One of the more serious impacts of human-caused climate disruption occurs when seawater absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When this occurs, the carbon dioxide reacts with the water to form carbonic acid, which then ultimately reduces its pH level. For much of the marine life in the oceans, the consequences of this will be dire.

"Animals that have a calcium carbonate shell such as, corals, coralline algae, pteropods, bivalves and gastropods are negatively affected by ocean acidification," said Richard Feely, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. "In some cases, their shells are weakened or actually dissolve while the animal is still alive. Fish behavior is also impacted by ocean acidification such that some species lose their ability to navigate or avoid predators."

Acidifying oceans have already killed valuable oysters within the Pacific Northwest where Feely lives. "Oyster larvae are dying in the shellfish hatcheries along the West Coast," he said.

Feely, who also holds an affiliate full professor faculty position at the University of Washington School of Oceanography, has been studying ocean acidification for nearly half a century. He moved to Seattle in 1974 and started a chemical oceanography program at NOAA. Feely ultimately went on to become one of the first scientists to measure how seawater was storing excess carbon dioxide and has, from the beginning, been one of the leading scientists studying ocean acidification.

The pH scale measures acidity, and 7.0 is neutral, whereas higher readings are more "basic" and lower readings are more "acidic." Historically, Earth's oceans averaged a pH of 8.2, but this is predicted to fall by as much as 0.4 by 2100. Since the pH scale is logarithmic, one pH unit represents a tenfold change. The ocean's pH level has already dropped from 8.2 to 8.1, which represents a 25 percent drop within just the past century.

As oceans absorb increasing amounts of our industrial emissions of CO2, their pH is expected to drop to a staggering 7.7 pH by 2100, according to professor of marine chemistry Aleck Wang at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Wang told National Geographic that by 2100, "you are going to start seeing calcium carbonate shells dissolve. It's not going to be that far away." Most scientists studying the impacts of ocean acidification agree that by killing off the types of organisms Feely mentioned (corals, oysters, types of phytoplankton, etc.), major portions of the oceanic food chain could be greatly impacted.

Feely told Truthout that key marine organisms and ecosystem services face contrasting risks from the combined effects of ocean acidification, warming and sea level rise, and that even under the most stringently controlled CO2 emissions scenario, warm water corals and mid-latitude bivalves "are considered to be at high risk by 2100."

"Under our current rate of CO2 emissions, most marine organisms are expected to have very high risk of impacts by 2100 and many by 2050," Feely said. "These results are consistent with evidence of biological responses during high-CO2 periods in the geological past. Impacts to the ocean's ecosystem services follow a parallel trajectory."

Ecosystem Impacts

Seiji Nakaya is a coral biologist who coordinated and recently completed the Palau International Coral Reef Center's research program on climate disruption's impacts on coral reefs. Now working back in Japan, Nakaya shared with Truthout his concerns about ocean acidification's impact on global fisheries.

Nakaya explained several ways the impact will be felt. "Acidification will inhibit growth of … organisms that have calcium carbonate skeleton such as shellfish, crustaceans and sea urchins," he said. "It will impact fisheries by inhibiting growth of planktons with calcium carbonate, such as pteropods, [which] are bases of food chains to sustain fish populations, and acidification will inhibit growth of corals, damaging the dimensional structure of coral reefs that fish or prey of fishery-target species inhabit."

Feely shared similar concerns and pointed out how corals, bivalves and other organisms are negatively affected by acidification, as it also reduces their competitiveness with non-calcifiers. He added how in some parts of the ocean that already have naturally low pH - like upwelling areas, the polar regions and in mid/deep waters - ocean acidification can even result in the "net dissolution of carbonate shells and skeletons (i.e. cold-water coral reefs) and loss of associated habitat."

Feely pointed out there are some positive impacts from acidification - species like blue crabs, lobsters and shrimp actually grow thicker shells that could make them more resistant to predators, according to one study - and that some biological responses can be exacerbated by other factors like oceanic warming, deoxygenation and metal pollution.

