01.10.2026

Notes on space

US airforce secretary Troy Meink has confirmed what we long knew: America has deployed ‘space control weapons’ in low Earth orbit. While details remain unclear, the dangers are all too evident. Jack Conrad argues that space display, space science and space war have a symbiotic relationship

Space - well, the idea of space - has long combined the promise of boundless progress with a recognition of human foibles and the possibility of self-destruction. To this day HG Wells, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov continue to have millions of devoted readers.

When Sputnik 1 went into orbit in October 1957, it was greeted with a mixture of wild enthusiasm, grudging admiration and blind panic. Here was a technological marvel, whose beep. beep, beep spelt out the triumph of Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘catch-up and overtake’ Soviet optimism. For ordinary Americans, however, Sputnik 1 broadcast something altogether sinister. The Soviet Union had the capability of delivering nuclear warheads onto their towns and cities with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Dwight D Eisenhower oversaw the formation of Nasa the following year. American schoolkids were soon doing ‘duck and cover’ drills. By sheltering under their wooden desks they would supposedly survive a nuclear blast.

Then came Luna 1, deep space and the moon. After that, Venera 1. Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight in Vostok 1 appeared to confirm the illusion that the Soviet Union was really about to catch-up and overtake the United States. JF Kennedy determined to puncture that illusion. He pledged to outmatch the Soviet Union in space display with his famous speech before a joint-session of congress in May 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”¹

In the fevered atmosphere of superpower rivalry, every success for the Mercury, Gemini and finally the Apollo programme - annual cost around 1% of US GDP - generated huge TV audiences. Besides American nationalism there was American optimism too. Space was the final frontier - reflected in fashion, architecture, interior-design, TV, films and music. The future was Star trek.

Meanwhile, Kennedy and his secretary of defence, Robert McNamara, aggressively accelerated the production of the Minuteman ICBM system. Based in hardened underground silos, these solid-fuel rockets were designed to launch in less than a minute. This gave the US a huge psychological advantage in the 1962 Cuba missile crisis. A thousand in total were built and they still constitute the main body of the ground-based US nuclear arsenal.

Space display serves as the acceptable, the noble, the popular mask for such weapons of mass destruction. American public opinion remains overwhelmingly positive, when it comes to space. According to Pew Research Center, some 80% hold a highly favourable view of Nasa. This makes it one of the most popular US agencies. Furthermore, 76% say that the space programme makes them feel proud to be Americans, and 69% “get genuinely excited” about space exploration.²

Hence, it came as no surprise whatsoever that Donald Trump began his second term by setting the aim of landing American astronauts on Mars within four years. Clearly, an attempt to emulate and outdo JFK. And it clearly delighted Elon Musk. He gave an instant two thumbs up. Musk not only stood to make shedloads of money from lucrative government contracts: he genuinely sees a Mars landing as a vital step towards establishing a human colony on the planet. A lifetime passion.³

Of course, Trump and Musk had their inevitable falling out. Moreover, the four-year time frame was never remotely realistic. Getting back to the moon in early 2028 is an incredibly big ask - Nasa’s Artemis II did a successful crewed lunar flyby in April 2026. Getting to Mars is something else. Whereas the moon is reachable within three days, it takes around seven to nine months for Mars.

Musk’s Starship is specifically designed for such a mission what with its 100-200-ton payload, expected mass production run and resulting economies of scale. Titan II could launch a kilogramme into low orbit for $30,600, Saturn V $5,400 and the much vaunted Space Shuttle a whopping $65,000. Space X’s Falcon Heavy reduced that to $1,500 and Musk promises he can do it for a mere $67-$100 with Starship.⁴

Of course, it is still at its test and preparation stage. Flight 14 successfully launched from Starbase, Texas and achieved two full earth orbits on September 28. It also released Starship’s first commercial payload - 26 Starlink V3 satellites.

Flight 15 is due in late 2026 or early 2027. It will see an attempted ‘ship catch’ too. The 50-metre upper stage will, it is hoped, be guided back to the ‘Mechazilla’ launch tower arms. This in preparation for full reflight: ie, reusable hardware and the rapid turnround that has Musk talking of Space X launching 30 Starships daily by 2030!⁵ Another highly improbable but nonetheless share-boosting target.

That aside, for Mars there will have to be multiple strides forward in life-support technology. Astronauts need to be protected from deadly solar radiation and provision must be made for medical care, hygiene, water, food supplies and overcoming the inevitable psychological problems - that, if astronauts are to return happy and healthy to Earth after more than two years of isolation. Remember, no real-time communication, nor any chance of rescue in the event of things going wrong.

