplane called Dyna-Soar, which—if it hadn’t been canceled before being flown even once—would have been launched on a rocket, aerodynamically glided around Earth in the mid-stratosphere at an altitude of sixty miles, and landed like an airplane. Suborbitally the Air Force teamed up with NASA to research the effects of hypersonic speeds, extremely high altitudes, and atmospheric re-entry on the
ir joint airplane, the X-15.108

  Much of the actual and potential militarization of space took place because of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texas Democrat, who had seized on space as a promising issue for his party.109 The Republican president may have wanted to downplay the importance of Sputnik and not explicitly race the Reds, but that soon became impossible. A couple of weeks after the launch of the second Sputnik, Johnson, acting as chair of the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, began several months of hearings on what would be needed for America to dominate space. These hearings, according to one of the drafters of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, “were conducted in an emergency atmosphere of deep concern with the status of U.S. national defense.” Senator Johnson was ascendant. The day before Eisenhower’s State of the Union speech in January 1958, Johnson told the Senate Democratic Caucus:

  Control of space means control of the world. . . . [I]f out in space, there is the ultimate position—from which total control of the earth may be exercised—then our national goal and the goal of all free men must be to win and hold that position.110

  The Democrats crushed the Republicans in the November 1958 congressional election. Almost immediately, Johnson began jockeying to preempt Eisenhower’s foreign-policy team. He also convinced President Eisenhower to let him address the UN General Assembly in mid-November 1958 in support of a US draft resolution calling for a Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.111 The resolution passed. In his speech, Senator Johnson—for whom, on a Wednesday in January, US dominance had been the only tolerable agenda—was ready to declare on a Monday in November that cooperation was the only true path forward:

  Today outer space is free. It is unscarred by conflict. No nation holds a concession there. It must remain this way.

  We of the United States do not acknowledge that there are landlords of outer space who can presume to bargain with the nations of the earth on the price of access to this new domain. . . . We know the gains of cooperation. We know the losses of failure to cooperate. If we fail now to apply the lessons we have learned or even if we delay their application, we know that the advances into space may only mean adding a new dimension to warfare. . . . Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.112

  Persuasive rhetoric. But by now it’s clear that “[w]hat passed for attempts at cooperation consisted mostly of fig leaves meant to embarrass or set back the other side’s progress,” writes James Clay Moltz of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School.113 To Everett Dolman of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies at the US Air Force’s Air University, cooperation was a fiction: “expansion into near-Earth space came not as the accommodating effort of many nations joined as one, but rather as an integral component of an overall strategy applied by wary superstates attempting to ensure their political survival.”114 Khrushchev himself saw cooperation as an avenue to be pursued from a position of strength: “We felt we needed time to test, perfect, produce, and install [an effective weapon]. Once we . . . provided for the defense of our country, then we could begin space cooperation with the United States.”115

  In the fall of 1960, during his last few months in office, President Eisenhower proposed to the UN General Assembly that there be a targeted ban, subject to verification, on the orbiting or stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space. It would be a small step toward cooperation, to keep outer space from becoming “another focus for the arms race—and thus an area of dangerous and sterile competition.”116 As with its predecessors, it remained a proposal, a glimpse of the possible—a little like recent proposals to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions or to guarantee “universal” health care in America. Implementation lay well in the future. Soon both President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev would take up the issue, each in his own way.

  In the 1960 election, John F. Kennedy ran in part on closing the fictive “missile gap” with the Soviet Union and on the need to beat the Soviets in space. After all, Khrushchev had said he was turning out ICBMs “like sausages.”117 Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon meant that money might be lavished on both a high-profile civilian race to the Moon and closed-door military work. The names of Eisenhower-era space-reconnaissance satellites vanished under a shroud of codenames. Also, unlike Eisenhower’s public position that the two strands of space activity must be kept separate, the Kennedy administration’s (and the Air Force’s) position was that both strands were part of a single mission: to preserve space as a domain of nonaggression.118 Kennedy’s budget for military space spending in 1963 was $1.5 billion—almost triple what Eisenhower’s had been in 1960. Meanwhile, NASA’s budget skyrocketed sixfold, from $400 million in 1960 to more than $2.5 billion in 1963.119