"As a result, many uncertainties remain in our understanding of the impacts of ocean acidification on organisms, life histories and ecosystem responses," he said.

But Feely has been concerned about the negative impacts for a long time.

"Over the past 20 million years, ocean ecosystems have evolved in a very stable pH environment," Feely told Climate.gov in 2009. "I'm worried that if concentrations of carbon dioxide continue to rise, the ocean could undergo large and rapid changes in pH."

In 2004, Feely had published two critically important articles in the journal Science that showed the ocean had already absorbed roughly one-third of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans, and had caused changes in the seawater.

According to Feely, high latitude and upwelling regions of the oceans are already "seriously affected by ocean acidification," and he said that he and his colleagues are "already observing dissolution of pteropod shells in the Arctic and Southern Oceans, and also upwelling regions along the West Coast of North America."

Rich Childers is the Ocean Acidification Policy Lead for the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife, where he monitors ocean acidification's impacts on wild stock populations in Washington's marine waters. To Childers, acidification's impacts on global fisheries is "the million-dollar question" that resource managers and researchers are struggling with.

"Of great concern to resource managers is how ocean acidification is and will impact planktonic species (both plant and animal) that are key organisms in marine primary production and large-scale food webs," Childers told Truthout. "A likely scenario is that future impacts to marine life from ocean acidification will result in 'winners' and 'losers' at the organism level, and a resulting change in marine community structures."

Similar to Feely and Nakaya, Childers described acidification's impact of reducing the carbonate ion and other essential minerals utilized by calcifying marine organisms to produce shells as a "great concern to resource managers and ecologists."

Childers told Truthout that, beginning in 2005, "Pacific Northwest oyster hatcheries in Washington and Oregon experienced oyster seed production failures resulting from arrival of low-pH (more acidic) seawater. This low-pH seawater was corrosive to shell-forming organisms, including the young oysters being produced in the hatchery."

Increasing Concerns

Nakaya told Truthout one of his most serious concerns about acidification's impacts was that it could cause a negative feedback by "reducing the capacity of seawater that can absorb atmospheric CO2 by affecting CO2 fixing organisms, which in turn increases atmospheric CO2. This may intensify climate change." Nakaya pointed out that there is no way to reverse acidification quickly, "except for reducing emission of CO2, and we don't know how serious the impact of ocean acidification will be in future." Childers pointed out that ocean acidification has the potential to "seriously influence survival of marine wild stock populations and compromise and/or change marine ecosystems on both large and small scales."

He said that while the end results are unclear at this time, "Clearly, ocean acidification will have negative impacts to some marine species and potentially to large-scale ecosystems."

Feely believes that successful management of the impacts of ocean acidification entails the reduction of human-caused CO2 emissions and "societal adaptation by reducing the consequences of past and future ocean acidification."

The latter of these entails the direct mitigation of acidification by reduction of atmospheric CO2 emissions, which he sees as also the least risky.

Feely addressed the idea of climate geo-engineering techniques based on solar radiation management and said that these efforts "will not directly abate ocean acidification since CO2 levels would continue to increase anyway.

He went on to add, "Techniques to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, by either biological, geochemical or chemical means, could directly address the problem, but are not yet well-developed." And of those, "They seem likely to have additional environmental consequences, or may be very costly, or may be limited by the lack of CO2 storage capacity."

Feely's deepest concerns about ocean acidification are that so many ecosystem processes that humans depend on for food and survival are already impacted by both oceanic warming and acidification, and the risks of these impacts to these services only increases with continued CO2 emissions, which currently show little signs of slowing down.

"[The impacts] are predicted to remain moderate for the next several decades for most services under stringent emission reductions," Feely said. "But the business-as-usual scenario would put all ecosystem services at high or very high risk over the same time frame."

A 2015 study warned that ocean acidification could cause dramatic changes to phytoplankton, the basis of the entire oceanic food web.

