Despite the many, many high tech weapons of death first used (and first perfected) in WWI, we still tend to recall it as a war of "elan" and of long lines of terribly brave doomed men charging machine gun posts with only their bayonets or horses.
By contrast, one can almost forget that there were any foot soldiers involved in the various famous victories of WWII, particularly among the victories of the western Allies and the Axis.
Instead, according to the omnipresent newsreels, their WWII seemingly only featured white middle class men driving (or designing) modern day mechanical steeds such as aircraft, tanks, battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines or firing (and designing) ever-longer range guns, torpedoes and rockets.
Now a quick look at the demographic data of 1940 confirms that the British empire had by far the world's biggest pool of manpower .
Far greater than the empires of Germany, Japan, America, Russia or any of the three contesting chunks of the Chinese empire, let alone the French, Italian and Dutch empires.
But instead the British left and right elites melted together as one in claiming they ('they' in their mind seemingly reduced to the Home Counties of England) simply didn't have the manpower to have a foot soldier army anywhere near the size of Poland or France let alone match those of Russia, Japan, Germany and America.
By contrast, the Great Russians ruling the Russian empire, faced by the prospect of losing to Germany and then being put to the sword en masse by murderous Nazis, swallowed their racial prejudice and conscripted endless numbers of soldiers from all of the dozens and dozens of sub ethnicities in their vast empire.
They also embraced the idea - albeit reluctantly - of women in combat roles.
True, Stalin and his generals then needlessly killed millions of their resulting vast armies of ordinary soldiers in crude frontal attacks against the Germans but they did redeem themselves by their unwillingness to invent new high tech weapons during the war.
Instead they selected the cheapest and most reliable of their existing conventional weapons and then set about making them even more cheaply, more quickly and in truly mountainous numbers.
All the other empires very reluctantly recruited from minorities (aka 'coloreds') within their existing empires and newly conquered territories (in some cases such as British India, the 'minorities' vastly outnumbered the majority !)
They tended to mistrust these colonial troops even more than the enemy, to give them second rate weapons and third rate leadership and then denied them meaningful combat roles.
The clearest example is the unspeakable French, who would rather delay the liberation of metropolitan France and the defeat of Germany than let their own well tested colonial (aka 'colored') troops lead the attack.
Letting the coloreds lead the final attack would recall all too vividly how quickly their abject white European masters had surrendered France and the Empire in 1940 and 1941.
Churchill felt likewise about letting his six million man volunteer Indian army ( still the biggest volunteer army in history) anywhere near North Western Europe.
He'd rather Russia swallowed up half of Europe and the Americans the other half than left Indians led the British empire to victory over his fellow white Europeans.
Colored minorities weren't the only groups that the various upper middle class imperial elites were reluctant to see granted the entry card into full citizenship : being a veteran of combat.
They denied it to women as well of course.
But this is all relatively well known : the Americans, for example, being desperately short of ground troops during the critical Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 , all because they had resisted letting women do war factory jobs and resisted letting black, latino and native men serve in combat.
Not so accepted is the claim that the elites of the Democracies (so called) grew tired of the idea of mass national armies marching as one being a symbol and creator of mass united nationalities.
Conscripting vast numbers of working class soldiers turned them into vast armies of of 'our noble veterans' all demanding redress and entitlements , to be paid mostly by the older richer part of the tax paying body, the part that generally got to stay home and had only full bank accounts instead of full chests of medals to show for it.
Substituting middle class driven war machines for working class foot soldiers would ensure that veterans' pensions and veterans' moral power would at least remain among the well off taxpayers' children and keep the bolshie workers out beyond the Pale.
So, at various times, military America had more aircraft in its Tables or Organization than it had MOS 475s (bog ordinary riflemen) in its combat frontlines.
We all know the resulting war-ending victory scripts.
For WWI , it is of images of infantry assault troops during the famous Hundred Days, breaking the German lines and ensuring Germany's defeat a few months later.
