Spoilers, obv.
December 19, 2016 10:45 AM   Subscribe

 
So the ethical approach to the American atomic bomb effort would've been to design it to explode in a populated American military base? (Insert "Soviet" for "American" if you have trouble imagining American use of the bomb as bad.)

Hmm.
posted by clawsoon at 10:55 AM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


No, but the ethical approach to being ordered to build a voting machine that has a backdoor is maybe to also build a way to independently log and audit access to that backdoor. For example.

I'm trying to come up with something for the folks at Palantir that built the software which will be used to maintain a list of Muslim Americans, but I'm not an engineer so someone else probably has better ideas.
posted by danny the boy at 11:26 AM on December 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


I think that's too literal a reading. The ethics of stopping the Death Star are more black and white than the ethics of stopping nuclear weapon development.

An ethical nuclear weapons engineer might endeavour to push against automation, to design some key component of the firing mechanism that requires a human decision to detonate the weapon and find some excuse for why it supposedly "can't" be automated. Thus creating an opportunity for a human being to interrupt the firing process if they had qualms about the chain of command that delivered the order.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:28 AM on December 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


I thought Clerks settled this issue back in the 90s.
posted by dr_dank at 11:31 AM on December 19, 2016 [7 favorites]


So the ethical approach to the American atomic bomb effort would've been to design it to explode in a populated American military base?

Maybe! The reason Hiroshima was targeted was that it wasn't a military base and was thus free from damage by earlier conventional strikes. "You want to test this bomb on an undamaged target? I can make that happen."
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 12:02 PM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Huh, and here I thought the FA was going to talk about the problems inherent in having only one non-networked offsite archive of all your technical documents...

(Although a friend on DW pointed out that the Empire's decision regarding the archive at the end of Rogue One made it far easier to explain how Han and Luke were able to bluff their way onto the Death Star in Ep. IV; all the personnel files had been lost!)
posted by suelac at 12:05 PM on December 19, 2016 [17 favorites]


tobascodagama: The ethics of stopping the Death Star are more black and white than the ethics of stopping nuclear weapon development.

Only if you're a Rebel.
posted by clawsoon at 12:06 PM on December 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


I think that's too literal a reading. The ethics of stopping the Death Star are more black and white than the ethics of stopping nuclear weapon development.

Really? There are some important differences between the movie and 1945, but I think the Death Star is a pretty obvious nuclear bomb metaphor. A weapon so powerful it will end the war / crush resistance.

I would definitely make my nuclear bomb a dud if I were conscripted (more likely I'd try to get janitor duty), but I have the luxury to say without being there. I kind of wish Rogue One give the death star engineers a little backstory to excuse them. Every other character got one!
posted by Popular Ethics at 12:07 PM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Only if you're a Rebel.

And similarly, only if you're not Japanese.
posted by danny the boy at 12:08 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


There are lots of debatable things about 1941-1945, but who was the aggressor in that conflict has not, heretofore, been one of them.

It's the Year of Our Trump 2016, though, so who the fuck knows? Maybe the Japanese Empire were the good guys.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:17 PM on December 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


It's the Year of Our Trump 2016, though, so who the fuck knows? Maybe the Japanese Empire were the good guys.

The Emperor was a strong leader.

(/s for days)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 12:20 PM on December 19, 2016


The Emperor was a strong leader.

I mean at least he has years of senatorial experience. It's hard to find even a fictional leader with less experience than Trump, with the possible exception of Rufus T Firefly, but he at least is good with words and the art of the one liner.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 12:30 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


(Not to mention that the Manhattan team were clearly thinking long and hard about the ethics of their project and decided to build the damned thing anyway. Meanwhile, their opposite numbers in Germany did a similar ethical calculus and decided to drag their feet long enough that the Nazis never had a practical chance at developing a functional weapon before they lost the war by conventional means.)
posted by tobascodagama at 12:31 PM on December 19, 2016 [7 favorites]


I'm thinking along these lines because I was re-watching a McNamara documentary the other day. He said that his commanding general - LeMay, I think? - had said that if the Americans lost, they'd be prosecuted as war criminals. I think he was talking about the fire bombing, but it applies equally well to the nukes. (My daughter was simultaneously trying to convince me to watch Thomas the Train, so I didn't quite catch everything he said. Maybe he made the "war criminals" comment about the nukes, too.)

