The best and worst of times: How do you solve a problem like war?

The period from the late 1950s—since the launch of Sputnik in 1957—till the 1980s is considered to be the golden age in planetary science. In 1958, former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an order for the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with which science education and funding for scientific research got a major boost. By then, the whole world was watching the ‘race for space’, the interest amplified by the new medium of television. From “distant and distinct discs moving through the night sky”, planets turned into “diverse new worlds in the course of exploration”, according to the editors of the book ‘The Space Age Generation: Lives and Lessons from the Golden Age of Solar System Exploration’.

But, they say, the glory of the space age was offset by the gloom of the Cold War and the arms race between the USSR and the US. Our expanding knowledge of our solar system came on the heels of one of the most horrific periods of human history, which saw the Holocaust, World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Ironically, the drive for more deadly weapons of warfare (modified ballistic missiles) became the very means that would allow voyages to the moon and planets,” they write. “It was the best and the worst of times….,”

Today, it seems like the world has come full circle. Recently, NASA declared that the next “golden age of space exploration” had begun. In the last two decades, astronomers have made many deep space discoveries, detected gravitational waves from black holes and fast-tracked the search for life elsewhere in the universe. Asteroid exploration missions like Lucy are studying the formation of our solar system. NASA’s first unmanned lunar missions in phase one of its $20 billion ‘moon base’ plan—to build a habitable outpost on the moon—will begin later this year. “America returns to the moon again, and this time to stay,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. American astronauts will touch down on the moon for the first time since the Apollo landings of the 1960s in 2028 as part of the Artemis IV mission, if all goes according to plan.

But just like the first golden age, this one, too, has a flip side. History repeats itself by placing us amidst another arms race, deadlier than ever before. “Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars,” said Booker-winner Arundhati Roy. “Now wars are being manufactured to sell weapons.” According to the latest SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) data for 2021-2025, the global volume for major arms transfers rose by 9.2 per cent compared with the previous five-year period—the largest increase since 2011-2015. The US remained the biggest spender, accounting for a third of all military spending in 2025, but the gap with the next largest spenders is shrinking. It spent 2.8 times as much on the military as China—the next largest spender. India was the fifth biggest spender in the world, increasing its military spending by 8.9 per cent to $92.1 billion.  

Countries are working on futuristic weapons that, as Pentagon official Andrew C. Weber warned, can increase the speed of warfare to outpace human ability to control it. These include cyberweapons that can turn off electrical grids across a country and bioweapons designed to kill people with certain genetic characteristics. America has Maven, which uses computer vision algorithms to identify and track targets. Russia has the advanced loitering munition V2U. China is working on interconnected AI networks, stealth aviation and hypersonic dominance.

Recently, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the world now has more wars than at any time since the UN was founded 80 years ago. THE WEEK analysed available data to arrive at the new nature of warfare and what its consequences might be. Through statistics and numbers, we expanded on some characteristics of modern warfare. Like how civilian casualties are increasing rapidly and how state-sponsored violence is at an all-time high. And then the business of war: global defence spending reached a record $2.44 trillion in 2023, according to SIPRI. The military-industrial complex is no longer an American institution. It is a global phenomenon, wearing different faces in different capitals.

So how do you solve a problem like war?

Unfortunately, today, everyone is treating that as a question too complex to have an answer. In a New York Times article, Lloyd J. Austin III, former US secretary of defence, wrote about what America needed to learn from the Iran war. He listed several measures to adopt, from disrupting drone supply chains and factories to encouraging battlefield cooperation among allies and partners. “The Iran war is a real-time case study in the changing character of modern warfare,” he wrote. “It shows that the lessons of Ukraine were not an anomaly. Making the institutional changes to learn these lessons will be hard—but as the Iran war has already demonstrated, doing so is not optional.”

Throughout, Lloyd’s focus was on winning the war, not ending it. These days, the difference between the two is becoming starker, as ‘winning’ a war does not necessarily end it; the underlying unresolved issues threaten to crop up anytime and keep the world teetering perennially on the edge of war.

Perhaps it is a basic human trait that our best and our worst selves must always co-exist. One part of us is interested in innovation, space exploration, science, beauty and poetry. Another part in developing cutting-edge weaponry that can destroy in seconds everything we have built and lived for. If one part were to win over the other, which would it be? In other words, are we moving into the dystopian world of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, in which Matthew McConaughey’s character says something profound: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”