History Most Certainly Repeats Itself
That Time Wernher von Braun’s Rocket Tried To Kill My Father
“Humanity now lives in space permanently. Our spacecraft have left the solar system. Our space telescopes look back to the beginning of time. We are spacefarers. Space technology has its roots in weapons of war. America’s early accomplishments in space were achieved with direct use of Nazi technology and personnel. Russia followed a similar path. Today North Korea, Iran, and other nations use rocket designs with a clear lineage originating with Hitler’s V-2. All technology is iterative. Smart technology persists and finds peaceful uses despite its war making origins. Hitler’s V-2 nearly killed my father. Yet I helped design things that flew into space on rockets inspired by V-2 technology – often with my friends on board. The technology that tried to kill my father gave me a career.”
Keith’s note: I wrote this rather long story several years ago after my father died from Alzheimers. On this date, 18 March, 1945 a V-2 quite nearly killed my father. One of the things I wanted to get across is how the traumatic wartime experiences that someone goes through as a young person can haunt them into their 90s. While I never served, these horrors jumped a generation and affected someone (me) with nightmares – and I was not even alive at the time the rocket fell from space on my father. I grew up in the late 50s/early 60s with tales of life during World War II here and in Europe as part of my upbringing. We all did.
Now, as a senior citizen, I am living through events unfolding – again in Europe – events that could lead to World War III. Millions are going through the horrors that my father and his comrades went through. All of Ukraine will be carrying these horrid memories for the rest of this century and beyond. My father’s nightmares, spawned from events nearly 80 years, have visited me again and now stare back at me from the TV every day. Weirdly, a Moon rocket – overtly echoing its predecessor half a century ago – also stared back at me from the TV today. History is echoing a little bit too much for me right now. How about you?
If you have not seen it, you should take the time to watch the video “A message to the Russian people” that Arnold Schwarzenegger about his father and World War II.
The echo of history we hear is actually an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo and so forth. This is the way it will be until there is a final settlement to how human beings live with themselves.
Americans and Europeans in particular look at our modern technology and mistake it for intelligence. No. We are no smarter than any group of humans who has lived since the dawn of civilization. What we have an ever greater cache of technical knowledge that gets passed down generation to generation. And we’re also supposed to have an ever greater cache of historic memory about the mistakes that were made that lead to mass suffering. Except that’s not really what happens. After a few generations, we all forget. With the fading of the Greatest Generation, even before Ukraine, but also with the rise of nationalism across the world (not just the west) in the last 10 years, we have shown the speed in which we forget.In about 75 years, we turn the page.
Many people truly thought that the end of the Cold War meant the permanent end to great power competition, and that the long peace since World War II – just 77 years – means the end of open warfare between the great power. That, I’ve long felt, presumes that we, the people living now, are somehow special and privileged compared to every group of people who has ever lived. Well, that’s flat wrong. The Copernican Principle applies generationally too. What is 30 years or 77 years in the lifetime of an empire or a civilization? A blink of an eye. Even the names “World War II” and “World War III” reflect almost a post-modern arrogance at the greatness of the suffering (or potential suffering). The sprawlings wars of centuries and millennium past may not have encompassed the physical world, but to the people and populations living at the time, they certainly encompassed the effective world, or their known worlds.
To understand the scope of this, one just has to read through the history of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire or the Chinese Dynasties. Decades long periods of peace and tranquility, followed by decades of upheaval and decline, followed by decades of expansion. Up and down, back and forth. As centuries rolled on, lucky generations knew times of plenty and less fortunate ones knew immense hardship.
So too are we in that period now, as the island of stability that World War II bought seems to be at its end. What comes next is less clear. The current conflict with Russia is very likely merely the prologue to the long anticipated far greater conflict between the US and China – the biggest Thucydides trap in human history.
And then what after that? What if after 50 or 60 years of a Second Cold War, the Free World prevails again, and the world enjoys another 50 years, give or take, of absence of great power conflict and warfare. It will be followed, in time, by another rivalry that upsets the balance of the world, one that we can scarcely imagine now anymore than someone sitting in 1922 can imagine the conflicts of today.