We were, like the Empire, willing to incinerate large numbers of innocent civilians. You can be happy that the Americans won and still see the use of nukes on civilians as not good.
posted by clawsoon at 12:32 PM on December 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


The engineers on the Atomic bomb, according to the many memoirs, autobiographies, and books on the subject, were of many opinions, some wanting the bomb to succeed no matter the cost, others willing to risk their own lives to make sure other counties also got the bomb (spies from Russia and China), and the head of the project was extremely knowledgeable about the subject, an engineer himself, and would very likely have known if someone tried to make it non-functional or likely to blow up in a US base. Now, if Oppenheimer/Groves had reported to a Palpatine-type president, who knows if a viable bomb would have been developed -- but we don't have to speculate, as we have the perfect counter-example in history of atomic bomb delvelopment: Nazi Germany.

In Nazi Germany, the excuse for why they didn't beat the Americans to the bomb is that Nazi philosophy objected to the Bohr model of the atom -- that the Nazis refused to believe that an atom could be split and refused to provide needed resources for the project, which is odd considering the number of pre-Nazi German atomic physicists who had actually written up and published papers on just that phenomena. Instead, what really seems to have happened, and the first hand evidence of this was only released recently in order to avoid retaliations, is that the top physicists running the programs that would have led to a bomb slowballed tests, sandbagged, deliberately overestimated production requirements, under reported successful results, sent lesser scientists and engineers on snipe hunts and misleading paths, made sure the UK and other anti-Nazi states knew where the critical manufacturing facilities were such as the Norwegian heavy water plant, and generally slowed down the project so much by the end of the war all the nuclear material and research the Nazis had could fit in the bilges of a 300' long x 30' diameter submarine -- which surrendered (another sabotage of the Axis nuclear program by a non-Nazi captain?) to the US when Germany gave up. That is the "Star Wars Death Star Head Engineer builds in a flaw" equivalent when it comes to atomic bomb development: instead of being blowing up after taking out Alderaan due to a flaw, the Death Star never gets developed as the power supply never works properly because the head of the project turned a blind eye to any engineers changing numbers, fudging equations, and telling the Empire that before they can even start to think of building the main reactor, they'll need a few million tons of unobtainium, a left-handed magnetic monopole shifter, and then making sure the Rebels know that should something untoward happen to the unguarded stockpile of Heisenberg compensators over on Naboo it would delay the development for months to years, and by the way the local Gungans might just be willing to do something about it if you work with them.
posted by Blackanvil at 12:32 PM on December 19, 2016 [57 favorites]


Blackanvil: but we don't have to speculate, as we have the perfect counter-example in history of atomic bomb delvelopment: Nazi Germany.

We also have the Soviet Union under Stalin, fresh from the Great Purge, urged on by Flyorov; why did that project turn out differently? Why didn't Beria's scientists lie, obfuscate, and delay?
posted by clawsoon at 12:43 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Why didn't Beria's scientists lie, obfuscate, and delay?

They were convinced that we were preparing to nuke them and that as bad as their leaders were, if they didn't have a way to respond we would annihilate them. When we built our nukes nobody knew if they were even possible, and if we hadn't gone to the trouble it's likely we still wouldn't be too sure. But once we had working nukes, the only answer to them was nukes of your own, and we'd proven that it was possible to build them and that we were willing to both build them and use them on population centers.

Germany was beset, as mentioned above, by political beliefs about Jewish science and the Bohr model of the atom, as well as a relative lack of resources and a mistaken measurement of the properties of carbon which ruled it out as a moderator in any reactors they might try to build. They also had the means to try only one method of isotope separation, and the one they tried because its inventor was still working with them doesn't happen to work with uranium hexaflouride.
posted by Bringer Tom at 1:00 PM on December 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Why didn't Beria's scientists lie, obfuscate, and delay?

