It's interesting that some on this thread have raised the problem that protesting military technology hampers you compared to your potential adversaries. This is a topic covered in-depth in Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episode "Destroyer of Worlds" [1], which talked about the development of nuclear weapons after WWII.
One point of contention was the morality of developing the hydrogen bomb and people will ask the question "what if our enemies have it and we don't?"
On the other hand, anyone having a particular capability greatly increases the chances that everyone will have it. The US thought the Soviets would take 20 years to develop the atomic bomb. It took 4 years thanks in no small part to espionage efforts by the USSR. Part of the reason why this worked is people who didn't want a world where only the US had nuclear weapons. It would be too dangerous.
So for any military tech that US companies develop consider how likely that is to stay in their hands and not be stolen by China.
On a personal level I support employees holding their employers accountable. If you think you're absolved of moral responsibility for what the company does let me ask you this: why then aren't the lawyers who work for patent trolls or the price gouging executives at Big Pharma or those who worked for Big Tobacco?
It would be imprudent not to develop this. If your adversary deploys this technology they would have a dramatic advantage against you. Like nukes its technology that should not be used, but you also don't want to be the one without it.
In a lot of these scientific do or don’t debates - people tend to disqualify that there’s a consequence to not building the technology.
In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn’t help develop the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a different place today.
China, Russia, shit - North Korea are all working on super shady projects that you not I would want any part of. However that doesn’t stop the technology from being developed - and in some dire cases - not making the technology domestically puts us at a disadvantage.
This isn’t me saying that Amazon should continue providing Facial Recognition software to the Government. This is just saying never doing evil isn’t always the best solution - on a global scale.
I don't think so. These things can disable nukes according to testimony given to Congress. They're the basis of US supremacy.
In the above situations, it'd be imperative for the US to acquire the tech through war, economic pressure or espionage, or if that wasn't possible try to prevent them manufacturing more. If it was a friendly country they'd have to share the tech.
This tech is basically like developing 5th gen fighters in the Stone age. There's simply no way the world's largest superpower wouldn't acquire the tech by any means necessary, since it threatens its very existence
We could have gotten nuclear tech without the will to kill people. There are smart scientists outside of the military, and a need for power plants. Which everybody agree would have been built with safer tech without the need for the bomb.
Now the problem is never the tech, as usual. It's that the society we are living is not constructed in a way that can prevent the tech from being abused.
We are talking about a country that attacked Irak while lying out the WMD and against the vote of the majority of the world, killing countless people for no proven result and living a country still in ruin decades after that.
I'm not really trusting with the governments we have.
No thanks. Not looking forward to a friendly competition to develop auxiliary technology for wmds with an authoritarian regime. I like such regimes technologically obtuse. Maybe we can also give Iran and NK an award for pushing the boundaries of human knowledge on nuclear science. Your assessment of risk to humanity vs reward for human scientific progress is out of whack.
the only way for all of this to work out (for all parties involved) is if there is another superpower nation with nuclear weapons with laws that punishes these sort of behavior and all the tech talent flows there.
It would be interesting to see an analysis of how WMD technology would develop in the absence of a major conflict. It did take a Manhattan Project to get the atom bomb, after all. It's also a mind-bending exercise to try imagining the remainder of the 20th century without WWII.
The problem is that if the United States doesn't do it, China or other countries will. It's exactly the reason why we can't get behind on such a technology from a political / national perspective.
For what it's worth though, I think you're right that there are a lot of parallels with nuclear warheads and other dangerous technologies.
To a degree they would not have been invented with out the weapon. For example thorium reactors are designed in the 60s. The US ignored them because we couldn’t make weapons from their waste. The only reason thorium even got started was we thought it could be a weapon.
Nuclear technology is not something you can just build in your garage. You can't just download the specs off the internet, pick up some plutonium and cooling rods at the Home Depot, and do it over the weekend. It requires an immense amount of knowledge and skill that can't be easily acquired, and billions of dollars of specialized equipment and raw materials.
No one short of a sovereign nation has the resources to even potentially acquire a nuke. And no sovereign nation would attack another nation with a nuke, because the backlash would far outweigh any gains. Even Kim Jong Il realizes this, and he's about as mentally unstable as leaders get.
To the contrary. You can use these things to breed very dangerous material for bombs. Hence most industrial countries (say Germany) are nudged by the superpowers to not implement such devices. If Iran would build one, for instance, it would immediately be bombed by Israel or become a nuclear superpower in a few weeks of operation.
The main obstacle is cultural. Even contemplating the building of nuclear weapons is considered a deep disrespect to the memory of the people who died in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There would be a lot of domestic opposition to any such project, and it might even be difficult to recruit people and companies to contribute to it, because involvement in that work could harm their reputation. But they definitely aren't lacking the technological, material, or financial ability.
(Source: lived in Japan and discussed this with various engineers there)
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