There's a reason the Americans discovered how to make atomic weapons first and it's because their researchers were living under a less oppressive state that wasn't motivated by anti-intellectualism and dumb ideology.
In addition many scientists involved (like Oppenheimer) later faced political persecution during the McCarthy era.
American atomic research succeeded despite, or perhaps because of, intense state control and funding
I don't particularly think that the secrecy or control of a single group really reflects on the overall culture however. We wouldn't call phreakers authoritarian just because they weren't publishing their exploits in the newspaper or letting any new person fully into their circle.
Also the prosecution and harassment of communists/leftists and minorities in the US during that era is why I stipulated less oppressive rather than unoppressive.
Consider that at the same time the Third Reich also had a nuclear weapons research program, and it went nowhere.
An Australian nuclear scientist working for the UK Rutherford (New Zealander) labs | Tube Alloys | MAUD program told them how to.
It took a while to convince the US scientists who were mainly interested in making big hot piles for power.
The actual building of atomic weapons (Trinity, Fat Man and Little Boy) took place under a fully authoritarian ultra secret State directed militarily controlled program that cost a significant chunk of national GDP.
The example you chose appears to be both incorrect and the very opposite of whatever point you wanted to make.
Anyways, we have the Internet, I'm not sure it matters _where_ innovations are created anymore. It certainly does not seem to be stopping China on any level.
America is going to have to give up the "World Police" (a.k.a. The Military Industrial Complex) badge and move into it's relative political middle age with a little more care and aplomb than the last 6 decades have allowed for. The haze of WW2 is far behind us now.
The "military industrial complex" is absolutely real. You just don't seem to realize that the MIC is into buying software and social media networks these days and not so much carriers and jet fighters. So your spending analysis is flawed and your outcome analysis is wildly out of touch with actual reality.
It's an extremely infantile view. Bought and paid for by the MIC itself. No wonder you can't recognize the reality of it.
> Bought and paid for by the MIC itself.
One thing you can always use to spot low-trust conspiratorial types is they insist that all bad things are caused by "corporations" and involve money in some vague way, but then they never believe any actual specific information if it conflicts with their vague ideas of evil corporations doing things out there, vaguely.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat...
That's a huge exaggeration. Who would commit naval piracy in the current age? Somalia, with their little boats and AK-47s? China already has a bigger fleet than the US and can easily take on the burden of securing trade routes, since they are the biggest beneficiary.
We already have piracy coming back with the Houthis; China didn't join the alliance with other countries, defended their own ships and ignored everyone else.
That’s just wrong. Xi has explicitly ordered cadres to "tell China’s story well"[1] and build "discourse power" that’s textbook soft-power ambition. Surveys show it’s working, China jumped to #3 in 2024 and #2 in 2025 on brand finance’s global soft power index.
1. https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspec...
> We already have piracy coming back with the Houthis; China didn't join the alliance with other countries, defended their own ships and ignored everyone else.
This is NOT piracy. Under UNCLOS Art. 101, piracy requires acts "for private ends" on the high seas. The Houthi campaign is openly political/armed-conflict behavior, so it doesn’t meet the piracy definition (even though it looks like it to laypeople).
The Manhattan project succeeded because it was consuming a significant portion of the US GDP at the time, the scientists were forced to live on site with their families and every word they said was monitored.
Military projects, especially making the most powerful weapon in history for use in the largest war up to that point, are always done with as much secrecy as is feasible. Living on-site was also practical: the reason the site was as isolated as it was was in part because of secrecy, the families being there was both to improve security and for convenience. Finally, yes, every word they said was monitored. But they were scientists and their families working on top secret machinery of war, which ended up changing the course of history in a significant way, they quite literally ushered in a new age. They knew they were monitored and that this was one part of the price to pay for working on that project.
In contrast with that age: now all our words are monitored, even inane ones that are exchanged between people who would have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I'm confused, are you claiming the enemy was not consuming a significant portion of their GDP on their weapons program?
the "necessary but not sufficient" concept applies here.
My crude take on the underlying root cause is resentment, discontent, and similar feelings. Happiness is reality minus expectations, and a whole lot of folks are unhappy life did not turn out how they thought it would.
https://warwick.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/researchers_point_t...
Nothing in physics requires us to buy into the political documents; if the average person isn't owed anything under the rules, no one is.
Either we're science driven where only politics makes someone special and we should then moderate that because in reality, they are not special, just a button pusher, just a signature. Or we're a bunch of idiots living in a trailer park.
Seems you subscribe to the whole "everything is a mystery to politics" when it's just biology self-selecting and we should fucking moderate that. With violence if necessary. Because fuck them. They aren't owed anything either, they're just manipulating politics.
If the Democrats had been (and had messaged themselves as being) the party of the working class, they would have drained the swamp that Trump's support comes from. Instead, the message was "if you're working class, and you don't support gay marriage and trans people in sports, and you think that abortion is morally wrong, then you are a moral outcast and we are going to destroy your entire culture." They may have been pro-working-class, but they were pro other things more, and those other things were not big concerns for the working class. And many of the working class took a different stance on the cultural issues than the Democratic leadership.
In fact, the Democrats quit cultivating their base, and so their base walked away from them to someone who at least pretended to care about them.
Nationalist populism harvested that. But there has to be something growing before it can be harvested, and nationalist populism didn't sow the seeds.
"Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds"
That is quite the claim !
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
Adding to @eastbound's comment the Soviets were also responsible for the first remote operated "robot" on the moon.
Not sure what relevance the space race has to this topic either!
When applied to medicine that same attitude becomes parasitic: you may be able to make much more money by restricting the distribution of the knowledge that could save people or prevent their suffering. This is where Martin Shkreli and other such characters come in to play.
It was so centralized, we effectively had Eleanor Roosevelt as acting President much of the time.