War was the place where the power that technology could provide began to be seen as a mixed blessing
how did modern era enthusiasm for technology come to an end?
technology gives us more and more power, maybe too much for humans to handle well

Lienhard tells us historical stories to reflect on the motivations of people developing technologies for war. 
Should ethical issues apply?

• personal ethics--what jobs would you take
• professional ethics--is something so harmful to society that the professionals involved shouldn't develop it?
• communal ethics--what do we as a society not want to do because of the harm it might cause
• ethics should be more than: something just seems too horrible. That is not a good way to make a decision, because that can change (or not)
• just war theory: war is ethically justified only in certain circumstances, you must conduct war in a way that harms the fewest possible civilians
  

Consider the near future example of robot soldiers:

• a machine that will take action in war at a distance from human beings
• machine can be remotely controlled
  
• or make its own firing decisions--autonomous
  
• robot soldiers would mean fewer casualties
  
• we already have remote controlled aircraft (drones)
• we don't trust machines
  
• emotional detachment--kill too easily because it feels like a video game
  
• war should be men facing men, this is not a fair fight--we aren't putting ourselves at risk
  
• more wars because there wouldn't be human casualties on our side

constant decisions in modern warfare so we are talking about autonomous robot soldiers that make their own decisions

• GA Tech professor says he can make robot soldiers that will follow the rules of war better than human soldiers
• what worries him is that countries will go to war more quickly if they can do it without human causalities
  
• how much autonomy would you give robots, and does this lead to risk of them taking over the world
• robots taking jobs way from people  -- the play RUR (Rossums Universal Robots) predicted this in 1921

Why is war a special case when thinking about the progress of technology

• different purpose: not to make our lives better, at least not directly
• marketed to government, not to consumers
• military technology doesn't have to compete in the free market
• the government will fund military technologies if useful enough even if very expensive
• urgency is high, special teams of researchers are pulled together for a crash program
  

The impact of technology on war, both in effectiveness and experience
The impact of war on technology (usually speeding it up)
The impact of war (as changed by technology) on society
The impact of the experience of war on attitudes towards technology
The impact of society on war technology (eg. ethical constraints)

When did technologies developed during a war start to make a difference?

The Civil War was significantly impacted by technology, particularly railroads and more accurate rifled guns.  The first step towards a machine gun, the Gatling gun, was tested but not widely used.

Maxim's invention of the first machine gun:

• motivated by profit--the US was not in a war
  
• in 1885 he produced a gun that fired 666 rounds a minute
• the Russians bought large numbers and showed their effectiveness
• he also predicted the importance of airplanes to war

The inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel, later founded a peace prize, but earlier in his life he said:

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World War I started in 1914, US entered April 1917, Armistice Dec. 1918.

• The war quickly settled down to a trench warfare stalemate due to the use of machine guns and barbed wire--technology seemed to be the only way out.
• deaths seemed particularly meaningless when it was so difficult to make any progress
  
• as well as airplanes and poison gas, tanks and submarines were developed into useful weapons
• The war therefore led to the first major wartime efforts to develop technology for military use

 French tank Poison gas

• A few months after the war began the French apparently used gas against the Germans and the Germans retaliated in kind.
• In the 9th month of the war the Germans released a cloud of chlorine gas--which causes choking--on French troops who retreated in panic, leaving behind perhaps 5,000 dead.  A four mile gap in the line was opened, but the Germans had not brought forward enough reserves to exploit it and the Allies repaired the break.
• At first troops wore makeshift masks of handkerchiefs wetted with urine and tied over nose and mouth.
• Germany was widely criticized for breaking the Hague Conventions of 1899.
  
