dangerous liberty

Mark Frauenfelder posts at Boing Boing - profile of neutron bomb inventor. He links to a Charles Platt piece (pdf, txt or PDB) on Sam Cohen, the inventor of a nuclear weapon he considered ‘the most moral weapon”.

Platt’s piece is thought provoking, not only becaues he’s overtly anti-war and perhaps isolationist (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but also because of his ruminations on the psychological make up of people who seek power and eventually make policy:

Representative Melvin Price was the most senior member of the JCAE, and had played a major role in formulating nuclear policy for more than a decade. Supposedly he was an expert on all things nuclear, but his response may have bothered Cohen more than any other. At the end of a briefing, Price asked only one question: “What’s a neutron?”

Perhaps Cohen should have known what to expect, yet still he was appalled. Elected representatives on committees that established policy at the highest level were motivated by base self-interest, expediency, and petty rivalries. They were not only ignorant, but uninterested in educating themselves. Given a choice between saving public money and spending it, they preferred to spend it. Allowed the option of destroying a city or leaving it unscathed, they opted to destroy it. Forced to choose between maximizing human suffering on innocent civilians or minimizing it, they chose to maximize it.

Journalists were not much better. They could have learned the ethical basis for the neutron bomb easily enough if they cared to do so, but, they didn’t care. They took the lazy way out, quoting cheap shots from peace activists’ press releases, which never failed to tag the bomb as the “ultimate capitalist weapon.” Cohen took grim solace when Leonid Brezhnev denounced him publicly as an “international war criminal,” but the vilification he received in his own country was hard to endure.

This was when Cohen was testifying before Congress, advocating the development of his inexpensive weapon, that would minimize destruction of property and environment, while achieving the war objective of killing enemy soldiers.

His experience should serve as a reminder to us all, especially those who support the Iraq War, about the venality and stupidity of elected officials, especially when it comes to control over the deadly US arsenal and the funds to build it - and the fear tactics all those in power use to keep the normal folk from fundamentally questioning why so much of their tax money must be spent on systems that are outdated, but are built in powerful Congressmen’s districts and states.

Read the essay, it is well written and gives a smidgen of insight into our atomic bomb past.