According to a 2016 study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, CO2 is being added to the atmosphere at a minimum of 10 times faster than it had during a major warming event roughly 56 million years ago that caused a major planetary extinction event.
(c) 2018 Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

ONE CAN look at events in Gaza through the left or through the right eye. One can condemn them as inhuman, cruel and mistaken, or justify them as necessary and unavoidable.

But there is one adjective that is beyond question: They are stupid.

If the late Barbara Tuchman were still alive, she might be tempted to add another chapter to her groundbreaking opus "The March of Folly": a chapter titled "Eyeless in Gaza".

THE LATEST episode in this epic started a few months ago, when independent activists in the Gaza Strip called for a march to the Israeli border, which Hamas supported. It was called "The Great March of Return", a symbolic gesture for the more than a million Arab residents who fled or were evicted from their homes in the land that became the State of Israel.

The Israeli authorities pretended to take this seriously. A frightening picture was painted for the Israeli public: 1.8 million Arabs, men, women and children, would throw themselves on the border fence, break through in many places, and storm Israel's cities and villages. Terrifying.

Israeli sharpshooters were posted along the border and ordered to shoot anyone who looked like a "ringleader". On several succeeding Fridays (the weekly Muslim holy day) more than 150 unarmed protesters, including many children, were shot dead, and many hundreds more severely wounded by gunfire, apart from those hurt by tear gas.

The Israeli argument was that the victims were shot while trying to "storm the fences". Actually, not a single such attempt was photographed, though hundreds of photographers were posted on both sides of the fence.

Facing a world-wide protest, the army changed its orders and now only rarely kills unarmed protesters. The Palestinians also changed their tactics: the main effort now is to fly children's kites with burning tails and set Israeli fields near the Strip on fire. Since the wind almost always blows from the West to the East, that is an easy way to hurt Israel. Children can do it, and do. Now the Minister of Education demands that the air force bomb the children. The Chief of Staff refuses, arguing that this is "against the values of the Israeli army."

At present, half of our newspapers and TV newscasts are concerned with Gaza. Everybody seems to agree that sooner or later a full-fledged war will break out there.

THE MAIN feature of this exercise is its utter stupidity.

Every military action must have a political aim. As the German military thinker, Carl von Clausewitz, famously said: "War is but a continuation of politics by other means."

The Strip is 41 km long and 6 to 12 km wide. It is one of the most overcrowded places on earth. Nominally it belongs to the largely theoretical State of Palestine, like the West Bank, which is Israeli occupied. The Strip is in fact governed by the radical Muslim Hamas party.

In the past, masses of Palestinian workers from Gaza streamed into Israel every day. But since Hamas assumed power in the Strip, the Israeli government has imposed an almost total blockade on land and sea. The Egyptian dictatorship, a close ally of Israel and a deadly enemy of radical Islam, cooperates with Israel.

So what does Israel want? The preferred solution is to sink the entire strip and its population into the sea. Failing that, what can be done?

The last thing Israel wants is to annex the Strip with its huge population, which cannot be driven out. Also, Israel does not want to put up settlements in the Strip (the few which were set up were withdrawn by Ariel Sharon, who thought that it was not worthwhile to keep and defend them).

The real policy is to make life in Gaza so miserable, that the Gazans themselves will rise and throw the Hamas authorities out. With this in mind, the water supply is reduced to two hours a day, electricity the same. Employment hovers around 50%, wages beneath the minimum. It is a picture of total misery.

Since everything that reaches Gaza must come through Israel (or Egypt), supplies are often cut off completely for days as "punishment."

Alas, history shows that such methods seldom succeed. They only deepen the enmity. So what can be done?

THE ANSWER is incredibly simple: sit down, talk and come to an agreement.

Yes, but how can you sit down with a mortal enemy, whose official ideology totally rejects a Jewish State?

Islam, which (like every religion) has an answer to everything, recognizes something called a "Hudna", which is a lasting armistice. This can go on for many decades and is (religiously) kept.

