OK, thanks.
Before von Braun took it over, btw, PeenemĂŒnde was a beach resort. Interesting and lucky that the german efforts for rocketry succeeded, but the efforts to build nuclear weapons didnât. (After the war, Heisenberg et al claimed that they had never really intended to build a bomb, but the evidence is reportedly, um, more ambiguous than that.)
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This is very interesting history but it is not really ânewsâ.
James Michenerâs historical fiction âSPACEâ has the story- The first man-made object to pierce into space from Earthâs surface was launched on the US Gulf Coast and MANUFACTURED in Germany by the Naziâs.
My Pop was med school draft deferred out of WWII and ended up working in what became first NASA aerospace medical unit in Randolph Field in San Antonio (where I was born) and he says he remembers the former Nazi scientists hangout out singing German drinking songs.
War in the 19th & 20th century was nothing if NOT a huge stimulus for scientific and medical invention.
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They didnât have the resources (the Manhatten project was HUGE) and also made some mistakes in their attempt to build a nuclear reactor (e.g using carbon derived from charcoal, which contains enough Cadmium to kill the chain reaction. I think it was Leo Szilard , who was aware of this problem, and managed to get ultra pure graphite for the moderator in the first reactor in Chicago).
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Not even ambiguous. They werenât stealing all that heavy-water to wash cars with.
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âA screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.â
Gravityâs Rainbow is a beast, and I still donât know what to think of it. But man, there are parts that have stuck with me for a long damn time.
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A worthy read on Operation Paperclip
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
Yup, everyone knew this back in the 60s and yet here we are with another exposé⊠of stuff weâve known all along.
50 years from now people will still be breathlessly informing us that⊠in fact⊠although itâs been a huge hush-hush secret⊠they DONâT want you to know this⊠there were NAZIS in the US rocket program!
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Nickyâs full of shit with his answer. Heâs claimed to be host of things and an expert on countless topics, none of which stand up to scrutiny.
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Your note is remarkable. Everything you point out is an article of war. Yes, scientists created new weapons. But what is missed in this thinking is that the things that were what all the fighting was about were generally invented during times of peace - genetics, chemistry. Manufacturing with standardized parts, the industrial revolution, advancement in agriculture, medicine. Were you aware that âsocial concernâ over the plight of the poor in the lat 19th and early 20th century was the result of Louis Pastureâs discovery of the microbe and advancement in disease theory? The rich did not want typhoid and other diseases around them to catch. Thus came sanitation laws, building codes, welfare, etc.
Iâm a progressive, so I COULD go on and on. War brings about advancement generally for more war.
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Here it is. Spend time with his collection, much so relevant today decades after he ceased performing.
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Iron and steel are military technologies. Ironâs abundance made it a more desirable material for weapons than bronze for edged weapons, not its hardness. Iron and bronze both have advantages and disadvantages for pointy, cutty things that more or less balance out to even except for ore availability and cost.
But ironâs high melting point required the development of technologies no one would have bothered with as long as copper was available but for the need to make enough pointy, slashy things to arm entire armies.
And then they figured out how to make steel. In little bits at a time. With huge amounts of labor and materials. For literally thousands of years, steel was sufficiently rare that the vast majority of what was made went into military technology. Like copper before it, and like aluminium and titanium and carbon fiber after it. Only with the Bessemer converter in the late 19th century did it supplant wrought iron as a common, everyday sort of material that now, quite literally, holds up our entire civilization.
And so it goes, because our brains are those of highly territorial small band hunter-gatherers with a penchant for exterminating competitors and we canât seem to fully get past it.
And with that homily, hereâs a thing that occurred to me about Von Braun watching video the last couple of weeks about him and Kennedy and him meeting Kennedy. The people who brought Von Braun into the fold were willing to smudge up his complicity in atrocities because they were the generation that fought World War II. And they necessarily saw shades of grey that we we donât because they themselves did terrible, terrible things.
We bombed out entire cities in Germany trying to take out a single plant and launched firebombing raids on Japanâs cities that LeMay himself coldly conceded would have been called war crime if weâd lost. We imprisoned an entire ethnic group. We fought a ground war in the Pacific in which no quarter was given by either side. They committed atrocious acts because it was ânecessaryâ and drew the lines for moral responsibility much higher up on the table of organization than people in a world untouched by the scourge of total war, and thus not personally involved in the infliction of the atrocious acts, can imagine.
Donât think for a minute that Von Braunâs complicity with a manufacturing industry built on slave labor didnât look very different to them. And think very carefully about the nested ironies of presuming to judge people who would say they bought us a world where we had the luxury of judging them with the very acts we now judge.
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A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or giltâ
A pig is a pal, whoâll boost your morale,
Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When theyâve blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you,
When theyâve turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby or Rover,
Youâll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
Youâll never go wrong with a pig!
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You are right. And I also remember that there was a Japanese officer convicted of war crimes after the war and hung. He water - boarded American prisoners trying to get information. It was war then. What is it today?
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Hypocrisy and evil, of course.
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You got there first! This is indeed the definitive statement about Werner von Braun.
Great post, Steve.
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Thatâs one of the best summations of this topic Iâve read in some time.
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It begs the question: one of the reasons to put people on Mars is the resources it would consume and the amount of technology it will kick back in return. In addition, the organizational style for such a thing tends to require the talents of military and Pentagon types. If you keep them busy with something like that, thereâs less time to come up with new and improved ways of committing mass murder.
And if an asteroid suddenly comes on a collision path with Earth, youâll have world unity so fast you wonât know what happened. Except for the fundamentalists, who will figure it is the mothership come to rapture them. This is why fundamentalists are so dangerous.
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Szilard was an interesting guy. He was a refugee from anti-Semitism in his native Hungary and conceived the idea for a nuclear chain reaction in London in 1932 (he didnât yet know which element or isotope would be fissionable). Aware of the possible importance of his idea he wanted to keep it secret, so applied for a patent and offered the patent to the British army. Still yearning for the days of the cavalry charge, the army turned him down, but the British navy was less stupid and accepted his offer. When in 1939 Otto Hahn in Berlin discovered fission in uranium, Szilard was in the US and was anxious to get the US started on what became the Manhattan Project. He was largely unknown, but he knew Einstein (and actually had a patent with him) so he drove out to Einsteinâs summer home on Long Island and persuaded him to write a letter to Franklin Roosevelt. And so it began. (Richard Rhodesâ âThe Making of the Atomic Bombâ is a great read for all this.)
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