US Presidents and the Militarization of Space, 1946-1967

摘要

Much has been written about America's space program, which challenged the Soviet Union in a cold war melodrama of peaceful Western-capitalist expertise versus communist military aggression. But the U.S. military played a critical role in space exploration and utilization, defining and developing its own outer-space systems. As Sean Kalic argues in US Presidents and the Militarization of Space, the United States readily utilized outer space for military purposes, but did so while rejecting programs that would weaponize the heavens. Following a trajectory of U.S. presidents from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson, Kalic details the changes in the administrative relationships with the military space program during the early years of the cold war, beginning with the initial conceptualization of the means of utilizing space for defense in the immediate postwar years and concluding with Johnson's Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Despite America's militarization of space, presidents from Dwight Eisenhower through Johnson refused to deploy space weapons, even when the Soviet Union investigated doing so.