The United States may not long continue to enjoy the sole secret of the atom bomb, and this and other no less deadly weapons will at no distant date be in the possession of other nations also. The flying bombs, now seen nightly in the west, are indications of what is going on behind the curtain. It is highly doubtful whether any new weapons, or indeed any mechanical inventions, could ever be relied on to remove the danger of war. A peaceful world order could only be safely based on a new spirit and outlook widely spread and actively practised among the nations.¹

Flying bombs seen nightly in the west? What flying bombs?

Smuts was referring to reports which had been coming out of Sweden since May, and more recently from Denmark and Greece. Fast moving objects, sometimes with wings, sometimes without, were seen flashing across the sky. Some had flames shooting out the rear; others appeared to manoeuvre. Some of them crashed; residents of Malmö reported that windows were broken when a rocket 'exploded' over their town.² They were sometimes even tracked on radar. A photo was even taken of one. They were seen by military personnel as well as by ordinary people. An example:

One of the mysterious bombs which in recent weeks have been passing across Sweden was seen last night by an officer of the Air Defence Department of the Defence Staff. He reports that the bomb looked like a fireball with a clear yellow flame passing at an estimated height of between 1,500 and 3,000 feet and at a considerable but quite measurable speed.³

The term now given to these objects is ghost rockets.

Suspicions immediately fell on the Russians, who had taken possession of the German missile research station at Peenemünde, along with many of its scientists and equipment. This was where V-1 and V-2 development had taken place during the war. As the Manchester Guardian editorialised:

No one has said who starts them [the ghost rockets] on their journey, but it does not need much imagination to see Russian engineers, no doubt assisted by obedient German scientists, operating from a research station on the Baltic coast. Russia, of course, could have found a more secret practice range, bu she probably enjoys revealing a little of her plaything, just as America carefully lets us know at least enough about her bomb to hold it in respect.⁴

There was even a precedent: the Germans had test-fired many V-1s and V-2s over the Baltic, and one of the latter landed on Swedish territory. The resultant wreckage was of some use to Allied scientific intelligence in working out just how much of a threat the new rocket weapon would be. But as R. V. Jones, who was involved in both the wartime and (more peripherally) the ghost rocket investigations, pointed out, with hundreds of sightings being reported from Sweden, some proportion of the supposed rockets would have crashed and the wreckage discovered. The Swedish military did look, even searching the bottom of a lake which a winged missile had crashed into. Nothing was found (although in Most Secret War, Jones relates an amusing episode about one fragment which initially denied analysis, but which turned out to be a lump of coke).⁵

As with the phantom airship scares a generation earlier, parallels can be found nearby in time and/or space. As I noted above, ghost rockets were also reported from Denmark and Greece. Both of these countries were fairly close to the new Iron Curtain, so it wasn't too implausible to think that they too might be playing unwitting hosts to Soviet weapon tests. But then ghost rockets were also seen in Portugal, Belgium and Italy -- except for the last, much farther away from the Soviet sphere. Some of the ghost rockets were undoubtedly meteors (the Perseid meteor shower coincided with the August peak of sightings; the photo mentioned above looks a lot like a meteor to me), others may have been new and unfamiliar jet aeroplanes (Sweden received its first Vampires in June). The British Consul at Salonika thought what he saw was nothing more than a Very light.⁶ But, as usual, not everything can be explained this way.

Going backwards in time, to the early 1930s, so-called 'ghost flyers' were seen, often in snowstorms, in the northern parts of Sweden, Norway and Finland. These aircraft were seen (and heard) mainly at night, sometimes flying at low-level. But they carried no markings, and military searches found neither the ghost fliers nor the aerodrome they presumably operated from. Explanations at the time included Soviet or Japanese (!) spies, alcohol smugglers or misperception and mass delusion. Soviet or even combined Soviet-German exercises are perhaps the most likely explanation, though no archival smoking gun has been found.

And going forward a few decades, and into a different medium altogether, in the 1980s and early 1990s Swedish coastal waters were plagued by incursions from mystery submarines. This time the witnesses were Swedish naval personnel, and the submarines were detected with sonar. Again, the chief suspect was the Soviet Union (though NATO has been blamed more recently), and after the 'Whiskey on the rocks' incident of 1981, when a Soviet diesel sub ran aground near a major Swedish naval base, that's understandable. But even trained sonar operators make mistakes: one prominent incident in 1982 was, it seems, caused by a charter boat.