For WWII, it is of the backroom boffins and scientists who designed the war-winning radars, aircraft, rockets, proximity fuses and A-Bombs that alone enabled the hard pressed Allies to defeat the top quality German and Japanese infantry forces.
A famous victory for modernity, the enlightenment project and for science - but it soon proved to be a famous pyhrric victory.
True, it was bog ordinary infantrymen who bayonetted all the innocent at Nanking and all through South East Asia or shot hundreds of thousands of Jews in cold blood at close range.
But strangely we barely remember such horrors - we choose to recall the high tech scientific deaths of Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Auschwitz, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Putting entire cities to the sword was old news in Jesus's time but a single bomb killing an entire city in a single instance seemed new (which it was) and extraordinarily barbaric (which it was not - morally, murder is murder).
Growing up as a boomer or transitional generation kid I heard both takes on WWII and Science.
It left me well and truly conflicted - did science try to keep humanity alive or did it try its darndest to kill it --- or both ??
Scientism's victory in WWII gave Modernity's thirty years of glory - but it also sunk a postmodernist-promoting shaft in its chest nothing could pull out..
Showing posts with label a-bomb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a-bomb. Show all posts
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Friday, February 6, 2015
WWII & 'small science' : how new WWII small science infantry weapons helped create our post-war post-modern world
The usual guff about WWII was that the Axis infantry soldier was far better than the Axis infantry soldier but the Allies won because of their superior BIG SCIENCE, with the big war-ending A-Bomb delivered in the big B-29 bomber offered up as a key proof.
But is any of this true ?
Could it not be claimed that while the (relatively few) Axis soldiers actually were a fair better - as individuals - than the average Allied soldier, the Allies had such potentially large numbers of recruits available that the advantage should have gone to the Allies by sheer weight of numbers.
But the Allies deliberately choose to starve their infantry both in manpower and even more critically, in material.
Because the key reason why the German infantry was so superior was that the Germans invented some small science infantry weapons so good the world is still using them as warfare blueprints 75 years later.
The Allied infantry doctrine focussed on squads of mostly riflemen slowly firing rifles discharging large, long range, bullets.
Things like squad level light machine guns were relatively few in number and pretty pitiful as suppression fire weapons.
By contrast, the Germans focussed on supplying each infantry squad with a number of a superior general purpose air-cooled machine gun .
The MG42 was made cheaply, quickly and lightly of stamped parts.
It was most famous for a very rapid rate of fire - sustained by the use of endlessly linked belts of ammunition, not small magazines, and by the ability to change the overly-hot barrels in seconds.
More importantly in the big picture, being so light for such a deadly weapon, it could be easily carried into battle and fired by one soldier, if need be - supplying the fire power of an entire typically combat-thinned British battalion of bolt action rifles.
The fact that German ammunition was generally far less smokey than Allied ammo, meant this one-man-battalion could remain better concealed longer.
Next in importance was the Germans heavy use of the infantry level mortar - an improved version of WWI's most significant infantry level invention - the British Stokes mortar.
Thanks to pipe manufacturer Wilfred Stokes, mortars, in an instant of inspired invention by this sheer amateur, went from being a big bulky heavy bit of artillery to something that ultimately a single soldier could carry and fire.
Again, it multiplied the ability of one or two foot soldiers to impede an entire advancing battalion.
It could be fire from the lee side of a hill and hit advancing troops without them being able to directly fire at it.
The WWI sniper rifle was also improved - more consistent matching of ammo and individual gun barrel and better optical scopes.
All three impeded, from a safe distance , a broad front infantry advance over open ground.
And their price for doing so - peanuts, both to make and keep supplied with ammunition.
And they totally resisted technological obsolescence that doomed so many highly expensive Big Science weapons within months of delivery. They remain deadly to this day, in their original WWII or even WWI configurations.
Can't say that about WWI and WWII planes, tanks or subs now can we ?
And for close combat, particularly in built-up areas, three other German weapons proved small science could still best Big Science.
The German anti-tank mine was a very cheap and very low tech weapon , considering it could take out one of the leading edges of WWII warfare - the fifty plus ton Main Battle Tank.
