Comment by ergoproxy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergoproxy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's debatable how much of this we can honestly attribute to the military--

Leó Szilárd and Enrico Fermi patented the idea of a nuclear reactor in 1933. The military didn't invent it.

Christian Hülsmeyer was a German inventor and entrepreneur. He was the first to use radio waves to detect "the presence of distant metallic objects"; he got a patent for his "Telemobiloscope" in 1904. The military didn't invent it.

The first patent for using a gas turbine to power an aircraft was filed in 1921 by Frenchman Maxime Guillaume. This predates the RAF's patent by 11 years.

Richard Drew invented Scotch tape and masking tape in the 1920s. In 1927, J&J invented cloth tape for medical uses. So far no military involvement. Then in 1943, Vesta Stoudt, an ordnance factory worker, thought to add waterproof plastic to J&J's cloth tape, making the first duct tape, and that's the extent of the military involvement. Duct tape was later improved in 1960 by an HVAC engineer by making it flame resistant. Seems that the military role in developing duct tape was rather minimal, and would have been made eventually by the free market.

There are serious issues trying to pin down who invented the first gunpowder rockets and for what purpose. Seems likely gunpowder was invented by Taoist alchemists seeking an elixir for immortality, and that the very first application of gunpowder rockets was fireworks for entertainment.

Writing for the WSJ in July 2012, Gordon Crovitz questioned "Who Really Invented the Internet?" at http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044446430...

Without funding these projects would not have happened, and the inventions would have died. Or at the very least would only have happened much, much slower.

An example of this is that however one designs a working fusion reactior, one thing you can be near sure of : the design is in the US patent database (and publicly accessible). Yes, really. Of course, most of them are not getting built (the US is the only country that's even considering anything but a tokamak approach at all).

Would humanity never ever have invented these technologies without war ? Probably we'd have found them eventually. Would we have them today ? No way in hell.

> Would humanity never ever have invented these technologies without war ?

Not all economic growth is good growth. There's bad growth too. Like anything else, war has costs:

(1) Price tag. For example, "The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting," quoted from The Washington Post (March 28, 2013): http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-...

(2) Harms/damages. For example, in the Afghan and Iraq wars, we have 6,600 dead Americans. Of the 1.6M veterans of these wars, 670,000 have been awarded disability, and another 100,000 are pending. Source: McClatchy DC (March 14, 2013): http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/14/185880/millions-went-t...

Harms inflicted on US troops include: amputations, traumatic brain injuries, mental illness, suicide, rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment.

Harms inflicted on Iraq include: 150,000 to 400,000 dead, 600,000 orphans living in the streets, 1.3 million internally displaced, 1 million displaced to Syria, 100,000 imprisoned and tortured with no due process, 25% without clean water, 30% unemployment, etc., etc.

(3) Opportunity costs: I think President Dwight D. Eisenhower said it best in 1953--

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

"It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

"It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

"It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

"We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

"We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

"This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

"This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com