Mission moon

With Musk effectively exiled from the White House, there has been a quiet tip-toeing back to Artemis and mission moon. This, and it needs to be stressed, is no Apollo 11 tribute act: the ambition is altogether grander.

The plan is to put a space station in high moon orbit: the Lunar Gateway. A Space X Heavy Falcon is due to launch the initial components in late 2027 (the Propulsion and Power Element and the HALO module). Using electric ion thrusters, they will autonomously manoeuvre and lock together. Then, in early 2028, the crewed Artemis IV will be launched by Nasa’s Space Launch System and head off to the moon, along with the European-Japanese-built Lunar I-Hab capsule. The Lunar Gateway will thereby be completed. Two crew members then descend via a commercial lander. Once again Americans will walk on the moon.

A permanent moon base, built mission-by-mission, is planned for Shackleton Crater near the lunar south pole. It is known to harbour water ice. The base is envisaged to support a team of four for up to a week at a time.⁶ Amongst the stated mission aims is developing and testing the engineering, endurance and survival techniques needed for a Mars mission in the late 2030s or 40s.

For their different reasons Russia, China, Japan, the EU, even India, try to compete to a greater or lesser extent with the US in space display. Russia, of course, continues within the Soviet-era paradigm of regular manned flights, rocket launches, satellites, etc. Dmitry Rogozin, former director general of Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, did outline plans for a crewed moon landing by 2030. Once there, the cosmonauts would live in an inflatable module. Towards that end Russia commissioned the new Yenisei super-heavy booster with the capacity to lift 27 tons into lunar orbit.⁷ Yet, Rogozin was sacked in July 2022 and, given the disastrous crash of Luna-25 in 2023 and the parlous state of the economy brought about in no small measure by the war in Ukraine, Russia now largely watches from the sidelines, when it comes to the moon. Yenisei remains on the drawing board - its first mission pushed back to 2035 at the earliest.⁸ The best Roscosmos can hope for is partnering with China.

Over the last few years, officials from the European Space Agency have vaguely talked of joining a ‘moon village’ near the Americans at the south pole.⁸ An open international community, it will be inhabited by humans and robots - the claim being that it will provide a staging post for getting Europeans to Mars by 2040.⁹ However, the ESA is entirely reliant of Nasa’s SLS, so, in reality, and for the conceivable future, it is little more than a very junior US partner.

China deserves to be taken seriously. By spending big time - around $20 billion in 2025-26 - it has undoubtedly hauled itself into the premier league. Progress has been steady and sure. In October 2003 the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft orbited Earth 21 times. Yang Liwei became the country’s first taikonaut. In September 2011 China established its first space laboratory (finally abandoned in March 2016) and in May 2018 the country made the first soft landing on the dark side of the moon. A year later, on January 3 2019, its rover, Yutu 2, began exploring the giant Von Kármán crater. Not long after that, in June 2021, China established the permanently crewed Tiangong space station. The third and final module was successfully added two years later.¹⁰

Showing an impressive confidence in the future, Chinese officials have plans for a crewed moon landing in 2030 and eventually going to Mars - admittedly more ambition than hard commitment. China’s Mars timeframe lies somewhere between 2040 and 2060. Nonetheless, China is determined to catch up with and eventually overtake the US. The Hong Kong-based space consultant, Blaine Curcio, says China’s space programme is “perhaps now only 10 to 15 years behind the US’s in terms of technology”.¹¹ There has, despite that, been talk of getting to Mars by 2033.¹² However, I take it as that: talk.

Meanwhile, US expenditure on space still more than equals that of the rest of the world put together.¹³

Space war

Basically, today’s US space programme is Trump’s space programme, going back to his first term. Compared with what went before, he oversaw a definite shift in emphasis. Trump told Nasa to establish an overwhelming military superiority in near space and simultaneously to press ahead with deep space missions. Trump loves space display, he loves space military power too.

