Could you explain your second comment? In context, “do this” seems to indicate “determine the ethics and safety” and, well, I’m pretty sure we did do that with nukes. I mean, even before the first test we (for certain values of “we”) were aware that ‘safety’ amounted to ‘kills everything out to X radius’ and ‘ethics’ was clearly ‘mass murder at the push of a button’, it’s just that those things were the whole point.
Unless maybe you’re suggesting Oppenheimer should have envisioned the whole edifice of MAD and the Cold War before the technology was developed...?
Nuclear energy, both as a weapon and as a productive enterprise, was developed primarily from a military perspective first. Because of that first move, the tone for nukes was set early on; that’s why light water reactors dominate and why there was significant debate even into the 1960s about using nuclear weapons tactically. (There still are, but nothing like midcentury. The infamous “just another weapon” ad was an exaggeration of some attitudes, but it was not a wholesale falsehood, cf. the nuclear shell, plans to drop atomic bombs on China during the Korean War and so on.)
When you get out ahead of an issue, the events bloom into a context you’ve prepared for them; your framework stands a better chance of being the path of least resistance.
What’s interesting is that it seems like we’re really working to get out ahead of ideas. Too bad we weren’t able to do this with nukes.
Could you explain your second comment? In context, “do this” seems to indicate “determine the ethics and safety” and, well, I’m pretty sure we did do that with nukes. I mean, even before the first test we (for certain values of “we”) were aware that ‘safety’ amounted to ‘kills everything out to X radius’ and ‘ethics’ was clearly ‘mass murder at the push of a button’, it’s just that those things were the whole point.
Unless maybe you’re suggesting Oppenheimer should have envisioned the whole edifice of MAD and the Cold War before the technology was developed...?
Nuclear energy, both as a weapon and as a productive enterprise, was developed primarily from a military perspective first. Because of that first move, the tone for nukes was set early on; that’s why light water reactors dominate and why there was significant debate even into the 1960s about using nuclear weapons tactically. (There still are, but nothing like midcentury. The infamous “just another weapon” ad was an exaggeration of some attitudes, but it was not a wholesale falsehood, cf. the nuclear shell, plans to drop atomic bombs on China during the Korean War and so on.)
When you get out ahead of an issue, the events bloom into a context you’ve prepared for them; your framework stands a better chance of being the path of least resistance.