So, to generalise wildly about a country I know not a lot about, the Swedish ghost rockets, ghost flyers and mystery submarines sound like the paranoia of a small country stuck in between hostile blocs and trying to stay neutral. Technology made it easier for foreign powers to sneak in and spy on Swedes. Although the geopolitical context was different, this sounds a lot like the situation in Britain in 1909 and 1913. The enemy outside became the enemy within.

Back to Smuts. He didn't place much emphasis on the ghost rockets; they were just further evidence of what everyone already knew, that new weapons were changing the world (yet again), and that the world needed to change its ways in consequence. He didn't have any very compelling answers to this problem -- maybe a world government proper, one day; for the moment, he wanted the great powers to have full and frank discussions about what they really wanted from each other, rather than issuing spurious vetoes -- but that he felt he had to try was just as much a sign of the times as the ghost rockets themselves.

1. The Times, 30 September 1946, 5. Emphasis added.
2. Manchester Guardian, 17 August 1946, 6.
3. Ibid., 8 August 1946, 6.
4. Ibid., 13 August 1946, 4.
5. R. V. Jones, Most Secret War (London: Penguin, 2009 [1978]), 511-2.
6. Manchester Guardian, 7 September 1946, 6.

I recently rewatched one of my favourite science fiction films, The Day the Earth Stood Still -- the 1951 original, of course, not the currently-screening remake (which I have yet to see, but tend to doubt that it will improve over the original in any area other than special effects). I can't remember when I last saw it, but it must have been before I started the PhD because otherwise the climactic scene would have leapt out out me and smacked me in the face, as it did the other day ... (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

The whole scene is shown above, but I'll quote the speech made by the alien Klaatu to the leading scientists of Earth (emphasis added):

The Universe grows smaller every day and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all -- or no one is secure. This does not mean giving up any freedom except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves, and hired policemen to enforce them. We of the other planets have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets, and for the complete elimination of aggression.

The test of any such higher authority, of course, is the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets, in space ships like this one, and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression we have given them absolute power over us. At the first sign of violence they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk.

The result is that we live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war -- free to pursue more profitable enterprises. We do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works.

So the robot Gort is an interplanetary policeman, whose function is to deter and punish any breaches of the peace with the use of force. The reason why this made me sit up straight is that it's yet another post-Hiroshima, space-based rehash of the international air force idea. (See, for example, Robert A. Heinlein's Space Cadets, published in 1948.) The international air force was a popular topic of discussion in the interwar years; the basic idea being that national air forces would be disbanded, and instead all countries would contribute towards a multinational force which would use airpower for collective security. (Exactly how was a matter for debate; some writers contended that it would need to use the full power of the knock-out blow, while others thought that it could get by with just fighters, since any aggressors would only have converted airliners to use as fighters, relatively easy to shoot down.)

The language and ideas of the international air force proponents are very much like Klaatu's: they too used the police analogy extensively, and I can easily imagine somebody in the 1930s saying 'There must be security for all -- or no one is secure'. Here's William McDougall, a British psychologist, writing in 1927:

The institution of such an international air-force might, then, well lead to general abandonment of national armaments, and might initiate an era of universal peace. For, given the condition that the International air-force were the only one in existence, resistance to it would be hopeless, and no nation would attempt it.¹

Klaatu would have understood where McDougall was coming from; it's the same hope for an end to war, now motivated by the fear of nuclear weapons instead of bombers and expanded to an interplanetary scale rather than an international one. Obviously the point was not so much that Earthlings needed to worry about aliens interfering in our affairs, more that we needed to set up an international police force of our own.²

But I do wonder just how credible a threat is a fleet of flying saucers flown by robots who can be pacified simply by speaking the words 'Klaatu barada nikto'?

1. William McDougall, Janus: The Conquest of War (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., n.d. [1927]), 126-7.
2. The idea doesn't appear in the 1940 short story by Harry Bates, 'Farewell to the master', so it was presumably introduced by the scriptwriter, Edmund North. Bates and North were both Americans.

