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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I wonder, how it is to be an engineer working for a crazy dictator.

I would guess you get some special privileges, you are not tied to any regulations but your constrains are budget and supply chain efficiency.

The dictator does not need to explain things to the public, does not need to obey the law so you can have a crazy idea about that machine you want to build and if you can convince one guy, you have it all.

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Just imagine your client or employer can shoot you if he's not satisfied with your pace of delivering seemingly impossible and the only thing that might stop him is bother of finding someone else for your spot.

Or get assassinated. Iran's nuclear scientists tended to get blown up, for example and i think most suspect Israel's Mossad.

Which is kinda shitty since a the mid level people who are living quite well but aware of how bad things could be are generally a source of stability and sanity in those kinds of regimes.

"I was just following orders", right? Turns out that's not a great defense anywhere in the world.

So we should send guys in to kill them? I mean, I hear your point but I think It could be made equally of all parties.

Only if you assume their actions (building a nuclear weapons program for a theocratic dictatorship like Iran, vs. preventing same from happening) are morally equivalent. I don't think they are.

Are you talking about Iran or Mossad?

See above.

You mean for the assassin or the scientist

If you're an engineer working for a dictator, empowering him with offensive (or defensive) technologies, you absolutely need to expect foreign intelligence agencies' attention, up to and including assassination. This is quite literally those agencies' raison d'être.

Iran's situation is fairly different than NK. NK enrages much more like a madman. Iran on the otherhand isn't starving, the leaders are much more rational, there are actual elections, and their attempt at nuclear weapons are generally defensive, although of course it's neighbors would sleep better if it didn't have nukes because that changes the balance of power in the region.

Us Iran relations are currently caught up because of the US alliance with Israel and Saudi Arabia who see Iran as the regional threat, otherwise there would not be such a focus on it. NK on the otherhand is a just a basket case that threatens it's neighbors to get handouts. I feel bad for NK's inhabitants, they are by far the biggest losers in all this.

Iran has officially stated they want Israel obliterated, and then they started building up nukes, so not sure how sane or defensive they are

Be sure to be grounded in reality, and not just rhetoric - all official estimates of Iran's nuclear weapon's program suggest it stopped pursuing it 2003:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran

To claim otherwise is to grasp to non-credible sources, which frankly is a very popular thing to do in this area.

Yeah, but the skills that country needs are concentrated in a few brains. That's a weak point that's easy to exploit. And deniable. Iran's got no shortage of intellectuals. A couple of nuclear scientists going away won't move the needle.

Also, Iran is not one of "those kinds of regimes". It's one of the better countries to live in in the middle east. Apparently it's a cool place to visit too. US allies like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan etc. are worse.

I don't know any specific examples, but I wonder how much of our knowledge today came from people working under these conditions. It's terrible, but do we now retain knowledge learned from people experimenting on humans under Hitler, for example? How many warfare techniques were developed by kings or other absolute leaders asking engineers to build novel weapons with no constraints?

Yes we did. A lot of textbooks on human anatomy are from that time.

There is even an ethical issues section on the wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

I'm not sure that you've provided evidence for the extraordinary claim that textbooks on human anatomy are based on Nazi experiments.

True. I was grossly exaggerating.

I was thinking of Pernkopf's anatomy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Pernkopf) when i was making the comment. It is not true to say textbooks are based on his work.

But apparently his work is used in books. The argument is that it we use results and data from nazi experiments.

Thanks to the Nazis, I know my maximum time to survive in freezing water is about eight minutes. That can't be the only example.

The accuracy of those studies has been questioned and the ethics of using that data, independent of their accuracy, debated, extensively.

When I got my scuba certification, my instructor told me very clearly how the data for the recommended decompression curves got collected.

That's really not correct.

http://gcaptain.com/cold_water/

Interesting find!

I also did some recreational ice swimming (and read much more about other maniacs who do it regularly): so I can totally see how hypothermia does not kick in as quickly as people think it would.

Most of those 'experiments' were rubbish from a scientific point of view: they were mostly sadistic torture. Eg the things Mengele did.

Yes, there is certain knowledge we could gain by ethically unconstrained experimenting. But the Nazis did not gain much of that.

On a more positive note, religious preferences sometimes gives us willing subjects. Eg the Jehova's Witnesses don't like blood transfusions but do agree with surgery. So surgeon get to come up and practice blood-transfusion-less procedures. (No ethics committee would let you get away with trying these out otherwise when they are still in the alpha phase.)

During the Manhattan Project some were motivated by solving a technological frontier and didnt really think about the consequences.

I doubt that's true. The entire point of the Manhattan Project was to create an atomic bomb before the Germans could make one. Everyone involved knew they were creating a weapon capable of an unprecedented level of destruction.

There were a tonne of people involved in the Manhattan project that weren't working on the bomb itself. The uranium enrichment was a huge project by itself.

Some certainly acted with the motivation of stopping Nazis, or at least had considerations other than pure science. Notably Oppenheimer, who was quoted thus after witnessing the first nuclear explosion: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

But others, best exemplified by Edward Teller, didn't concern themselves with such liberal arts nonsense, and merrily continued building larger and larger (and–actually more dangerous–smaller) bombs after Germany was long defeated, and before the Cold War's weapon's race had begun.

And, of course, the Trinity test mentioned above only happened three months after Germany's capitulation. Since afaik none of the scientists quit and the Manhattan project continued unabated, the idea that it was solely motivated by the fear of a German bomb seems somewhat...strained.

>Sometimes I wonder, how it is to be an engineer to work for a crazy dictator.

Luckily we know the answer already:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36MSXRPjfLk

I saw a great documentary on that topic called "Space Race" which showed the difference between the US and Soviet space program.

OMG i think u just invented a world class Movie/script. >> please someone start writing it.

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