For several years now, Hamas has been almost openly hinting that it is ready for a long Hudna. Egypt has volunteered to mediate. Our government has totally ignored the offer. A Hudna with the enemy? Out of the question! God forbid! Would be terribly unpopular politically!

But it would be the sensible thing to do. Stop all hostile acts from both sides, say for 50 years. Abolish the blockade. Build a real harbor in Gaza city. Allow free trade under some kind of military inspection. Same for an airport. Allow workers to find employment in Israel, instead of importing workers from China and Romania.Turn Gaza into a second Singapore. Allow free travel between Gaza and the West Bank by a bridge or an exterritorial highway. Help to restore unity between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

WHY NOT? The very idea is rejected by an ordinary Israeli on sight.

A deal with Hamas? Impossible!!! Hamas wants to destroy Israel. Everybody knows that.

I hear this many times, and always wonder about the stupidity of people who repeat this.

How does a group of a few hundred thousand "destroy" one of the worlds most heavily armed states, a state that possesses nuclear bombs and submarines to deliver them? How? With kites?

Both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin pay us homage, the world's fascist dictators and liberal presidents come to visit. How can Hamas pose a mortal danger?

Why doesn't Hamas stop hostilities by itself? Hamas has competitors, which are even more radical. It does not dare to show any sign of weakness.

SOME DECADES ago the Arab world, on the initiative of Saudi Arabia, offered Israel peace under several conditions, all of them acceptable. Successive Israel governments have not only not accepted it, they have ignored it altogether.

There was some logic in this. The Israeli government wants to annex the West Bank. It wants to get the Arab population out, and replace them with Jewish settlers. It conducts this policy slowly, cautiously, but consistently.

It is a cruel policy, a detestable policy, yet it has some logic in it. If you really want to achieve this abominable aim, the methods may be adequate. But this does not apply to the Gaza Strip, which no one wants to annex. There, the methods are sheer folly.

THIS DOES not mean that the overall Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is any more wise. It is not.

Binyamin Netanyahu and his hand-picked stupid ministers have no policy. Or so it seems. In fact they do have an undeclared one: creeping annexation of the West Bank.

This is now going on at a quicker pace than before. The daily news gives the impression that the entire government machine is now concentrating on this project.

This will lead directly to an apartheid-style state, where a large Jewish minority will dominate an Arab majority.

For how long? One generation? Two? Three?

It has been said that a clever person is able to extricate himself from a trap into which a wise person would not have fallen in the first place.

Shaun King is an activist in a bubble, hobbled by a shrunken worldview that makes him an ally of the same forces of racial and economic repression he purports to oppose.

The stunted nature of King's politics was laid bare in a July 18 article in The Intercept. He had just seen President Trump "willfully dodge and deny the overwhelming evidence that Russia tried to intervene in the 2016 election." Trump had shirked "his responsibilities as president" and "sided with Putin," in King's view, by "saying he could see 'no reason' why Russia would ever do such a thing." Worst of all, "When asked whether he trusted his own intelligence agencies or Putin," Trump rambled incoherently about Hillary Clinton's email servers.It was possibly "the lowest moment of any presidential press conference in modern American history," King wrote. That Trump would "proudly" stand next to his Russian counterpart "just days after 12 government agents from that country were indicted for interfering in our elections and defend that president was a betrayal. Even I felt betrayed."

However, the 38-year-old former pastor thinks the episode in Helsinki represents a teachable moment for white people, who are now experiencing the kind of truth-denial by persons in authority that Black Americans have confronted throughout our history in this country. "To be black in America," wrote King, "is to constantly be told that what you know - the facts you've actually experienced, the life you've actually lived, and all of the pain and problems and injustice that comes with that life - only matters when a white person in authority says so."

King harkened back to his initiation into activism, as a student at Morehouse in 1999. The murder of Amadou Diallo, cut down in a 41-bullet fusillade by New York City cops, who were subsequently acquitted, taught King that: "Facts be damned. Justice is often administered by the powerful, for the powerful."