My guess is that this is a lot harder to do this once it's well known that the weapon is not just possible, not just demonstrated, but deployed. At that point, the project's scientists are no longer the only gatekeepers, and you can get information and possibly even hardware through intelligence and intrigue rather than science and engineering -- and check them against one another.
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:07 PM on December 19, 2016 [4 favorites]


At that point, the project's scientists are no longer the only gatekeepers

This also was exactly true; it is now known, as Richard Rhodes relates in Dark Sun, that the Russians were in fact getting intel from within the Manhattan Project, and that even though Sakharov was already having ideas on how to improve Fat Man, the first Soviet bomb was essentially a carbon copy so they'd be sure it would work.
posted by Bringer Tom at 1:11 PM on December 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


We also have the Soviet Union under Stalin, fresh from the Great Purge, urged on by Flyorov; why did that project turn out differently? Why didn't Beria's scientists lie, obfuscate, and delay?

Because for all its flaws and for all the evils that the system in practise under Stalin entailed communism was still attractive enough to defend, much more so than nazism and fascism could ever be. Note that there weren't any nazi spies at the highest level of American and British atomic bomb development stealing its secrets for the cause.

Communism promised a better world that even people among the enemy could believe in; fascism not so much.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:13 PM on December 19, 2016 [5 favorites]


I thought Clerks settled this issue back in the 90s.

Indeed.
posted by Sangermaine at 1:16 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Well, it definitely puts an end to "if I was an evil overlord, I wouldn't let my Death Star have such a weakness" and "lol 'super death killer machine' is actually a massive firework" - for me I felt the film really amped up the scary-ness of the Death Star- the ability to only wipe out certain cities (a low power mode) actually made it more terrifying- yes Alderaan is totally obliterated - which is hard to comprehend, but the total destruction of a planet seems to be something that is done rarely- the comparatively small destruction makes it a tool much more likely to be deployed, in my mind.

This discussion reminds me of the discussion we had in September about the captured German scientists discussing the development and deployment of the American nuclear weapon.
posted by freethefeet at 1:30 PM on December 19, 2016 [6 favorites]


They were convinced that we were preparing to nuke them

They had a point, though.
posted by kmt at 1:47 PM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Maybe the Japanese Empire were the good guys.

The dead and tortured of Nanking, Manila, Bataan, Unit 731, and a thousand other charnel houses would say otherwise.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:48 PM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


what really seems to have happened, and the first hand evidence of this was only released recently in order to avoid retaliations, is that the top physicists running the programs that would have led to a bomb slowballed tests, sandbagged, deliberately overestimated production requirements, under reported successful results, sent lesser scientists and engineers on snipe hunts and misleading paths, made sure the UK and other anti-Nazi states knew where the critical manufacturing facilities were such as the Norwegian heavy water plant

Can you source this? I went trying to track some of it down and found a discussion about Heisenberg's efforts that seems to indicate on balance that he made mistakes rather than sandbagged. Another web source suggests it was simply different priorities. Where else should I be reading?
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:50 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Heisenberg's role in either sabotaging or simply bumbling the German nuclear project is debatable to this day.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:51 PM on December 19, 2016 [3 favorites]


Heisenberg's role in either sabotaging or simply bumbling the German nuclear project is debatable to this day.

Would it be fair to say that there's uncertainty about Heisenberg's principles regarding the bomb then?

I'm sorry
posted by nubs at 3:16 PM on December 19, 2016 [21 favorites]


The reason Hiroshima was targeted was that it wasn't a military base

Hiroshima was headquarters of the Japanese 5th Division and the 2nd Army. It was also a port and communications center.
posted by IndigoJones at 3:32 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


The reason Hiroshima was targeted is that it was spared from LeMay's conventional bombing, kind of like a science fair experiment, to provide a pristine target for the atomic bomb. This was along with a handful of other cities which were on the targeting list mainly because LeMay hadn't gotten around to bombing them yet conventionally when the targeting committee got around to asking about pristine targets. Nagasaki was added at the last minute; Kokura would have arguably made a much better military target, but the weather spared it when Bock's Car came around with Fat Man in its belly.

