THE DARK SIDE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: MILITARY TECHNOLOGY II
??????????? Science always increases the body count.?
??????????? I then moved on to nuclear weapons, beginning with Trinity, Fat Man, and Little Boy.? The students hadn’t lived through the height of the Cold War, like I had.? So I took them through a “drop drill” and other parts of my childhood. ?As they got under the table they had to place their hands around their necks to protect their jugular veins and carotid arteries.?
??????????? I shared that I still react to air raid drills and I trained myself to immediately turn away from a bright flash. If you were to dust off my essays from high school English classes, quite a few of them covered the subject of nuclear annihilation. ??
??????????? The main campus of Solano College was built in 1972 at the height of the Cold War.? When I first arrived, there was a placard in every classroom:?
In case of natural disaster or nuclear attack….??
??????????? I collected one of these plaques and I have it hanging in my office.? During this lecture I brought it to the classroom.?
??????????? I start the discussion of the nuclear age with footage of the first nuclear weapon used in war from the BBC documentary on Hiroshima:
??????????? And the announcement by Harry S. Truman:?
??????????? threatening to continue to drop atomic bombs on Japan until their unconditional surrender; the first defeat in Japan’s long history.?
??????????? From there the arms race began.?
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??????????? Those bombs dropped on Japan were tiny, of course, by contemporary standards.? ?They were replaced by the subsequent invention of Hydrogen bombs - ?fusion weapons replaced fission weapons.??
??????????? Most of the students were unaware of tripartite defense, that the United States still armed B-52’s in the air at any time and South Dakota is filled with silos that contain intercontinental ballistic missiles, fueled and ready to be launched at any time, and that Trident submarines patrol the world’s ocean.? Each of these multi-billion dollar submarines contains the equivalent of three World War II’s.? I show the speech from CrimsonTide:?
??????????? When the captain says that his boat is “capable of launching more firepower than has ever been unleashed in the history of war.”? Here I pause the video to emphasize “true statement.”?
??????????? We still live under the threat of complete nuclear annihilation, but we don’t think about it like we did in previous decades.? Deterrence proved to be an effective strategy – at least so far.? ?
??????????? We covered Mutually assured destruction (with the appropriate acronym MAD), overkill, MIRVed warheads, Megatons, strategic versus tactical nuclear weapons, neutron bombs (enhanced radiation weapons), backfire bombers, cruise missiles, the Strategic Defense Initiative, nuclear winter, NORAD, overpressure, fallout, first-strike, NATO, missile gap, non-aligned nations, minutemen missiles, MOAB bomb, and the nuclear football.?
??????????? Rather than leaving everyone depressed, I would bring in an expert to talk about non-proliferation efforts, SALT I, SALT II, the Helsinki accords, détente, and glasnost
??????????? The solutions are not technological – they are human.? They fall into the realm of political science and negotiation.?
??????????? And I end with a poster from the height of the Cold War (it’s better with a black-light) that I first saw in a headshop in Haight-Asbury in 1969.
In case of a nuclear bomb attack:?
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