The Commander-in-Chief, President Donald Trump, has announced a new mission into the realm of martial excess. It is one that will surely enrich the aerospace industry while spreading the global battlefield to a new dimension.
Trump is calling for the creation of a new Space Force as a sixth branch of the U.S. military, to militarize the heavens.
“It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space,” Trump told a meeting of the National Space Council in mid-June. “We must have American dominance in space.”
To this end, the President has taken a page from Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” playbook. Reagan’s scheme, according to a recent article by Karl Grossman, was built around “nuclear reactors and plutonium systems on orbiting battle platforms providing the power for hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons.”
Grossman, a journalism professor at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury and author of the book The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, has been reporting on the militarization of space for decades, says the move will likely spur a new international competition to weaponize space.