• In mid-1915 Germans started using phosgene, which causes severe lung damage, and both sides developed gas masks.
• By the end of 1916 a variety of weapons were in use by both sides.  Germans introduced mustard gas--could cause burns to exposed skin even when a soldier was protected by a mask.
• This quickly became a research race.  It started with the US Bureau of Mines working on adapting mining equipment.
• A central lab was created in fall 1917 at American University--at peak employed 1200 scientists.  Developed a new gas called Lewisite, that poisoned through the skin, simpler ways of producing mustard gas, and more
• Chemical Warfare Service created July 1918--university chemists and Bureau of Mines personnel were given commissions.
• In all as many as 50 different gases were used--poison-gas causalities 1.3 million with 92,000 deaths.
• After the war chemists were proud of their contribution to the nation--wanted ongoing research.  Argued that chemical weapons were humane (and effective) because they disabled soldiers rather than killing them.  They didn't get the continuing high level of research they wanted.
• A strong reaction against the use of gas took over instead.  The Geneva Protocol--an international protocol signed in 1925 prohibiting the use in war of "asphyxiating, poisonous and other gasses" and of "bacteriological methods of warfare."
• Poison gas research continued and poison gas development eventually led to the invention of some of the pesticides we use to control insects
  
• The treaty held through World War II but use of poison gas is a difficult issue today.  Fear becomes an issue even when it is not used:  seven Israelis suffocated to death due to improper use of gas masks during Iraqi attacks in the Gulf War.
  

 We can make choices about technologies

Poison gas was seen as too horrible

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what is the role of the government in technological progress?
war is a time when the government role will increase
WWI:

• NACA
• Naval Research Lab
• NRC
  

The Navy also decided it needed to encourage research

• Thomas Edison said he had a plan for preparedness but that he was reluctant to discuss the terrible devices he had in mind.  War could be mechanized with labor-saving devices
• In 1915 the Navy established the Naval Consulting Board
• the board was to consist of "Civilian Experts on Machines" who would originate ideas and critically examine ideas submitted by others--11 professional societies each named two members.  These were engineers and business leaders, not scientists
• the Board had a big fight about building its own laboratory, but the laboratory that was eventually built continued after the war as the Naval Research Laboratory
• the effort that got the most public attention was a plan to screen inventions submitted by the public--Edison believed that American inventors could win the war
• 110,000 inventions were submitted, 110 deemed worthy of development, only one reached production--an aircraft simulator invented by W. Guy Ruggles (photo)
• one of the Board's largest projects was trying to find new methods of submarine detection
• they also sponsored research on gyroscopic stabilization, leading to the first primitive autopilots for aircraft (Lawrence Sperry proved they didn't work too well--at least not well enough for the pilot to get romantic instead of flying the plane)

  World War I British Submarine Meanwhile scientists felt unappreciated and the National Academy of Sciences (an honorary society created during the Civil War) established the National Research Council in 1916 to show what science could contribute

• Scientists wanted to show how valuable science is: George Ellery Hale (an astronomer) wrote: "I really believe this is the greatest chance we have ever had to advance research in America"
• they also focused on the problem of submarine detection--German U-Boats sunk over a million tons of Allied and neutral merchantmen in the first quarter of 1917
• the NRC brought in professors from universities to work on the problem
• a young mathematician named Max Mason had the idea of a listening device that could focus sound--he build something that looked like a trombone
• the final device had a range of 3 miles and was very successful.  Similar technology was developed for artillery ranging
• scientists felt they had proved the scientific research approach to developing new technology

So then what was the impact of war on technology and science?
WWI led to the government getting involved in developing new technologies in a big way
It proved that scientific research can often  come up with new products on demand.

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Another such story in Europe:

Rockets are another product of the modern dream  (a brief history of rockets)