Unfortunately, Shaun King didn't learn very much, after all. When it comes to the powerful denizens of the FBI and the CIA, or federal special prosecutors, or corporate communications outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and CNN, King is a true believer -- if the target is Trump or Putin. Grand juries that routinely fail to indict killer cops, even when the murders are caught on video, become paragons of justice and virtue in King's mind when manipulated to indict Russians. Intelligence agencies that tell galactic lies about non-existent Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction," setting the stage for the extermination of millions, or whose top spies brazenly (and feloniously) lie to Congress about spying on the entirety of the U.S. population, become vectors of truth when they offer "assessments" -- but no proof, whatsoever -- that Russia "meddled" in the U.S. electoral process.

For Shaun King, Trump's willingness to stand in physical proximity to the leader of the other nuclear superpower while failing to signify "trust" in these same intelligence agencies marks "the lowest moment of any presidential press conference in modern American history" -- lower apparently, in King's estimation, than George W. Bush's declaration to the press that his FEMA chief was "doing a helluva job" aiding victims of Katrina, or President Bill Clinton's press conferences announcing his intention to abolish welfare "as we know it," or introducing his "anti-crime" bill that would send, literally, millions of African Americans to long terms in prison. King's activist awakening occurred in 1999, but it seems not to have shocked his moral sensibilities when President Obama named Wall Street operatives Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to top economic positions, even though these same financial interests had just tanked the global economy and wiped out generations of Black wealth.

King did not believe that presidential press conferences had reached historic low points when Obama stood with national security advisor Susan Rice, the person most intimately involved in the U.S.-sanctioned slaughter of over six million Congolese under presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, the worst genocide since World War Two – that is, the worst bloodbath "in modern American history." King probably isn't even aware of the scope of the Congolese genocide, despite his years as a journalist, since the presidents he holds in such relatively high esteem have done all in their power to cover it up with the complicity of the same corporate media that King trusts to inform him on "Russiagate." Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon's many press conferences on Vietnam -- replete with lies that led to the deaths of at least three million people -- do not rank nearly as low in King's historical assessment as his sense of "betrayal" at Trump's meeting with Putin. This shows where King's head is at – and where it's not. King is fully respectful -- in awe, really -- of the legitimacy of the CIA, the assassins of Lumumba and countless other foreign leaders, and the most prolific regime-changers on Earth, and the FBI, the "neutralizers" of COINTELPRO, who assassinated Fred Hampton and who are now working whatever program targets "Black Identity Extremists," which may or may not include activist Shaun King. When these professional liars, disrupters and regime changers turn their tools on Trump and Putin, their words become golden for King.

King bemoans the fact that white racists only recognize Black perceptions as true "when a white person in authority says so," yet he accepts the proof-less Russiagate "assessments" of the white people in authority at the CIA and the FBI. That's strange and contradictory behavior for a self-described "Black Lives Matter" activist. In their platform on issues, the Movement for Black Lives warns that intelligence agencies are not Black people's friends. "The Edward Snowden leaks in 2013 revealed a vast surveillance apparatus constructed by the FBI and NSA that collects information on everyone in the U.S.," says the Movement for Black Lives policy statement, under the heading, End the War on Black People. "These leaks popularized the idea that surveillance is happening, but has been largely framed as having a universal impact. The reality is that surveillance has always existed and continues to be concentrated within targeted communities of color namely Black, Arab, and Immigrant; and activists who challenge state and corporate power."

In other words, the national security state is a greater danger to Black people, person for person, than anybody else in the country -- not to mention its crimes against people of color around the world. But Shaun King believes every word these agencies say about Trump and Putin -- and he will denounce YOU if you challenge their veracity. King is making his stand -- with the FBI and CIA.

