Make, Think, Imagine by John Browne

Author:John Browne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 7.11 Beam me up, and beam me down: teletransportation made easy for Captain Kirk and co., Star Trek (1966).

8

Defend

The roar of the Vulcan bombers’ jet engines seemed to shake the ground as they streaked across the sky above me; the exhilarating noise and the trails of red, white and blue exhaust left by the arrowhead-shaped aeroplanes are among the most vivid of my early memories. I was a young boy watching the celebrations for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Singapore in June 1953 – I was there because my father, an army officer, was stationed at the UK military base. It was the time of trouble in what was then called Malaya, as the Malay, rebelling against British rule, fought for the independence of their part of the peninsula. My father’s predecessor had been killed by terrorists, so we lived with very tight security in a big house on Tanglin Hill, a leafy district of Singapore. My other lasting memory is of being taken to my primary school in an armoured car – war and the military were ever-present in my childhood.

As I watched the fly-past on that humid day, my father was on the parade ground with his soldiers. As a five-year-old, I was oblivious to the abysmal reality of war; the planes that roared overhead were a straightforwardly exciting spectacle, and I had no any inkling that they had been designed to carry the most devastating cargo of all. Just eight months before the coronation festivities, the UK had become the third country, after the US and the USSR, to start building an arsenal of nuclear weapons; the Vulcan bombers represented a core part of its nuclear deterrent.

Ever since a stone hand axe was first used in anger, people have had weapons. The need to defend that which is yours, and the temptation to gain through violence that which is not, have been prominent concerns throughout history. This fundamental characteristic has not only caused bloodshed and devastation – it has also, perhaps counter-intuitively, delivered real progress. The statistics show that most people, in most parts of the world, are now less likely to be involved in war than ever before. Beyond helping to make our world safer through stronger defence and better deterrence, warfare has always increased the pace of innovation. As a result, many of our most potent technologies, be they in medicine, communication, transport or elsewhere, have their roots in military engineering. Without the immense investment in government-led defence, we would not have jet travel, antibiotics, the Internet or many other marvels of the modern world. When considering engineering for defence, simple-minded notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ do not suffice. And, as humankind’s destructive capacity has grown, so too has its ability to create.

The hideous power unleashed by the atomic bombs that devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, killing at least 130,000 people, demonstrated that destructive capacity approaching its apex. I only appreciated the full horror of this when,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.