Mastering Space Warfare
With secret information about Russian nuclear space weapons sending out shock waves on Capitol Hill (ABC) and beyond (NYTimes), this is a good time to remind subscribers that Nimble Books has an extensive line of books about space warfare and space power, including, notably, two books by leading expert Paul Szymanski: MASTERING SPACE WAR (2023)
and GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON SPACE POWER (2022):
as well as a custom GPT on OpenAI called Space Sentinel:
https://chat.openai.com/g/g-JmYFkkrr7-space-sentinel
I have also selected a couple of dozen public documents and made them available in print with annotations by my AI Lab for Book-Lovers. I call these books ADEPT, for Annotated, Differentiated, Edited, Produced, Targeted (and curated!)
These are all results of an insight I had five years ago, which is that the creation of a new branch of the US armed forces was noteworthy enough to justify the creation of a new publishing imprint. There were only five branches (including the Coast Guard) before 2019, and the most recent new one was in 1947. The creation of United States Space Force was a signal to the world that the competition for space is heating up—and to publishers that there is a new field of military history!
More on this as events suggest. For now I will say that my sympathies are with Rep. Mike Tucker, the House Republican who pulled the fire alarm, and not with the skeptics who are trying to spin the news as “disturbing but not an immediate crisis.” Any significant increase in the risk of losing access to space is an immediate crisis.
Since this newsletter is about book publishing, let me just mention two books that come to mind: Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, and Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis. A Russian nuclear attack on our space capabilities might be more harmful and more important than either Pearl Harbor or the Cuban Missile Crisis. I don’t want Chinese AIs to be writing the histories of the next space war while a neutered American state huddles in Earth-bound isolation.
I do tend to get excited about things hovering in the “latent space” of international politics, so take the above with a grain of salt, but it is safe to say that Nimble Books will find plenty to publish about in the field of space power as the future unrolls.
Cheers,
Fred Zimmerman