He ordered a 10% spending hike for space military power and the creation of the United States Space Force. It now stands alongside the five traditional branches of the US military - army, navy, marines, airforce and coast guard. The sci-fi-inspired dress uniforms were condemned as ‘authoritarian’, even ‘fascist’, by various over-excited commentators, but the reasoning behind the USSF is pure Mackinder: who commands near space commands the whole world.¹⁴

Troy Meink’s announcement that the US has ‘space control weapons’ in Earth orbit was certainly telling us what we already knew. Naturally, there were immediate accusations from Moscow and Beijing that the US has initiated an arms race in space. CND provided what amounted to an echo.¹⁵ Yet the fact of the matter is that the arms race in space has been “underway for years”.¹⁶

So what has the US got up there? The only honest answer at the moment is that we do not know. However, we can take a few educated guesses.

Space control implies domination, protecting space existing assets (like GPS, communications, and tracking satellites) and combining that with the ability to disrupt or destroy the space capabilities of opponents. Military experts, public intelligence assessments and policy statements tell us that the US space arsenal is already two pronged.¹⁷

1. Non-kinetic (soft kill) weapons blind, jam or disable satellites without physically destroying them. This includes directed-energy laser dazzlers to blind optical sensors, electronic warfare jammers to block radio frequencies and advanced cyberattack capabilities, which intercept or hijack satellite controls.

2. Kinetic weapons physically strike rival space assets or otherwise interact with them. This includes co-orbital satellites, equipped with robotic arms capable of damaging, moving or grabbing other satellites. In other words something like Bird One in You only live twice (1967).

Then there is Trump’s Golden Dome - a $2.7 trillion programme - which is surely linked to the weapons in space announcement. A constellation of some 600 low-orbit satellites almost instantly locates and targets hostile ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles. Space-based missiles intercept them during the boost phase. Of course, the Golden Dome includes powerful, ground-based radar arrays and missiles such as Patriots, THAAD and Lockheed Martin’s Next Generation Interceptors. They deal with any enemy missiles that have managed to get beyond the slow-boost phase and are approaching the US homeland. Both these layers being woven together by the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications (C2BMC) system, using AI and other such cutting-edge technology.

The calculation is that overwhelming US military superiority in near space would leave China and Russia with only one good option: the right to peacefully surrender, as in ancient times. Roman military doctrine stipulated that a city (oppidum) would be allowed to surrender peacefully, but only till the moment that the first battering ram struck the outer walls (priusquam muralis aries attigisset). After that the city lost its civilian status and the Roman army was free to loot, slaughter and enslave (direptio). The classic first-hand account of elite surrender and the terrible consequences of defying Roman might is to be found in The conquest of Gaul, written by none other than Julius Ceasar himself.¹⁸

That, or China and Russia could be forced to strike the first blow - in the manner of Imperial Japan, with its desperate attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. President Franklin D Roosevelt had frozen Japan’s financial assets and imposed a total oil embargo (note, the US had an economy 10 times the size of Japan’s, controlled nearly all the world’s negotiable money resources and was the source of 94% of Japan’s oil supply that was vital for its industry and armies fighting in China and south-east Asia). Japan faced three impossible choices: (1) impoverishment within a couple of years, (2) agree to US demands and yield territorial conquests in China and south-east Asia, (3) go to war with the US and its allies. Having been boxed in, Japan chose war and that excused the US demanding unconditional surrender. Emperor Hirohito finally conceded after Hiroshima, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, and Nagasaki.¹⁹

However, China and Russia both possess their own ground-launched missiles, designed to hit low-orbit satellites. China confirmed that capability during a historic 2007 test, when it destroyed one of its own redundant weather satellites. This created thousands of pieces of space debris - a real menace. Russia too has successfully tested its anti-satellite Nudol missile, hitting an old Soviet-era satellite and forcing the crew on the International Space Station to take emergency measures to avoid the resulting debris shower. Space debris, it should be noted, travels at approximately 17,000 mph and even something the size of a marble can cause damage equivalent to a hand grenade.

Co-orbital satellites too. In May 2026 Russia positioned four military satellites, Cosmos-2610 - Cosmos-2613, close to ICEYE-X36, a US-Finnish commercial weather and radar satellite used by Ukrainian forces for intelligence imagery. Such co-orbital satellites can observe, jam or tilt targets out of their orbit. China certainly has satellites equipped with robotic grappling arms. While officially described as being for the purposes of collecting space debris, these arms can just as easily grab an enemy military satellite.

Nor has America a monopoly with non-kinetic, soft-kill, anti-satellite weapons. Russia deployed the Peresvet laser weapon system to multiple strategic missile divisions. This laser is designed to blind the optical sensors of western spy satellites tracking Russian deployments. Jamming satellites can also be done from the ground by blasting out high-frequency interference.