• Jules Verne's novel From the Earth to the Moon (1865), featuring a launch from a cannon in northeastern Florida
• Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's work (influenced by Verne) in Russia on the theory of rocket propulsion?
• in 1903 he published a book titled Exploring Cosmic Space with Reactive Devices in which he laid out the mathematics of orbital mechanics and designed a rocket powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.  Recognized many of the problems, eg. burning up during reentry, and thought of multistage rockets (which he called rocket trains).  No attempt to experiment--he received only one small grant.  Saw spaceflight as liberation from human limits and the first step towards the perfection of human society.
• Robert Goddard's theories (1919 treatise A Method of Reaching Extremely High Altitudes), and experiments, starting in 1926, with small, liquid-fuel rockets?
• In 1930 Goddard set up full time research in New Mexico, attempting 41 launches, 31 of them successful, in the next 11 years.  His largest rocket was 22 feet in length, fueled with gasoline and liquid oxygen.  After 1941 he couldn't get further support, and he died in 1945.
• He was much laughed at and couldn't take it, so he conducted his research privately, failed to build an organization, suffered from lack of support, and had little influence.  He repeatedly failed to get military funding (on the grounds that the U.S. had no need for military rockets at that time), and while he received over $200,000 from foundations, it was on a year by year basis that made it difficult to undertake large projects.  His fame came only when space travel began to look realistic--in 1960 the U.S. government awarded his family $1 million for the rights to use more than 200 of his patents.

The key to turning this enthusiasm into a serious space program turned out to be government support, and the Germans were the first to get it.

• the roots of this development are in an society of amateur rocketeers inspired by a German-speaking Rumanian schoolteacher and rocket theoretician, Hermann Oberth, who published The Rocket into Planetary Space in 1923
• The Society for Space Travel (VfR) was founded in 1927, with Oberth as its president

• by 1929 it had 870 members, including Wernher von Braun, who had just graduated from high school.
• It had two goals: popularize the idea of flight to the moon and planets and perform serious experiments in rocket propulsion.
• Oberth was a classic incompetent theoretician (one of his colleagues said that if "Oberth wants to drill a hole, first he invents the drill press"), early efforts resulted in many explosions including one that killed a member, Despite these problems, the society successfully launched 87 small liquid-fueled rockets in 1931 from an abandoned WWI ammunition storage facility (including one that set fire to a nearby police station).  Experiments continued at a slowing rate until 1934, when the society went bankrupt
• Amateur research could only afford to go so far: the VfR was funding only by dues and admission charged to view launches.  The leaders of the VfR promoted the idea of rockets as weapons in hopes of getting the funding they needed.
• The German army became interested in rockets in 1929 as a way of getting around the treaty of Versailles limits on the army
• In 1932 the German army assigned Walter Dornberger to look into liquid-fueled rockets, and he hired von Braun and a number of amateurs--but clearly to develop a weapon, not space travel
• This led to the building of the V-2 intermediate range ballistic missile, used against England.
• When the war was over von Braun arranged to to captured by the U.S. not the Soviet Union and said he wasn't a Nazi, he was only interested in space travel.

 captured V-2 being prepared for launch U.S. military interest was at first spotty.

• U.S. cold war strategy was based on bombers carrying nuclear weapons.  For one thing, it was cheap, and Truman and Eisenhower both were reluctant to increase the size of the government and distort the economy by large-scale defense spending.  Substituting technological superiority for a large standing army put a new weight on being ahead
• Project RAND (an Air Force think tank) produced in May 1946 a report: "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship" mentioned reconnaissance, weather, and communications
•  In 1951 RAND scientists visiting Wright Field heard a briefing by James Lipp of Boston University's Physical Research Laboratory about using television for satellite reconnaissance.  The key RAND reconnaissance people though the idea was ridiculous, and set out to disprove it with pictures taken at 30,000 feet with 8mm movie camera lenses mounted to a 35mm Leica camera loaded with coarse grain film and processed for poor resolution.  The pictures showed streets and bridges, convincing Amrom Katz and others that satellite reconnaissance was feasible.
• the army had von Braun working on medium range ballistic missiles, the Air Force was working on the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile, and the Navy's Naval Research Lab was doing a wide range of scientific research on rockets--but none of these had high priority or crash project funding
• Korean war led to more funding for intercontinental ballistic missiles in 1951--Atlas--but with funding only for a slow development process (at Convair--even in FY 1954 Atlas got only $14 million).  Only in 1954 was the decision make to give it high priority

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