The Time Between: War, Peace and the Questions That Cannot Wait

The book asks, of decisions in war and at its edges: what must be decided now, and what would make the decision change? Its own question, under that one, is how a decision record holds the time between a question and its answer when some answers cannot wait (an alarm, an evacuation, a ceasefire signed outside the room) and others must be kept for decades or generations (the record of the missing, an alliance a later generation may refuse). It reads Meridian's fifty defence questions, set in four layers of time from 2026 to the late twenty-second century, each with the thirteen AI-generated judgments Meridian published, through a ledger that codes every question on the same six axes, and sets what the ledger shows beside the literatures on ending wars, warning and surprise, civilian control, and justice after war. Its argument concerns the records and the ideas, not which option is right: these questions name their decider and their deadline and write conditions for reopening, as their form asks; the thirteen judgments seldom part; and what the records leave thin is who bears the waiting and whether a reopening condition could be observed by anyone outside the room.