Perhaps the most worrying concern involves Russia’s ongoing development of a space weapon that would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. US intelligence agencies claim that Russia is actively developing a satellite designed to carry a nuclear weapon into orbit. Rather than directing a nuclear warhead down to some target here on Earth, the idea is to detonate it in space and thereby create a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would disable the electronics of thousands of commercial and military satellites simultaneously, rendering entire orbital planes useless.²⁰ Only specially shielded satellites would survive intact.

Space science

While Trump flaunts, struts and bellows when it comes to space display and space war, he has next to no time for space science.

The Asteroid Redirect Mission was defunded in March 2017. Designed to bring an asteroid into moon orbit - not only with a view to studying it. ARM would have been used to refine the technology necessary to head off an asteroid that threatens the planet (65 million years ago an asteroid smashed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico, sent a huge plume of ash and debris into the upper atmosphere and triggered the extinction of roughly three-quarters of all animal species, including the dinosaurs).²¹

No less myopically, Trump ordered a $100 million cut in the already modest Earth science programme. The DScover, OCO-3, PACE and CLARREO Pathfinder missions were scrapped - all devoted to monitoring global warming.²²

Such space science can be considered science for the sake of science. That would be terribly naive though. From the point of view of sponsoring governments, it is partially a form of diplomacy - to use the current lingo, soft power. But there always remains an overarching military context.

Marxists are rightly known for taking a positive attitude towards science. But we remain painfully aware that capitalism perverts science. Not only by bending it to the lopsided, narrow and demeaning dictates of profit, but by turning it against humanity, to the point of threatening our very survival as a species: carpet-bombing, chemical and biological weapons, nuclear warfare. Walter Benjamin damningly wrote: “If the natural use of productive forces is impeded by the property system, then the increase in technological means, in speed, in sources of energy, will press towards an unnatural use. This is found in war.”²³ Hence for him revolutions are not so much about speeding up the train of progress, “but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake”.²⁴

The fact of the matter is that even the most seemingly objective space science is interwoven with the military-industrial complex. Indeed there is a military-space-industrial complex. What is true for the US is true for Russia, China, the EU, Japan, India and the UK too. Communications satellites, weather satellites, asteroid capture missions, planetary exploration, even optical telescopes and radar astronomy are component parts of a technological nexus that is fundamentally military. That includes wonderful projects, such as Jodrell Bank, VLT in Chile and the Hubble and James Webb space-based telescopes, each of which has greatly contributed to the commons of human knowledge - discovering quasars, proving Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, dating the known universe, confirming dark energy and supermassive black holes, locating exoplanets, etc.

Astrophysicists, mathematicians, engineers and computer scientists are regularly recruited from academia into the military-space-industrial complex. Together they form a highly specialised talent pool. In their book, Accessory to war, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-author Avis Lang explore the long-standing, symbiotic relationship between space scientists and the military. They document how tools built to explore the universe (like radar, satellite imaging, and infrared tech) are inherently linked to tools used for geopolitical domination.²⁵ Astrophysicists and defence departments routinely harvest each other’s work, because they care about the exact same things: multispectral imaging, tracking objects across space and high-performance computing.

There is another aspect which cannot be ignored. The military-space-industrial complex constitutes a third department of production in its own right (the other two being the production of the means of production and the production of the means of consumption). An idea pioneered by Rosa Luxemburg in The accumulation of capital (1913). She writes of the “aggregate social product” consisting of “three parts”, the third part being military production of all kinds, purchased by the state and paid for by taxing the masses - that and borrowing on the money markets.²⁶ Though workers (and the middles classes) have had their consumption levels squeezed, this no longer constitutes a barrier to capital accumulation.

Department III - named by Michael Kidron²⁷ - effectively obliterates the distinction between consumption and destruction. Possible precisely because for capital the purpose of production, the end aim, is not human consumption of use-values according to need: rather it is self-expansion. Problems of real use, and therefore real consumption, are overcome (though not eliminated) through the ability of the state to generate artificial demand through taxation and credit.

That approach - initially tried before World War I and then after the 1929-33 world economic crisis - became the model of normality after 1945 and allowed Kidron to explain the long economic boom. Of course, that has long gone. Nonetheless, under Trump 2.0 the peacetime US arms budget is set to be $1.05 trillion in 2026 (well over twice as much as China and Russia put together).