These are grim, given the advent of atomic weapons. It may be the case that for every weapon, Clarke says, a defence is eventually evolved. But

During the interval between the adoption of a new weapon and its countering, the damage done to the material structure of civilization grows steadily greater, and there must come a time at last when breakdown occurs. The present state of Germany shows how nearly that point had been reached even with the weapons of the pre-atomic age.²

One particularly interesting possibility Clarke considers is that of 'radiation war'.³ He notes that the vast majority of the radiation emitted by an atomic bomb must fall outside the visible spectrum, concluding that 'the bomb acts as an X-ray generator of unimaginable power'.⁴ So a bomb could be detonated at high altitudes to blind large numbers of people, or to ruin huge areas of crops. Atomic bombs carried by long-range rockets would be the 'ultimate weapon'.⁵

Such attacks might in time assume even more vicious forms. The rockets might be detonated nearer to the ground to induce artificial radioactivity which would compel the evacuation of the areas affected. Neutron and gamma-ray warheads might be developed against which only great thicknesses of rock could provide protection. And most terrible of all would be the threat -- even if it were no more than that -- of X-ray mutation. This might well daunt a race which would fight to the death against ordinary weapons.⁶

Armies, navies and air forces would still have their uses -- atomic-tipped rockets wouldn't have been much use in Burma, for example; and at sea, the 'mobile rocket launcher, almost certainly a submersible' has great potential⁷ -- but they will ultimately deploy only once the first rocket strike (quite possibly a surprise, Pearl Harbor-style attack) has secured victory. In the air, piloted aircraft will give way to unmanned vehicles operated by 'controllers sitting in safety before television screens'.⁸ Fully-automatic aircraft may even be possible, since

All possible combat manœuvres can be analyzed and recorded by suitable coding in machines of the punched-card type. It is conceivable that "battle integrators" may be constructed along these lines, capable of making operational decisions in a matter of milliseconds according to changing combat conditions.⁹

In fact, such computers could be used to make strategic decisions as well as tactical ones, leading to a 'new type of warfare which would be too swift and complex for detailed human control [...] the apotheosis of mechanized war'.¹⁰

Clarke closes with a section on the problem of defence. Actually, the problem is bigger than that: he quotes the Smyth Report to the effect that

civilization may soon have the means to commit suicide at will. The problem that now confronts us is not one of defence but of survival.¹¹

He considers, but swiftly rejects, the idea that civilisation could move underground more or less permanently, to save itself from the bomb. Firstly, it would be practically impossible to arrange a food supply for a massive population of people for an indefinite period of time. Secondly, and more importantly, even deep underground there would be no guarantee of safety:

The penetrating power of a rocket falling from a hundred miles or more is enormous and would enable atomic warheads to be exploded at a considerable depth. Such "ground depth charges" could collapse or severely damage any cavity that could be built without an impossible amount of labour.¹²

The good news is that the British Empire, being so vast, is 'probably the least vulnerable target in the world'.¹³ The bad news is that Britain itself is indefensible, and so Clarke concludes that

the removal to Canada of the Central Government and the Service Departments must be carried out as a permanent measure. It would be impossible to do this after a war had started, and there would certainly be insufficient prior warning to enable such a vast transfer of administration to be made.¹⁴

But ultimately he doubts whether even a political unit as big as the Commonwealth could work effectively during an atomic war.¹⁵ The only winning move in this game is not to play:

In other words, the problem is political and not military at all. A country's armed forces can no longer defend it; the most they can promise is the destruction of the attacker.¹⁶

So, the United Nations is mankind's last, best hope for peace. How can rockets help it with this task? By backing up an international air force:

even if there is no intention of using them except as a last resort, the World Security Council should for psychological reasons possess long-range rockets. However, the weapons which it would use if force proved necessary would be the air contingents of its members, employing ordinary explosives and machines of the type that exist to-day. Behind these would be the threat, never materializing save in dire emergency, of the mightier forces against which there could be no defence.¹⁷

The international rocket force would need, according to Clarke, no more than 20 launch sites for world coverage. The personnel would come from every nation, and 'It would be the aim to inculcate in these men a supra-national outlook',¹⁸ much like the Red Cross. That most of them would be 'scientific' types would doubtless help this process along. And as support, they would need access to a research organisation that no nation could match:

This body might in time act as the nucleus around which the scientific service of the World State would form, perhaps many years in advance of its political realization.¹⁹

He sees this international force as only temporary, needed only until such time as 'a world economic system is functioning smoothly, when all standards of living are approaching the same level, when no national armaments are left'.²⁰

I'm sure the RAF implied no endorsement of Clarke's views by publishing them in RAF Quarterly!

