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June 9, 2013 at 3:15 pm
Hmmm, her history is interesting but spotty. Only -wealthy- warmongers get to deploy cutting edge tech. That pretty much has limited it to the US. PCs, which weren’t developed by DoD, made smart bombs possible when the Pentagon figured out they could make one as an add-on pack to a gravity bomb and invented the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). DoD directed the Manhattan Project but the science was the work of the world’s leading high energy physics and chemistry minds. It went with nuclear reactors first but the technology, after a ramp up in the US, stalled after Three Mile Island. Coincidentally, the news here just announced the San Onofre Plant will be put in shutdown permanently. Nuclear reactors are most prominently used in the navy but didn’t take over domestically. Military advances in the biosciences are close to nil. There’s truth to the drones thing but it’s hard for me to see them taking over in Pasadena or other towns with supervisors who want to keep the place relatively tourist friendly. Pasadena banned Segways in Old Town as soon as they showed up. I can see the same kind of attitude in places around the country curbing unlimited use of flying toys. Applied science and basic science are two different things. The US military has never done the latter, the foundation of applications, well. One of my favorite moments in US innovation — The US military could never have invented the electric guitar. Yet it quickly became a ubiquitous piece of distinctly American origin and did really quite a lot to spread a youthful enthusiasm for a particular set of good American (and British) ideals around the world. It helped win the Cold War because the Soviet kids heard it, wanted it and tried to have their own. It was most driven home to me decades ago when the first “Soviet” bands were allowed out to tour the US. One of them, Gorky Park, came to Allentown and I had to cover them. They were a big hair pop metal band, hadn’t always been so, but they changed with the trends they saw and heard from here. They were also not real good but they were pathetically happy to finally be here, if only for a little while. The American thing had changed them. They obviously did not view us as enemies.
June 10, 2013 at 8:37 am
Her piece was hardly in-depth analysis, true. I do think she makes an important point: you can un-make technology; you can hope only the control it.
Your last sentence caught my attention. Endless war requires an endless enemies.
There’s probably a history award for someone who provides a definite analysis of the “enemy creation industrial complex,” which he or she will receive just before disappearing.