Though it has taken some time to come to fruition, President Eisenhower's 1959 warning of the rise of the military complex has proven to be prophetic. The United States, a country which began its time as a republic without a standing army is now an empire which uses the credit cards of Asian bankers to pay for a global military which, each year, costs hundreds of billions of dollars to fund. It is, as we have seen in recent years, an unsustainable price to be paid in the name of freedom, not freedom itself. Developing weapons only encourages those who are afraid of you to develop their own weapons capable of combating yours which gets you to build better weapons and on and on it goes, a cycle feeding upon itself until its inevitable collapse from lack of available funds. Though, as of this writing, that frightening day of reckoning is yet in the future, Mr. Brzezinski's account of how it began gives us little hope that the cycle will end in happiness. He has written here a vivid portrait of how lies accumulate on top of lies, and how posturing begets posturing to create one of the largest and strangest arms races in human history. There is but one useful side-effect to this buildup, good science. And it is that which Mr. Brzezinski focuses on in Red Moon Rising, a chronicle of the 1950s sspace race which came to define the last half of the 20th century.
Red Moon Rising recounts the post WWII rocket programs of the only two superpowers left on Earth, the US and the USSR. From the German rocketeers who jump-started them, to the brilliant, native scientists who elevated them, Mr. Brzezinski allows us to be witnesses at the dawn of modern technology, a moment so singular that it captured, as its designers and funders had hoped, the imagination of a world. Sputnik, that solitary, harmless satellite which pinged its way around a planet, declaring with each rotation the beginning of the arms race. For while Sputnik itself may not have been weaponized, its significance was not lost on the United States. The Russians had the capability of launching a rocket capable of delivering a payload anywhere in the world. And in that moment of realization, the national security state was born. If an enemy could launch an attack from anywhere, without the slow and obvious accumulation of troops along the border, then how could anyone be safe?
Bigger rockets, rockets capable of delivering the same or more destruction upon any country which would dare to launch such an attack, rockets capable of mutually assured destruction. And so, at immense cost, it was done. And those programs begot other programs, and those programs yet more programs, as rockets became weapons and weapons became better weapons until the USSR was spent out of existence by American capitalism. After all, what do nice, shiny weapons mean to a country that can't feed itself?
Mr. Brzezinski has put together a well-researched history of the moment the space race began, and how the space race became an arms race and how that arms race inevitably leads to bankruptcy. Along the way, we meet the giants of rocketry, men who, it isn't a stretch to say, made possible the satellite-dependent world we have today. Yes, this book appeals to my fascination with folly which predisposes me to like it. But anyone even mildly interested in how the pushing of a boulder down a mountainside can create an avalanche will find Red Moon Rising engrossing and sobering. (5/5 Stars)
No comments:
Post a Comment