Phantom Orbit A Thriller

So this is a novel about the way in which space weapons, space warfare are coming to dominate warfare more broadly.

I've become convinced in four visits to Ukraine that Ukraine is really the first space war.

I can explain that in a minute but the book opens with a Russian astrophysicist, not a defector, not a traitor, but somebody who's come to believe that Russia and China developed the ability to essentially have a kill switch that can disable the GPS system on which American communications everywhere, our cell phone calls, our air travel, our travel of every sort depend.

And he tries to communicate that to the United States thinking he has a responsibility to do so and the CIA doesn't want to respond, doesn't get back to him.

But more broadly it's a book about what I think is the future of warfare, maybe the future of commerce as well, which is systems in space.

So, Joe, I have a friend from Syria who said to me once, David, you tell the truth more in your fiction than in your journalism.

The Washington Post David Ignatius, thank you.

So, John Meacham, Phantom Orbit is about the world of warfare that has really arrived.

The next war will begin in space, it may end in space, and these are systems that people haven't really begun to think about.

I get to think in this broader way about what's coming and the characters who are driving it.

So I tried to teach myself, got rejected by everybody but it ended up getting published in 1987. And because it told this amazing true story it became almost like a text.

So I've written 12 novels. Things that I find interesting in my journalism and want to unpack and tell in a rich way that they really happen I put into my fiction.

So sometimes I do make them columns in the Washington Post and then there's a dimension that is, I don't know enough to write it as fact but I know enough to make it plausible fiction.

So this book opens with a Russian who thinks that he has discovered a Russian-Chinese technique for, as he calls it, a kill switch for turning off GPS satellites which would, as all your listeners understand, would have a crippling effect. You couldn't use your cell phone, you couldn't travel, commerce wouldn't work. And so he feels he has to share this secret with the CIA.

But why is this so critical? Why was this the thing you wanted to put in? That they had put in essentially a sleeper cell, not a person, but a sleeper software that would disable.

So this is a book that's about space weapons which are taking over the world of warfare.

The book is about a Russian space scientist named Ivan Volkov who finds evidence that makes him believe that Russia and China have developed a system, kill switch is what he thinks of it as, that can turn off the GPS global positioning system on which every aspect of U.S. communications, transportation and really our economic lifeline depends and feels that he has a responsibility to share that information with the CIA.

The book pulls back to look at how his obsession with space shared with two other main characters began in the mid 1990s in Beijing and how the stories of this Russian, a Chinese who's his mentor and an American woman who works for the CIA become entangled in ways that take them right to today to the shadow of the Ukraine war which is happening as the concluding action of the book takes place.

And I wanted to go there because I wanted to see what people who had been crushed after the fall of the Soviet Union looked and felt like. I wanted my character to be of that world. People were recovering from this catastrophe.

So I was all set to go, was thinking about what hotel to stay in and this Magnitogorsk faraway place when boom, Russia invaded. And I was, I think, in the first big chunk of people who were banned. I was, I think, the only or one of the few journalists to this day. I don't know quite why I was on the list, but it meant that my visa was gone, obviously, and my chance of going to Magnitogorsk and Moscow had vanished.