Absent a final settlement, the cycle will continue. What is that settlement? It’s far from clear. The United Nations system was a noble attempt, but truly reflects a vision of the world locked in 1945. In the late 21st or early 22nd century, with climate change’s worst effects being felt, a dramatic global demographic shifts and technology we can’t yet imagine, any solution we conceive of now will be useless to the people and the challenges living then.
So what is the solution then? There may in fact not be one. These are not original thoughts. The Peace at Westphalia,the Concert of Europe, the League of Nations and the United Nations are but four attempts in just the the past 500 years to come to a perpetual settlement, that every time broke down within a matter of decades. And there were attempts before that stretching to antiquity in whatever was defined as the “world”. It didn’t work at smaller scales, with smaller populations and less technology. It’s proven equally as elusive as “the world” came to mean our entire actual planet we share.
If there is one hope, it may ironically be economics and technological advances make war ever more difficult to wage. The United States spent trillions of dollars on two wars since 2001, and in the process of allocating immense resources towards terrorism and nation building, saw a decline in its ability to deter great power rivals. Russia has been at war for 3 weeks and has lost at a minimum 7000 soldiers and suffered such substantial equipment losses, it’ll take many, many years to recover from it. Modern weapons and vehicles are so complicated, expensive and slow to build that in a major great power conflict, what you enter the war with is likely what you’re going to have for it’s duration – and that stockpile of 4000 tomahawk missiles the US has will go pretty quick in a slugfest with China. War at a certain scale, in other words, may be in the process of pricing itself out of relevance as a policy tool for the powers in the world. Can anyone imagine the US engaging in another Iraq style war anytime soon? No way. Even the costs Russia are incurring are sure to be making China think twice about invading Taiwan.
Which leaves nuclear weapons. And therein lies the problem, because Russia’s attack on Ukraine validates that no country is truly safe unless they are part of a mutual defense alliance with a great power or have nuclear weapons all their own. Coupled with Russia’s years of cheating on WMDs in particular (they still have chemical and biological weapons too), international agreements to reduce the risk of their use have clearly failed as soon as generations turn over and a new set of leaders decides agreements made by their predecessors are no longer in their interests. Global Zero is myopic. What happens if everyone signed on, then after 25 years, government with the technical means to re-arm quickly changes its mind? The failure of the INF Treaty due to Russian cheating – the only treaty that banned a whole class of weapons – makes that a non-theoretical risk.
So we’re stuck. There is no way back, but also no clear way forward. This is not a new problem. This was faced during the Cold War, and they got the broad strokes of the strategy right, and we must do it again. We deter – and yes, my fellow Americans, that means looking at our nuclear arsenal as an insurance policy we are happy to have, not a curse we’re embarrassed to be saddled with – and we wait out our adversaries whose internal contradictions will undermine them day by day, for decades. Prudence and vigilance will save the world, this time like it did the last. And hopefully in time, give our children and grandchildren an opportunity to to discover what a final settlement in their time looks like.
Thank you for taking the time to write this – awesome
A final settlement,,,
Peace through Affection,,,,and that’s not weakness.
The problem with your last approach is that it demands American centrism and dominance. But American ideas need to have the option to be challenged and even rejected systematically by the world at large – especially ideas like capitalism and exploitation. For one, if the term “American adversary” includes people like Indigenous groups having their water stolen from them by privatization, then I want them to win against America. I want America to lose and those “adversaries” to gain strength, power and capacity in the world stage. Be very careful how you define adversary, because not all that could be construed as such are Vladimir Putins or Xi Jinpings.
Keith, I heard the same recollections from my grandparents.
For the reasons you’ve stated, and the echos of my grandfathers’ warnings of “it will happen again in your lifetime”, I’ve taken the public stand reflected in my comments on NasaWatch.
Cooperative space exploration cannot be held sacrosanct when considering and implementing methods, tools, plans, and actions to defeat Putin. EVERYTHING, including cooperating on any interest, has to be on the table of tactics and strategies to finish him.
Free people and countries across Earth have again succumbed to the “kindness interpreted as weakness” interpretation by evil people like Putin and his minions.
Enough. As I have stated on your forum in other comments, I am putting my life and resources where my mouth is. We all must if there is any opportunity, not born of hope, but of strategy and planning executed to defeat Putin.
