I got this fundamental problem with my conscience, I love technology mostly because
it’s so bloody cool what can be done and I like to see the progress. But I also hate
war and not at least the warmongers, but you see most technology is developed by the
needy and war is the biggest game in town when it comes to need and technology. So
the ugly thing is that when the US goes out to enslave another part of the world in
it’s retarded regime I’m just glued to the lame-o-vision at home because who knows
they might have developed a new fantastic plane at the Skunkworks or some cool head-up
gadget for the troops. On the other hand I know that this very certainty of technological
progression in the game of war is also very know to the politicians and even more
so to the industries that drive the war machine. War as they have been forght for
at least the last hundred years have been driven by the economic aspect not of gaining
foreign resources but to activate the giant techno-mill in the home-country. Now,
I hate war and I love progress can this ever be a stable cocktail? Perhaps we can
learn from the cold war. I was born in 1983 at the height of the cold war, but too
late to experience is as such, but looking back at what is now history I can see that
it was in a cynical sense a beautiful construction. Both the Soviet and the U.S (and
likely the allies as well) where working the techno-mill like it was a real war, and
not just a war like we seem them today where a superpower claps the child-nation on
the chicks no it was a full scale confrontation between to nearly like sized powers
(we know today that they weren’t so equal but they didn’t know that back then) This
historically unique situation where to adversaries stand posed but know that if any
of them start it mean total destruction not just to both of them but to all makes
for a really interesting scene from a technological viewpoint. The only real way to
end the crisis was to gain a fundamental superiority over the other, or the run the
weapons race long enough to drain the others resources. In the end the last option
seemed to close the conflict, but the arms race never the less accelerated the technological
development in many fields. No doubt the political leaders knew this. There might
have been a real fear and paranoia among some of the leaders at least in the lower
echelons, but some must have seen the benefits as worth the effort. I wonder what
would have come out of it if the Soviet where the prevailing nation. Instead of the
silicon and plastic era that the Americans has started we might have seen a whole
different focus or at least other things coming before what we got now, just think
“The Internet” and try to imagine a Soviet equivalent…