Tom Stevenson

It is one thing to station military forces around the world to maintain your empire, but quite another to do so for someone else’s. It’s not a new observation that those in power in Britain have become more culturally militarist as the UK has been shorn of actual global military influence. It’s harder to explain the persistence of imperial lackeydom after Iraq. Part of the reason is a refusal, in most parts of society, to confront the reality of the post-9/11 wars. An aphakic view of the British military’s role in the world persists. The UK remains a country in which the phrase ‘east of Suez’ is used without irony. A country that claims having soldiers in 46 countries is necessary to keep its citizens safe. A country where professing a willingness to use nuclear weapons is considered a precondition for political office. A country that passes legislation to protect itself from prosecution for torture and war crimes (the new Overseas Operations Bill was criticised by the UN special rapporteur on torture as ‘one of the most corrupt ideas the UK has come up with in modern times’). 

History​ is full of mysterious deaths in which lethal substances are alleged to have been responsible, but the accusation is often misplaced: the tenth-century Byzantine empress Theophano wasn’t responsible for the sudden death of her husband, Romanos II, or the historian Rashid al-Din for the death of the Ilkhanid ruler Öljeitü. Some poisoning stories are no more than...

Unlike planets, asteroids have no atmosphere and much less energy is needed to lift materials off their surfaces. In December, a Japanese mission returned to Earth with the first samples taken from below an asteroid’s surface. Nations have fought plenty of wars over shitty little islands. Fighting over shitty little asteroids is not implausible.