Then go and demand a global peacekeeping force – or some other arrangement – that will hold everyone accountable equally to a standard of international law, both Vladimir Putin and the presidents of the United States. No country should be above others. All must be equal before a truly equitable system of international law.
Further research indicates disconnecting the Russian segment of the ISS is not a trivial task:
https://futurism.com/nasa-f…
I recognize that Keith and other contributors to NASAWatch have a far higher technical and engineering skill set and experience than I will ever have.
However, it is difficult for me to believe that we “must” keep Russia involved in managing ISS operations.
I also guess that behind the scenes, contingency plans are being dusted off / modified or prepared in the event a Russian departure from the Station occurs. And, I am willing to bet SpaceX is involved.
In any case, my opinion stands, as illustrated in my previous posts.
My mind keeps coming back to Gateway. The PPE+HALO are being built right now for Gateway. PPE by Maxar and HALO by Northrop, PPE has hall effect thrusters and chemical rockets. HALO is a stretched, modified Cygnus. Together they replace (and then some) Zarya.
Why not just repurpose the one being built for the ISS and build another pair of them for Gateway? It is, after all, the Russian segment of the ISS that is aging the worst. The US+international segment is aging very gracefully. DItching the Russian segment and replacing it with PPE+HALO would serve not only to to wash our hands of a morally indefensible partnership with Russia, but also would open the door to extending the ISS’s lifetime well past 2030. It won’t be weighed down by the oldest, most trouble prone, yet also among the most essential elements of the station.
Doing this would delay Gateway, but realistically, with the SLS flight cadence as planned, we’d hardly notice.
With respect to the Gateway, and all concerned, it’s participation in space exploration at this time, is moot.
We’ve much bigger concerns back home; defeating Putin means sacrifice for all of us desiring peace in our world. If space exploration is delayed or repurposed to defeat him, I am 100%, without remorse, supportive.
Dump the Russian segment as soon as we can, repurpose the Gateway hardware as illustrated herein for ISS, get SpaceX involved for inexpensive launch to ISS, and let SpaceX manage the whole thing for commercial and space exploration use.
I know about the 51 degree orbital inclination issue; it is time we decide how to use advance propulsion tech to execute an Earth orbital plane change over a couple of years to 28.5 degrees.
Let an aging gracefully US segment be continually repaired and evolved to build a US orbital base for R & D.
Could a orbital refueled Starship do gentle burns to accomplish this? My guess is with a properly throttling of a single SpaceX Raptor, the answer is “yes”.
Instead of “we can’t”, how about WE CAN.
Kill SLS.
The one constant over our history is ourselves. Human nature has shown itself to be destructively expansionistic. The world’s resources represent a zero sum game … you can have something only if I can’t have it, at my cost.
A second (?) constant over history is the dominance of male leaders. Is this our weakest link ? Is our best hope for the future female leaders ??
I think it’s that or “sky-net”.
My father, John Edwin Boardman, was drafted to serve in WWII. Aced some kind of test and was sent to ASTP, a sort of accelerated tech program for smart kids. Midway through the gov’t figured out they needed more infantry than smart radio kids so he was sent to the 102nd Infantry. There he aced another test, he was a crack shot. They made him a BAR man, the only one in the platoon with an automatic weapon. A virtual death sentence, as they walked along the BAR and its bipod sticks up saying “shoot me first”. In a friendly French machine shop he had the end of the barrel cut off and the bipod moved. Maybe the reason I was born in ’61. In any case he took a piece of shrapnel through his helmet and into his head outside Linnich Germany in November of ’44. Months blind and deaf in London hospitals he recovered enough to be sent to France to help at a POW camp near Reims. In reading his letters home to his mother in Oklahoma I found a paragraph that has stuck with me. He talks about his rifle and how important it is to him. How he has to live, eat, sleep and work with it. How it has to function PERFECTLY every time he uses it or it could cost him his life. And how he spends every moment waiting for the day he can walk up to some muddy pond and hurl it into the depths.
Here’s to fewer inter-generational nightmares and many more rifles in the bottoms of muddy ponds.
Slava Ukrainia
We must NEVER forget.
Thank you for sharing this story.