Military leadership as carefully counted the estimated totals of MBTs on each side in WWII as they had counted estimates of dreadnoughts in WWI.
The German's 1944 Topfmine for instance was made of a casing of tar-covered cardboard - to resist water, detection and because it was light and dirt cheap.
With the use of a shovel, it was literally dirt-cheap to employ by the tens of thousands as well.
The German Faust Patrone was a very cheap and low tech one time use recoilless weapon that could destroy medium tanks and stop a big tank by destroying its tracks.
Weapon and firing tube together weighed only 3 kilos and was a metre long, the tube being made of cheap stamped steel and wood.
It was easily carried and used by one soldier , who would remain mobile enough to make it hard for tank or accompanying infantry to hit him.
It fired a very low velocity projectile about 30 metres - thanks to its low tech centuries old black powder propelling charge.
Yet with its carefully shaped explosive charge of only a third of a kilogram it was easy able to penetrate six inches of armour.
It proved even more useful at destroying infantry strong point bunkers.
For the first time ever, even super thick armour was defeated without the need for a large, bulky, heavy artillery piece with long thick gun barrel , elaborate mounting system and case-hardened shell to penetrate armour.
At the very short ranges typical of combat in city streets, a well concealed, poorly trained one man team could fire a cheap 3 kg weapon more effectively than a bulky, hard to move, expensive 7000 kg 88mm anti-tank weapon with a large highly trained crew!
Now even the relatively light MG42 is a big bulky heavy piece of overkill in city combat. Its ability to kill two kilometres away usually irrelevant.
But a single solder firing a lightweight, cheap (stamped-parts) sub machine gun firing pistol strength small cartridges was more effective - more mobile, better able to carry more (smaller) rounds upon themselves.
Instead of mortars lobbing explosives up from concealed positions, this soldier also made free use of small, light cheap hand grenades.
All this little science infantry weapons had an enormous impact , post WWII - in fact helping to bring about our post-modern world .
Post modern in the sense that a truly key hallmark of Modernity - advanced nations lording it over small less advanced nation in the form of imperialism and colonies - has totally died away.
It all happened when nationalist rebels began using these sorts of small science infantry weapons in rural and urban settings .
That made for such big casualties that Big Science/low casualties oriented western nations gave up their colonies rather than endure losing such long term and asymmetrical wars ....
But is any of this true ?
Could it not be claimed that while the (relatively few) Axis soldiers actually were a fair better - as individuals - than the average Allied soldier, the Allies had such potentially large numbers of recruits available that the advantage should have gone to the Allies by sheer weight of numbers.
But the Allies deliberately choose to starve their infantry both in manpower and even more critically, in material.
Because the key reason why the German infantry was so superior was that the Germans invented some small science infantry weapons so good the world is still using them as warfare blueprints 75 years later.
The Allied infantry doctrine focussed on squads of mostly riflemen slowly firing rifles discharging large, long range, bullets.
Things like squad level light machine guns were relatively few in number and pretty pitiful as suppression fire weapons.
By contrast, the Germans focussed on supplying each infantry squad with a number of a superior general purpose air-cooled machine gun .
The MG42 was made cheaply, quickly and lightly of stamped parts.
It was most famous for a very rapid rate of fire - sustained by the use of endlessly linked belts of ammunition, not small magazines, and by the ability to change the overly-hot barrels in seconds.
More importantly in the big picture, being so light for such a deadly weapon, it could be easily carried into battle and fired by one soldier, if need be - supplying the fire power of an entire typically combat-thinned British battalion of bolt action rifles.
The fact that German ammunition was generally far less smokey than Allied ammo, meant this one-man-battalion could remain better concealed longer.
Next in importance was the Germans heavy use of the infantry level mortar - an improved version of WWI's most significant infantry level invention - the British Stokes mortar.
Thanks to pipe manufacturer Wilfred Stokes, mortars, in an instant of inspired invention by this sheer amateur, went from being a big bulky heavy bit of artillery to something that ultimately a single soldier could carry and fire.
