Lunar Plans

No sooner do I write about the building of British nuclear weapons as a wasteful prestige project, then news comes from NASA of their firmed-up plans to build a moonbase by 2020. This seems to more or less follow the plan for a permanent presence on the Moon and manned exploration to Maras as laid down by President Bush in his "vision" speech of 2004. No cost has been stated, but expect something in the tens of billions.

I will state my reservations about such an enterprise. This project will be costly, and of dubious scientific value. Further, the expenditure of such funds will likely stifle the attention needed by more useful yet small-scale projects. A government-agency mission to the moon seems overly inefficient and old-fashioned, and raises potential fears of the weaponization of space.

Yet when all is said and done, I would still rather oppose this project and see it go ahead anyway. At some point humanity must begin to explore and inhabit its solar system on something of a more permanent basis. The fact that to date no human has left the immediate orbit of earth for anything more than a few hours, despite the thousands of pages written and thousands of hours filmed on the subject (both fiction and non-fiction) indicates to me that a permanent settlement on the moon in itself would possess some scientific value. Just how will the human body adapt to life on another heavenly sphere? Surely a moonbase has more lasting value to science and humanity (by capturing the imagination and providing facilities for experiments as yet unplanned) than the obsolete International Space Station and space shuttles, two super-expensive Cold War relics.

I say good job to NASA for finally scrapping the shuttle with plans for a new bold step forward. And I wish even more luck to Virgin Galactic. Carl Sagan once stated that he considered the hybrid government-private business model of the Dutch and English East Indies Companies to be the prime means to further space exploration. I cannot urge the greater participation of business in space travel more strongly.

A Modern Pharaoh and his Pyramids?

Although he may be ideologically closer to Clinton, Tony Blair has shown himself to be a true soulmate of George W. Bush in a number of ways, one being his governmental tendency to throw good money after bad. His latest demonstration of this has been his latest proposal to spend 20 billion pounds (at the current moment something in the range of $40,000,000,000) to upgrade Britain's ageing nuclear deterrent. This money will go to building a new class of ICBM-armed submarines to replace the Trident system in about 17 years' time. The system is deemed necessary owing to such threats to nuclear nonproliferation as the North Korean atomic programme (in a poverty-stricken country whose ballistic missiles, if not exploding on launch, could currently barely reach Alaska), and the potential for state-sponsored nuclear terrorism (a fear whose basis in reality some specialists are beginning to question). Apparently money spent on such prestige projects is a better line of defense than money spent on conventional forces (Britain's are already stretched to the limit, as its top officers are stating) or better intelligence.

But what is ironic is how questionable the use for a nuclear-armed Britain has ever been. As a member of NATO, the UK has been under the American nuclear umbrella for over 50 years. Even during that time, a country with something like 2% of the world's population faced guaranteed nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Soviet Union (with over four times the population and many more times the area), and could at best incinerate a handful of Soviet cities. Since the Cold War the very need for a nuclear umbrella struggles to be proven.

Yet much like the American Anti-Ballistic Missile defence system, such anachronisms continue to be built. In my opinion the singular failure of Donald Rumsfeld was his inability to hold to his promise to end Cold War-era money pit projects and streamline and modernise the American military. Blair seems to have taken note of Rumsfeld's failure. As some MPs have pointed out, this very proposal is being rushed, perhaps in an attempt to build a nuclear Blair legacy.

Whatever the value of nuclear weapons, it seems redundant for such a country as the United Kingdom to spend billions on their maintenance and updating. Blair has shown some political courage in attempting to address unorthodox yet pressing problems of our time, such as Global Warming, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and societal collapse in Africa. It is a shame that as his time draws to an end, he too has decided to throw some military pork into the works in the name of a political legacy.