  Congress and the American people had been prepped for the civilian portion of those billions during Kennedy’s speech to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, in which he proposed landing on the Moon as “a great new American enterprise.” Six weeks earlier, Yuri Gagarin had become the first human to orbit Earth, while America had not yet perfected an astronaut-ready rocket that wouldn’t explode on launch. Intent on shoring up America’s faltering prestige through a stunning commitment to space projects, Kennedy sought to make America the guarantor and facilitator of world peace. In space, he maintained, US nonaggressive militarization would be able to neutralize Soviet aggression: “Our arms do not prepare for war—they are efforts to discourage and resist the adventures of others that could end in war.” The classic distinction between defensive and offensive weapons, between the good intentions of the good guys and the bad intentions of the bad guys.

  Kennedy began his speech with a crusader’s vow to defend freedom—“Our strength as well as our convictions have imposed upon this nation the role of leader in freedom’s cause”—and concluded with a biblical call for an end to war:

  [W]e will make clear America’s enduring concern is for both peace and freedom[,] that we are anxious to live in harmony with the Russian people—that we seek no conquests, no satellites, no riches—that we seek only the day when “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”120

  The Soviet Union had heard that claim before, when Stalin was still alive and Molotov was his foreign minister. After more than a decade of repetition, the assertion that the expansionist United States had no desire to conquer surely rang hollow to its expansionist adversary in the East.

  In early June, less than two weeks after Kennedy’s speech to Congress, a team of authors from NASA and the Department of Defense issued a report titled The National Space Program, which, despite its classified status, scrubbed virtually all mention of military applications. No references to ASATs or ballistic missile defense programs occur in these pages, even though work on them had already been pursued for half a decade. Outdoing the Soviet Union in space science and technology was the primary agenda. America’s post-Sputnik space failures must be swallowed by strings of successes. Prestige would be the prize.121

  Speaking sixteen months later in the open-air stadium at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Kennedy rhapsodized about science, space, and leadership. Along the way he also mentioned that the year’s space budget exceeded those of the previous eight years combined. But could America afford it? Sure. The $5.4 billion budget, Kennedy deftly pointed out, was less than America’s annual expenditure on cigars and cigarettes. Noting the many American space successes since the beginning of his term of office, he invoked the interconnectedness of US leadership with his earlier themes of peace and freedom:

  [T]his generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vo
wed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

  Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first.122

  By the time Kennedy spoke at Rice, civilian scrutiny of weapons programs and overall military spending had mounted. Add to that the shock of several US debacles, and arms control and denuclearization began to look increasingly attractive—almost as attractive (or imperative) as being first.

  Like Eisenhower, Kennedy sent up several trial balloons on arms control and cooperative endeavors. Just a few months after he took office, his State Department produced a document titled “Draft Proposals for US–USSR Cooperation,” which paints scientific cooperation between the superpowers as both fiscally and strategically sensible and as a path toward working cooperatively in other important fields. One proposal urged “early cooperation in fields (e.g. meteorological activities that might eventually lead to weather control or manned exploration of the moon) in which unchecked competition may ultimately be dangerous as well as wasteful.” Half a year later, as the US ballistic missile program was revving up, the Kennedy administration created the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, an initiative loathed by much of the military. As one general commented, “the U.S. is attempting the exercise of trying to dress and undress at the same time.”123

  By mid-1962, Kennedy’s stated space agenda was to permit militarization but to forbid weapons of mass destruction. Khrushchev’s was to forbid all weapons. Subsidiary issues added to the complexity: Should the ban on nuclear weapons in space be a separate agreement or part of a general disarmament treaty? What about inspection? What about advance notification regarding all space launches? Everyone in the US administration wanted to preserve some militarization of space for purposes of reconnaissance, communications, navigation, and weather monitoring. Some officials wanted a swift ban on nuclear weapons in space; others had grave doubts about any ban.