If King were a smarter fellow, I would suggest that he attend the Black Is Back Coalition national conference in St. Louis, August 11 and 12, whose theme is, "There is no peace: Africa and Africans are at war. U.S. to the world: Comply or Die!" The conference "recognizes the unrelenting war that is being made by the U.S. government against Black people -- on the continent of Africa and throughout the U.S. -- in every aspect of our lives." Shaun King sometimes makes noises indicating that he is aware this war is going on, and that the intelligence agencies of the state -- under presidents of both corporate parties -- are main actors in this ongoing aggression. But, at this juncture in history, King is "all in" with the FBI and the CIA. So, he won't be wouldn't be welcome in St. Louis.

The Commander-in-Chief, President Donald Trump, has announced a new mission into the realm of martial excess. It is one is 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.

In an interview, Grossman told me that "the Russians and Chinese are hesitant because of the high cost. But if the Americans proceed with this, all bets are off. They're not going to sit for it. They're going to get up there before you know it."

"It will all be nuclear," Grossman adds. "It's the ultimate nightmare."

Trump's move contradicts the letter and spirit of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which was won after years of epic negotiations, mostly during the Vietnam War. The landmark United Nations accord brought the Soviet Union, China, the United States, and 120 other nations together in a monumental agreement to designate space as a global commons, reserved for peaceful purposes.

"States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner," the treaty states.

"The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military maneuvers on celestial bodies shall be forbidden."

Now Trump has instructed the Pentagon "to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces; that is a big statement. We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal, it is going to be something."

The proposal for a Space Corps as part of the Air Force could likely pass in the House but faces tougher going in the Senate.

"There's a lot of resistance to this," says Grossman, "because a lot of the current work is located in Colorado Springs, and in Huntsville, Alabama. So there's geographical lobbying from the Pentagon because they thought a new Space Corps might be competition to some of the vested interest in those towns."

"It's hard to know how much this would cost," says Grossman. An article in Roll Call has estimated "$500 billion or more in the coming decade."

"The real cost will depend on how greedy the aerospace companies are," Grossman says. "So much of space is now private business, with Elon Musk and Bezos and all kind of companies talking about making a buck out there."

Representative Trent Franks, Republican of Arizona, seems to agree, telling Roll Call that "a big payday is coming for programs aimed at developing weapons that can be deployed in space."

According to Franks, "It was a Democrat mindset that caused us to step back from space-based defense assets to ostensibly not 'weaponize space,' while our enemies proceeded to do just that, and now, we find ourselves in a grave deficit. In every area of warfare, within the Geneva Conventions, America should be second to none. That includes satellite warfare, if it's necessary. We cannot be victims of our own decency here."

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was the result of worldwide recognition that war is incredibly costly in terms of lives and resources-and that more needed to be done.

"The U.S. led the effort to de-weaponize space in the wake of Sputnik," says Grossman. "I was told by Craig Eisendrath of the State Department that the U.S. feared the Soviet presence in space. As a model they used the Antarctic Treaty, which banned weapons down there."

Since the mid-1980s, key players at the United Nations have tried to expand the ‘67 accord. The Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space Treatyhttps://fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/ArmsControl_NEW/nonproliferation/NFZ/NP-NFZ-PAROS.html, proposed in 1985, would have banned from space all weapons, nuclear and otherwise. Canada, Russia, and China pushed hard for its ratification. But no American president has been willing to sign it. The United Nations committee working on it was dissolved in 1994. In 2008, China and Russia submitted an updated draft to the U.N. General Assembly which the United States alone has continued to oppose (Israel has abstained). Even Putin, at their infamous Helsinki presser, chided Trump about it.

Now Trump is heading where no President since Reagan has gone before. "My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a warfighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea," he says.

"Trump's plan, like Reagan's, involves laser beams, particle beams and hypervelocity guns, all of which will have to involve nuclear power," says Grossman. "If there's a shooting war it will be Chernobyls and Fukushimas in the sky. Some of it will come down, which will be catastrophic. And some will take millennia to fall, which means the heavens are going to be littered with radioactive debris."