LeMay had pretty well murdered the idea that cities should in any way be held aside as targets with his firebombing campaigns, which killed hundreds of times more people than the atomic bombs did. After all all those residential houses might have drill presses in them, making parts for the war effort. Proper military targets all of them, so the logic went. To his credit (and I type that with a bit of a wince) LeMay recognized that if we'd lost the war he would have almost certainly been hanged as a war criminal.

We did Hiroshima because we didn't know what it would do; there were reasons at the time to think the atomic weapon might not be as effective as a similar load of conventional explosives. Those reasons turned out to be wrong. We did Nagasaki because the destruction to Hiroshima was so complete that it took time for the news to get out, and when it did get out nobody quite believed it. We were ready to do a third bombing but, as President Harry Truman wrote in his diary, he couldn't stomach the thought of killing "all those kids."
posted by Bringer Tom at 3:58 PM on December 19, 2016 [7 favorites]


Why didn't Beria's scientists lie, obfuscate, and delay?

Beria was the head of the NKVD and would have executed them.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:41 PM on December 19, 2016


Beria was the head of the NKVD and would have executed them.

Not only that, as alluded to above, he was using the NKVD's resources to obtain information about the nuclear weapons programs of the US and UK, but he probably didn't share that with any of the actual scientists, instead keeping it to himself so that he could root out potential sandbagging, etc. It's definitely the most Beria way to approach that particular problem.
posted by Copronymus at 6:02 PM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]


Maybe! The reason Hiroshima was targeted was that it wasn't a military base and was thus free from damage by earlier conventional strikes. "You want to test this bomb on an undamaged target? I can make that happen."

Doing some reading for a comment I never made in the fairly recent and very excellent FPP about secretly recorded captured German physicists, I ran into the extremely startling claim that Dresden was high on a list of candidate cities for the first nuclear strike -- until it was firebombed, of course, which is now almost universally regarded as superfluous to the war effort and therefore a war crime.

But maybe it really was necessary to destroy the city in order to save it.

With everything that might say about the true depths of American racism.
posted by jamjam at 6:07 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


Is this the official Rogue One thread?

This is part of Hollywood’s habit of labeling as ‘science’ the most exciting parts of engineering.

This. It's hard for me to think of the last movie I've watched in which science was actually science.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 6:21 PM on December 19, 2016 [1 favorite]


There's a thread for full discussion of Rogue One on Fanfare.
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:35 PM on December 19, 2016


This. It's hard for me to think of the last movie I've watched in which science was actually science.

The important question to ask yourself is whether you fucking love it.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:54 PM on December 19, 2016 [2 favorites]




Really? There are some important differences between the movie and 1945, but I think the Death Star is a pretty obvious nuclear bomb metaphor. A weapon so powerful it will end the war / crush resistance.

Spoilers if you haven't seen Rogue One (although why are you reading this thread if so?): The Death Star is used in Rogue One exactly as a nuke. Twice they fire it, at reduced power, to destroy a single city. The imagery is pretty much spot on a (really big) nuclear fireball. Earlier in the film it's described as a weapon that will end the war ("bring peace to the galaxy"). It couldn't be any more of a nuclear weapon metaphor.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:59 AM on December 20, 2016 [5 favorites]


It's hard for me to think of the last movie I've watched in which science was actually science.

That would have been Brainstorm.
posted by Bringer Tom at 6:25 AM on December 20, 2016


Interesting!
I came away from the movie thinking about how it centred around archives!

The abilty to use the transmitted plans is dependent on some kind of common file format.
The file retrieval automation was central to the final action sequence.
The data centre tower was central to the cityscape. Where have you ever seen the archive be the impressive tall focal point?
I saw rogue 1 hilarious described as 'the story of an incredibly difficult FOIA request'.