Again, it multiplied the ability of one or two foot soldiers to impede an entire advancing battalion.
It could be fire from the lee side of a hill and hit advancing troops without them being able to directly fire at it.
The WWI sniper rifle was also improved - more consistent matching of ammo and individual gun barrel and better optical scopes.
All three impeded, from a safe distance , a broad front infantry advance over open ground.
And their price for doing so - peanuts, both to make and keep supplied with ammunition.
And they totally resisted technological obsolescence that doomed so many highly expensive Big Science weapons within months of delivery. They remain deadly to this day, in their original WWII or even WWI configurations.
Can't say that about WWI and WWII planes, tanks or subs now can we ?
And for close combat, particularly in built-up areas, three other German weapons proved small science could still best Big Science.
The German anti-tank mine was a very cheap and very low tech weapon , considering it could take out one of the leading edges of WWII warfare - the fifty plus ton Main Battle Tank.
Military leadership as carefully counted the estimated totals of MBTs on each side in WWII as they had counted estimates of dreadnoughts in WWI.
The German's 1944 Topfmine for instance was made of a casing of tar-covered cardboard - to resist water, detection and because it was light and dirt cheap.
With the use of a shovel, it was literally dirt-cheap to employ by the tens of thousands as well.
The German Faust Patrone was a very cheap and low tech one time use recoilless weapon that could destroy medium tanks and stop a big tank by destroying its tracks.
Weapon and firing tube together weighed only 3 kilos and was a metre long, the tube being made of cheap stamped steel and wood.
It was easily carried and used by one soldier , who would remain mobile enough to make it hard for tank or accompanying infantry to hit him.
It fired a very low velocity projectile about 30 metres - thanks to its low tech centuries old black powder propelling charge.
Yet with its carefully shaped explosive charge of only a third of a kilogram it was easy able to penetrate six inches of armour.
It proved even more useful at destroying infantry strong point bunkers.
For the first time ever, even super thick armour was defeated without the need for a large, bulky, heavy artillery piece with long thick gun barrel , elaborate mounting system and case-hardened shell to penetrate armour.
At the very short ranges typical of combat in city streets, a well concealed, poorly trained one man team could fire a cheap 3 kg weapon more effectively than a bulky, hard to move, expensive 7000 kg 88mm anti-tank weapon with a large highly trained crew!
Now even the relatively light MG42 is a big bulky heavy piece of overkill in city combat. Its ability to kill two kilometres away usually irrelevant.
But a single solder firing a lightweight, cheap (stamped-parts) sub machine gun firing pistol strength small cartridges was more effective - more mobile, better able to carry more (smaller) rounds upon themselves.
Instead of mortars lobbing explosives up from concealed positions, this soldier also made free use of small, light cheap hand grenades.
All this little science infantry weapons had an enormous impact , post WWII - in fact helping to bring about our post-modern world .
Post modern in the sense that a truly key hallmark of Modernity - advanced nations lording it over small less advanced nation in the form of imperialism and colonies - has totally died away.
It all happened when nationalist rebels began using these sorts of small science infantry weapons in rural and urban settings .
That made for such big casualties that Big Science/low casualties oriented western nations gave up their colonies rather than endure losing such long term and asymmetrical wars ....
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
History of A-bomb began not with Germans splitting nucleus of Atoms in dec '38, but with Germans splitting heads of Jews nov '38
That's not a fact many WASP historians (cheerleaders ?) of science want to hear.
But it is true : no Jews , no Bomb, at least not during WWII ....
But it is true : no Jews , no Bomb, at least not during WWII ....
Monday, January 12, 2015
OSRD (and academia's) dirty little secret : just how little the OSRD spent on penicillin - not how MUCH it spent on A-Bomb
Vannevar Bush grew a whole lot fonder of penicillin after it was highly successful (and highly popular among voters and congressmen) than when its future lay in doubt and only he had the power to ensure it succeeded.