The Trump administration justifies this perverse and obscene squandering of human and material resources through peddling Maga nationalism (and generating jobs). Voting in favour of the endless production of waste thereby becomes a patriotic duty and sees trade union misleaders actively promoting the expansion of the arms industry in the name of high-paid employment and regional growth. Spending on space is essentially no different. Except that, besides nationalism, it is able to harness another misplaced idealism - the quixotic belief that space provides our natural destiny and offers solutions to all our mounting problems.

Meanwhile, the UN estimates that over a billion people have no access to clean drinking water, some 840 million have to survive on significantly less than the recommended daily intake of calories and around 40 million are infected with HIV/Aids. There is nothing inevitable about any of this.

IMF and World Bank programmes of market ‘reform’ have greatly exacerbated the unevenness characteristic of the system over the last 40 years. Today the richest 1% own nearly half the world’s wealth, the poorest half just 0.75%, And - no surprise - a billionaire “emits a million times the carbon dioxide than the average person”.²⁸ Here, in ‘broken Britain’, some 2.5 million live in a household which uses a food bank.²⁹ Around 1.6 million claim out-of-work benefits. Even in America, by far the richest country in the world, an estimated 745,000 experienced homelessness last year.³⁰ Over seven million are officially unemployed.

Yet, with organisation and political will, humanity has within its reach the ability to easily meet all basic needs. The wealth exists in abundance. Simply diverting the US arms budget to real human needs would do away with global poverty - almost at a stroke. But such a turnaround can never happen through the banal platitudes and essentially diversionary calls of the NGOs, religious notables and various soft-left reformers for G20 governments to do their moral duty. The modern state palpably exists to defend and promote the self-expansion of capital - the two are inextricably interwoven and interdependent.

That, incidentally, is why leftwing calls to ‘tax the rich’ to overcome poverty, health underfunding and homelessness are so misplaced. Mainstream governments do ‘tax the rich’. Their revenue derives in large part from corporation, payroll and capital gains taxes. So, if they do not want to see the goose that lays those golden eggs taking flight abroad, not only must tax rates be limited: capital accumulation is positively required. Therefore, in order to tax the rich, the rich must stay rich … and continue to exploit the working class. Taxing the rich with a view to progressively expropriating their riches, socialising capital - that is another matter entirely.

The fact of the matter is that capitalism long ago outlived any usefulness that it once possessed. Now this most alienated of social relationships not only goes hand-in-hand with poverty, exploitation and war: it threatens to bring about a civilisational collapse - perhaps some time between 2070 and 2090 - through climate breakdown.³¹ Objective circumstances cry out for revolutionary change.

Once humanity supersedes capitalism, overcomes self-alienation and becomes properly human once again, who knows what we might choose to do? Mars, along with other planets and moons in the solar system, could be explored, using intelligent, self-replicating, evolving robots, as envisaged by John von Neumann.³² From our solar system such probes might conceivably head off to nearby stars and Earth-like exoplanets (there would, though, have to be a non-interference ‘prime directive’ and guarantees to prevent the probes turning into ‘cosmic locusts’ - that is, stripping entire planets and moons of their resources to create more and more copies of themselves).

If life arises whenever there is a suitably sized and suitably situated planet orbiting a suitably benign star, it follows that life must exist scattered here and there across the universe (the Drake equation). Given the huge number of stars and planets in the cosmos, the chance is that we are therefore far from alone, when it comes to intelligence (so why don’t we see it? - the Fermi paradox).

Life on Earth evolved through a DNA-RNA information system - albeit entirely randomly through natural selection - from a primeval soup some 3.5 billion years ago, to the point where consciousness emerged. But must extraterrestrial life be based on DNA-RNA? If, in language, there is the Latin alphabet, can there not be the Arabic or Cyrillic … or the Mandarin characters. So why not HNA, ANA or TNA? We have long wondered about such existential questions. It would be expected, therefore, that future generations would want to find answers, if for no other reason that curiosity.

However, the closest star aside from our sun - the unpromising red dwarf, Proxima Centauri - is 4.24 light-years away. Even using Jupiter, the biggest planet, as the gravitational slingshot, with present-day technology a probe would take around 80,000 years before getting there. It would also take 4.24 years till we receive an arrival message - that is, assuming that we have managed to escape extinction.

Now, though, the main subject of humanity must be humanity - as we find it, here on Earth: a planet which gave birth to our species and which has everything we need in terms of our evolved physiognomy and psychology. If we want to survive as a species, our prime directive ought to be taking care of planet Earth and restoring it to full health.

