Shades of President Kennedy explaining his decision to push for an all-out effort to land men on the Moon before the end of the decade, "not because it was easy but because it was hard" !
"Hard" attracted lots of top (alpha male) scientists who could graceful forget about doing something boringly useful in this current war by focusing instead on daydreams of achieving eternal scientific glory.
The glory of building a new bomb that would fire-bomb entire cities just as good as existing fire bombs already were and the glory of artificially synthesizing an already existing - and already useful- natural substance.
"Hard" also meant that A-Bombs and synthetic penicillin would remain a dark secret to the enemy for at least a year or three, even after their first use at the front revealed their existence : this is the reason why the OSRD and their British equivalent were so interested in these "hard" projects....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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