The uncomfortable fact is that it was Washington's tiny New Deal-oriented OPRD (and not the similar-sounding but Republican Party-dominated much larger ORSD) that actually gave the world cheap abundant natural penicillin in time to save millions of lives during the wartime and postwar health crises.
While the OPRD had all the ideas and all the energy, it was the OSRD that had all the money --- and all that money bought plenty of tame academics prepared to rewrite war history - for money - in a manner than would have even given Goebbels himself pause.
Bush - never a top drawer scientist but always a Beltway bureaucrat with very sharp elbows - was determined to use the 'miracle of penicillin' as a weapon to bludgeon money out of a hitherto reluctant Congress to fund the postwar dreams of university academics.
But he could only do so if all the university academics kept up their end of the implicit bargain.
That was their agreeing never to probe his claims of wartime 'success' too closely - because frankly, if right wing Bush's legacy was screwed as a result, so would be a whole lot of still living left wing professors also hoping for a pot of federal gold for their pet project....
The uncomfortable fact is that it was Washington's tiny New Deal-oriented OPRD (and not the similar-sounding but Republican Party-dominated much larger ORSD) that actually gave the world cheap abundant natural penicillin in time to save millions of lives during the wartime and postwar health crises.
While the OPRD had all the ideas and all the energy, it was the OSRD that had all the money --- and all that money bought plenty of tame academics prepared to rewrite war history - for money - in a manner than would have even given Goebbels himself pause.
Bush - never a top drawer scientist but always a Beltway bureaucrat with very sharp elbows - was determined to use the 'miracle of penicillin' as a weapon to bludgeon money out of a hitherto reluctant Congress to fund the postwar dreams of university academics.
But he could only do so if all the university academics kept up their end of the implicit bargain.
That was their agreeing never to probe his claims of wartime 'success' too closely - because frankly, if right wing Bush's legacy was screwed as a result, so would be a whole lot of still living left wing professors also hoping for a pot of federal gold for their pet project....
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Manhattan gave the world the first life-saving penicillin shot - as well as the first death-dealing A-Bomb
Don't let terrorists like Ramzi Yousef limit Manhattan's wartime role to killing (and here I quote his justification for blowing up the twin towers of the World Trade Centre) "250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki".
Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.
New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.
It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.
Alexander Fleming in London had discovered penicillin 12 years earlier but had decided it would only be useful if made as a patentable man-made economical synthetic and even then only useful as a surface antiseptic - not in an internally-oriented pill or needle.
Howard Florey in Oxford had taken up Fleming's challenge and for a decade his team chased the chimera of man-made patentable economical man-made penicillin - but they never succeeded and no one else ever has.
New York went back to Fleming's original semi-purified natural penicillin and ran with it - in five short weeks Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team had obtained spores, grown it , concentrated it and tested it for toxicity (on Dawson himself).
Now the team was ready to give it to patients dying of then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) for lack of it - a young black man from Sugar Hill, Harlem named Aaron Alston and a young Jewish man named Charles Aronson from the Bronx.
SBE patients were then considered the 4Fs of the 4Fs and not a priority to an Anglo-American medical establishment using the excuse of war preparation to curtail social medicine (medicine directed at the poor and minorities).
So the day Dawson picked for history's first penicillin shots couldn't have been more freighted in symbolism.
It was October 16th 1940 - the historic first day of America's draft registration process - a process still going strong 75 years later.
So on a day when all the minds of America and of the Allied and Axis world were focussed on whether or not the hardships of the Great Depression had reduced America's numbers of 1A fit-for-combat youth , a 4F black man and Jew got to make their own history in a quiet corner of upper Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre...
Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.
New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.
It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.
Alexander Fleming in London had discovered penicillin 12 years earlier but had decided it would only be useful if made as a patentable man-made economical synthetic and even then only useful as a surface antiseptic - not in an internally-oriented pill or needle.
Howard Florey in Oxford had taken up Fleming's challenge and for a decade his team chased the chimera of man-made patentable economical man-made penicillin - but they never succeeded and no one else ever has.