Anyway, I really enjoyed this article, not knowing much about engineering. And I especially like reading the comparisons here to the sandbagging efforts of bomb makers. Seems like the Imperial archivists maybe could have had some character development too!
posted by chapps at 7:28 AM on December 20, 2016 [7 favorites]


It's hard for me to think of the last movie I've watched in which science was actually science.

That would have been Brainstorm.


Don't ignore Twister! The central drama of the film is whether they're going to collect their data successfully.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:47 AM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


Don't ignore Twister!

It's true that there is a drama of whether they get their data, but the central drama seemed to me whether the insufficiently insured RED DODGE RAM PICKUP TRUCK would end up getting eaten by a tornado, and of course the price of getting the data was that the RED DODGE RAM PICKUP TRUCK had to be sacrificed to a tornado.

I don't recall the similar product placement in Brainstorm; I think maybe there was a pile of Coke cans in a flashback?
posted by Bringer Tom at 1:54 PM on December 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


the central drama seemed to me whether the insufficiently insured RED DODGE RAM PICKUP TRUCK would end up getting eaten by a tornado, and of course the price of getting the data was that the RED DODGE RAM PICKUP TRUCK had to be sacrificed to a tornado.

Look, the RED DODGE RAM PICKUP truck was a metaphor for Bill Paxton's marriage to and new life with the nice psychologist lady, Dr. Reeves. So yeah, it is insufficiently insured and it gets sacrificed because the movie is about Bill realizing that he isn't about that type of life; he belongs with Helen Hunt because he grounds her from her flightiness and she elevates him in terms of taking chances, and together they make amazing fucking science, alright? The truck had to go, not just for the plot, but also for the symbolism.

Plus the movie has Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Dusty, and part of me thinks that Dusty and Dr. Reeves wound up getting together at some point, just on a complete opposites-attract-physical-chemistry level. But that's a gut instinct and I have no data to back it up.
posted by nubs at 2:09 PM on December 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


To be fair, the RED DODGE RAM PICKUP TRUCK wasn't product placement so much as Twister's main character. I don't recall who else was in the movie. (Was there anyone else in the movie?)
posted by clawsoon at 2:10 PM on December 20, 2016


Oh, I guess there was.
posted by clawsoon at 2:11 PM on December 20, 2016


Look, you guys can mock Twister all you want. That's a movie about change and chasing dreams and how they can both fuck you up and make you whole.

I didn't realize I had such strong opinions about Twister.
posted by nubs at 2:21 PM on December 20, 2016 [5 favorites]


Well to be fair to Twister, when Our Heroes seek shelter in the barn only to find it is completely full of sharp implements hanging from the ceiling I did laugh out loud.
posted by Bringer Tom at 3:10 PM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


Well to be fair to Twister, when Our Heroes seek shelter in the barn only to find it is completely full of sharp implements hanging from the ceiling

And that's how we know that Twister ties into the same universe as Cabin in the Woods.
posted by nubs at 3:14 PM on December 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


It's hard for me to think of the last movie I've watched in which science was actually science.

Arrival?
posted by shponglespore at 11:02 PM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


On the subject on whether Orson Krennic is a scientist or an engineer, I find it entirely plausible that the head of a military project staffed mostly by engineers would be a scientist by training. I worked for nearly a decade as an engineer at a company run by a scientist whose employees were mostly engineers, and whose funding mostly came from the military. (Ethical objections were part of why I eventually left, but only a small part. Our research was so far from being practical that I think the main effect of our work was to siphon money away from projects that could have actually hurt people.)
posted by shponglespore at 11:15 PM on December 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


If you look at a real world project like the Large Hadron Collider, LIGO, or hell even the Manhattan Project, you will find a few people doing pure science but most of the personnel doing what amounts to engineering (and construction, and other lower-tier tech services). It takes a scientist to work out the parameters of a detector or reactor that has to do something that has never been done before, but then you give those parameters to engineers and techs to realize.

The Death Star would have been that kind of project for the Empire, with power reactors and energy projectors an order of magnitude or more larger than anything that had ever been built. It takes pure science to work out how to build a new thing like that but then it takes engineering to realize it as a practical project.
posted by Bringer Tom at 12:14 PM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


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