So, there are a couple of points of interest here. Firstly, there's the very early prediction of 'radiation war'. I've suggested before that pre-1945, the radiation effects of atomic bombs were not well understood. Here's some evidence, then, that not very long after the first atomic explosions, there was enough publicly available information to put together a fairly accurate picture of the longer-term and larger-scale effects of a nuclear war. (The fact that Clarke had immersed himself in 1930s pulp science fiction may have helped enlarge his imagination on this point too!) For that matter, in contrast to the first part of the paper, Clarke made quite a few accurate predictions: not just intercontinental ballistic missiles, which one might think was obvious,²¹ but also submarine-launched ballistic missiles, nuclear bunker busters, and unmanned aerial vehicles.²²

Secondly, it's clear that Clarke was the very model of a liberal internationalist. His list of the causes of war -- economics and armaments, more or less -- speaks to the former, and his proposed solution to the latter. I don't know if Clarke was aware of groups like the New Commonwealth, who took pretty much the same line in the early 1930s (minus the rockets!) but it seems to me that the international air (rocket) force and the world state were temptations that many others of a technocratic persuasion had succumbed to before and since. And it's surely no coincidence that H. G. Wells was a huge influence upon Clarke, and Wells was practically obsessed with pretty much the same ideas in his later years (he died in 1945).

I'll close by quoting Clarke's two closing paragraphs in full, because they show just how strongly he felt about the need to reconstruct the world system, and also because the last paragraph, in particular, sounds very Clarke.

Only along these or similar lines of international collaboration can security be found: any attempt by great powers to seek safety in their own strength will ultimately end in a disaster which may be measureless.

Upon us, the heirs to all the past and the trustees of a future which our folly can slay before its birth, lies a responsibility no other age has ever known. If we fail in our in our generation those who come after us may be too few to rebuild the world when the dust of the cities has descended and the radiation of the rocks has died away.²³

We'll never know whether Clarke was correct in his belief that an international air and rocket force could have ensured world peace. But we do know that he was wrong to say that disaster awaited us without such a force: we've managed to survive for more than sixty years. (So far, anyway!) I'm sure Clarke would be quite happy to admit that he was wrong about this, since that's allowed him to reach his four score and ten.

Happy birthday, Sir Arthur!

1. Arthur C. Clarke, "The rocket and the future of warfare", RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.
2. Ibid., 76.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 77.
6. Ibid., 77.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 78.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 79.
15. It may seem odd to us now that anyone would even think that the Commonwealth would ever function like that, but of course it just had, in the war just past.
16. Ibid; emphasis in original.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. But wasn't: see Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London: Indigo, 2000), 16-7, where incidentally he discusses the May 1945 Lords debate I've talked about before.
22. OK, there were pre-atomic and pre-rocket precursors for most of these too.
23. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder, 79.

Nanotechnology is now starting to move out of science fiction and into the real world, though currently it's more advanced chemistry than the molecular-scale engineering foretold by K. Eric Drexler more than two decades ago. So no Strossian cornucopia machines yet, no swarms of nanobots swimming in our blood to clean out the cholesterol. But some people are already trying to think through the implications of what might lie over the technological horizon.

The November/December 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists contains a review, by Mike Tredar of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (blog here), of Jürgen Altmann's Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control (Routledge, 2006). The 'potential applications' of the book's title are both direct, for example 'specially designed warfare molecules'; and indirect, with the application of nanotech manufacturing techniques to the production of weapon systems of all types.

Thus, he [Altmann] warns, "MNT [molecular nanotechnology] production of nearly unlimited numbers of armaments at little cost would contradict the very idea of quantitative arms control," and would culminate in a technological arms race beyond control.

This is because anyone could -- with access to a nanofactory and the requisite blueprints -- construct vast quantities of very lethal weapons in very little time. Rogue states, terrorist groups, Rotary clubs. Anyone. There would be no way to police this. No hope for the future. Unless ...