1. www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/address-to-joint-session-of-congress-may-25-1961.↩︎

2. www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/07/20/americans-views-of-space-u-s-role-nasa-priorities-and-impact-of-private-companies.↩︎

3. A Crowley Redding Elon Musk: a mission to save the world New York NY 2019.↩︎

4. www.basenor.com/blogs/news/starship-below-100-kg-to-orbit-what-it-takes.↩︎

5. www.investors.com/news/spacex-stock-starship-flight-14-launch-plans-elon-musk-nasa-update-spcx-stock.↩︎

6. www.space.com/nasa-artemis-base-camp-more-moon-bases.↩︎

7. tass.com/science/1219555.↩︎

8. www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russia-delays-lunar-missions-us-marks-historic-flight-2026-04-07.↩︎

9. www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Exploration/ExoMars/Europe_s_Mars_exploration.↩︎

10. cset.georgetown.edu/article/chinas-space-progress-report.↩︎

11. edition.cnn.com/2019/07/19/asia/china-apollo-us-space-race-intl-hnk/index.html.↩︎

12. www.statista.com/statistics/745717/global-governmental-spending-on-space-programs-leading-countries.↩︎

13. The figure for the US is $76.68 billion, Japan $6.8 billion, Russia $3.96 billion, the EU $3.71 billion and India $1.89 billion - www.statista.com/statistics/745717/global-governmental-spending-on-space-programs-leading-countries.↩︎

14. Sir Halford Mackinder was a highly influential British geographer who introduced the ‘heartland theory’ of world politics in 1904, later expanded into a full length book: Democratic ideals and reality (1919). The basic hypothesis being “Who rules East Europe commands the heartland; who rules the heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world” (en.wikisource.org/wiki/Democratic_Ideals_and_Reality:_A_Study_in_the_Politics_of_Reconstruction_i). Perhaps the most famous cold war disciple of Mackinder was Zbigniew Brzezinski - see his Game plan: a geostrategic framework for the conduct of the US-Soviet contest (1986) and The grand chessboard (1997). For an analysis of the effect of Mackinder and the heartland theory on US cold war foreign policy, there is GR Sloan Geopolitics in United States strategic policy, 1890-1987 (1988) and CS Gray The geopolitics of superpower (1988).↩︎

15. cnduk.org/us-space-weapons-deployment-will-spark-international-arms-race-in-space.↩︎

16. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists September 22 2026.↩︎

17. www.sciencenews.org/article/united-states-space-weapon-announcement.↩︎

18. By surrendering tribal sovereignty, the elite saved their own skins along with personal wealth and local power, albeit thereafter placed firmly under Roman hegemony. Those who resisted were tortured, killed or mutilated as a warning to others. See SA Handford (trans) Caesar: the conquest of Gaul (Harmondsworth 1976), especially the last chapter, written, not by Ceasar, but Aulus Hirtius, a friend and one of his lieutenants in Gaul.↩︎

19. Perhaps the most detailed account of this history from the Japanese side is E Hotta Japan 1941: countdown to infamy New York NY 2013. For the US economic war against Japan, see ES Miller Bankrupting the enemy: the US financial siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor Annapolis MYA 2012. The best study of the diplomacy is, I am told, H Feis The road to Pearl Harbor New York NY 1964.↩︎

20. www.spaceforce.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Fact-Sheet-Display/Article/4297159/space-threat-fact-sheet.↩︎

21. See www.psi.edu/epo/ktimpact/ktimpact.html.↩︎

22. www.space.com/36112-trump-budget-cancels-nasa-earth-science-missions.html.↩︎

23. W Benjamin The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility and other writings on media Cambridge MASS 2008, p42.↩︎

24. W Benjamin Selected works Vol 4, Cambridge MASS 2003, p402.↩︎

25. N Tyson and A Lang Accessory to war: the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and the military New York NY 2018.↩︎

26. R Luxemburg The accumulation of capital London 1963, p463.↩︎

27. M Kidron ‘A permanent arms economy’ International Socialism No28, spring 1967.↩︎

28. www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/wealth-inequality-oxfam-billionaires-elon-musk.↩︎

29. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9209.↩︎

30. www.hud.gov/news/hud-no-26-037.↩︎

31. actuaries.org.uk/document-library/thought-leadership/thought-leadership-campaigns/climate-papers/planetary-solvency-finding-our-balance-with-nature.↩︎

32. A Bhattacharya The man from the future: the visionary life of John von Neumann London 2021.↩︎