C. Remick writes,
> > All technological improvement is an unqualified good
>
> Including the hydrogen bomb?
>
> > peace
>
> Indeed!
>
>
> Carl Remick
Yes, comrade, the hydrogen bomb, or more properly the science that created it, is an unqualified good. As for the bomb itself, I wouldn't have liked the Soviet Union's chances of surviving if they hadn't had it, but that is a separate matter. People, specifically men, will use any technology they come across to make things go "boom". If you don't believe me, then watch what happens to the most pacifist group of hippie men when you provide them with a clever combination of PVC pipe, some couplings, a piezo-electric gas barbecue lighter and some WD-40 known as the potato gun. Suddenly, all talk departs from saving the indigenous squirrel population of Antarctica through peaceful resistance to ballistics, choice of propellant, chamber pressures and comparative firepower.
Add to that natural inclination the quite reasonable belief that someone who might be unfond of you could develop the capacity to kill everyone you ever knew and 50 million like them with one shot and you have the impetus for the hydrogen bomb. Said bomb then, as I see it, was an inevitable consequence of the science (an unqualified good) which all the pointless Ludditism in the world will not wish away. And, I might add, won't your face be red if the super-geniuses at Los Alamos come upon the missing ingredient to make sustained, controllable, fusion energy possible. What are hippies going to do when man finds a way to make energy like the sun or even more scary, if man, through his exhaustive study of the hydrogen atom (sponsored in no small part by those who draw up the plans to vaporize a quarter of the planet), finds a way to make energy like the plants. Nukes are here and no series of concerts by Jackson Brown is going to make them go away.
Then the very real problem is how, as I said, to get their control into the hands of working people. Anti-technology hand-wringing will not accomplish that purpose, so far as I can see. Neither will the belief that technological advance is anything but good and essentially inevitable. That, by the way, also informs my thinking about the fact that the "People's" (as if) Republic of China probably has my new hometown of Seattle in the sights of their newly MiRV'ed ballistic missiles. My only shock is why they are so late to the party. They clearly have had the requisite paranoia and criminal intent for some time.
peace