The book’s most controversial thesis is not that MNT is plausible and should be taken seriously; it is that the only coherent response to this technology’s military implications is to develop global governance structures that supersede existing national powers. "The traditional way of guaranteeing national security -- namely the threat of armed force -- may no longer be compatible with the advance of technology,” he argues. And since security “can no longer be reliably ensured by national armed forces," he prescribes "strengthened international institutions and international law, in particular criminal law with prosecution of perpetrators, moving into a direction toward an international monopoly of legitimate force, strong enough to prevent or punish threats or use of illegal force."¹

This idea that technology has become so dangerous that the world needs a sort of international military organisation, with a 'monopoly of legitimate force' to guard it against destruction, is one that keeps coming up. Robert Heinlein suggested something similar in the age of the atom; Lord Allenby and (more hesitantly) Stanley Baldwin did likewise in the age of the aeroplane. They certainly weren't the only ones. (And see also Anthony Eden and Ronald Reagan on the extraterrestrial threat). And arguably, even before Kitty Hawk, there was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in "Locksley Hall" (1842):

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.²

Though Tennyson is actually speaking of a world government, this is clearly very closely associated with a world military: in practice it would be hard to have one without the other, in some form at least.

So, we keep getting told that we must unify in the face of some dire new threat: bombers, bombs, 'bots. And admittedly we've actually survived quite well (OK, maybe 'well' is not quite the right word here) so far, despite remaining approximately as fractious as ever. The doomsayers have all been wrong, thus far. Does that mean that they always will be? As I've suggested recently, in a different context, as a species we quite naturally tend to avoid taking the hard choices, at least until we are right up against it. So what happens if we ever do face a threat that really does require our unity -- maybe nanotech, maybe something else? It probably won't happen until it's too late.

Am I being too pessimistic? I sure as hell hope so.

1. Emphasis added.
2. Emphasis added.

First, Allenby outlined the danger:

There is danger in delay, for it seems likely that, unless an effort in the right direction -- a successful effort -- is made soon, the present social system will crumble in ruin; and many now alive may witness the hideous wreck. Then will loom the dreadful menace of the dark ages; returning, darker, black, universal in scope, long-lasting.²

'Recent progress in Science has now given to the machine the mastery over man its maker',³ Allenby claimed. Scientists everywhere were 'busily experimenting with new inventions for facilitating slaughter; [...] designing more monstrous methods of murdering their fellow men and women'.⁴ There would be no hesitation in attacking civilians with these new weapons in the next war. But science (by which he really means, technology) also gave him hope, for it enlarged people's horizons:

Man is now able to navigate the atmosphere, plumb the deep seas, travel in three dimensions of space, move anywhere at a speed unimaginable to our fathers. Willingly or unwillingly, he has become a world-citizen; and the duties of that citizenship cannot be evaded; duties calling for the whole-hearted co-operation of every man and woman alive, joined in mind and purpose to promote the good and the advancement of all.⁵

And his solution? A world state and an international police force.

Is it too much to believe that the human intellect is equal to the problem of designing a world state wherein neighbours can live without molestation; in collective security? It does not matter what the state is called; give it any name you please: -- League of Nations; Federated Nations; United States of the World. Why should there not be a world police; just as each nation has a national police force?⁶

It's somehow reassuring that Allenby could retain some measure of faith in the future after fighting the Battle of Armageddon!

1. Though for that matter, in 1930 Allenby did set up the British National Cadet Association in order to help preserve the public school cadet system after the Geddes axe. I'm sure Bobs would have approved.
2. Allenby, Allenby's Last Message: World Police for World Peace (London: New Commonwealth, 1936), 8.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 9.
6. Ibid.

It's 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started -- but never finished! -- was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can't have been older than 12 so it's not exactly sophisticated ...)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I'd even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn't quite worked out the way I'd envisaged it -- yet -- but of course, I'm in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There's a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun's proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.¹

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.²

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry -- including leading the V2's development team -- von Braun's obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders -- a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.³

Von Braun wasn't the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier's Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven't for a long time so I'll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. [...] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party's manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change ... sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a 'Race for Space' between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward -- if impressive -- technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn't have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it's hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it's good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I'll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, "Wernher von Braun's ultimate weapon", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53.
2. Quoted in ibid.
3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it's more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn't aware of the potential of ballistic missiles.