New York went back to Fleming's original semi-purified natural penicillin and ran with it - in five short weeks Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team had obtained spores, grown it , concentrated it and tested it for toxicity (on Dawson himself).
Now the team was ready to give it to patients dying of then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) for lack of it - a young black man from Sugar Hill, Harlem named Aaron Alston and a young Jewish man named Charles Aronson from the Bronx.
SBE patients were then considered the 4Fs of the 4Fs and not a priority to an Anglo-American medical establishment using the excuse of war preparation to curtail social medicine (medicine directed at the poor and minorities).
So the day Dawson picked for history's first penicillin shots couldn't have been more freighted in symbolism.
It was October 16th 1940 - the historic first day of America's draft registration process - a process still going strong 75 years later.
So on a day when all the minds of America and of the Allied and Axis world were focussed on whether or not the hardships of the Great Depression had reduced America's numbers of 1A fit-for-combat youth , a 4F black man and Jew got to make their own history in a quiet corner of upper Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre...
Sunday, September 15, 2013
"Collar the Lot" : Churchill's callousness push-starts A-bomb and Penicillin development
I don't like Winston Churchill.
Granted he was a very complex man, much given to uttering extreme verbal outbursts on whatever position he held that moment, replaces a few hours or weeks later by an equally exaggerated outburst on the opposite view on that same issue.
So it is easy to find vivid quotes from him displaying both humanity and brutality towards the German Jews and Leftists who fled Hitler for Britain before 1939.
For brutal , see his comment 'collar the lot' as soon as he became PM in May 1940.
Until then, the UK had sensibly only interned ( interned gently) those it deemed as obviously pro-Nazi.
But as he threw pro Nazi Aryans and very anti Nazi Jews together in internment camps, those few (because judged potentially 'valuable' to the war effort) German Jews still free in the English-speaking democracies could see dire times ahead for them too.
If they didn't move from being potentially valuable to 'actually valuable' and soon, they and their families would be interned with all the rest.
Ironically, existing restrictions on their current activities actually helped many succeed in becoming valuable ( very,very,very valuable) to the Allied cause.
We already well know about all those Jewish physicists, denied the right to work on important war efforts like Radar, who fell back upon the then scientific backwater of a possible engine of atomic energy.
Their energetic development (hello Simon, Szilard and others) led directly to the idea of a possible A-Bomb becoming not the last but the first priority of the war.
It is not often thought of in the same way, but the Penicillin project (often twinned with the A-Bomb as one of the two big discoveries of the war) was push-started by two German Jewish emigres also facing possible internment for themselves and their families in the Spring and Summer of 1940, after Churchill's churlish actions.
Ernst Chain had to push and pull Howard Florey into realizing their peacetime, long term, basic research on microbe on microbe warfare could have huge wartime implications.
He probably pushed and pulled a little too hard in claiming credit on a back up project - this one on the chemical nature of the activity of the (mildly anti-bacterial) connective cellwall-destroying enzyme Lysozyme.
This had the effect of rousing the anger of , and the fear within, of another German Jewish emigre in America who had additional fears as he was also an WWI veteran of the Central Powers.
Karl Meyer had worked with (Martin) Henry Dawson among many others,to do the initial work on the chemical nature of Lysozyme and on some other important connective tissue destroying enzymes.
He saw himself as the pioneer in this small but valuable new field in bio-chemistry.
Meyer heard of Chain's forthcoming exaggerated claims for his Lysozyme efforts via the American-born Jew Leslie A Epstein (later Falk).
Like Meyer and Chain in those days, Epstein was a left-winger in politics and in medicine.
He got along with both of these two fellow Jews.
He had been forced, by general government order, to flee Oxford University and a Rhodes scholarship before his year and PhD was completed.
So he completed his work, begun under Chain in Oxford, with Meyer in New York, because he was the other recognized expert on the topic.
He there mentioned Chain's part in the recent successful demonstration (May 1940) that the twelve year old nigh-on useless penicillin actually could cure bacterial disease inside mice without harming them.
This meant it probably could do likewise inside humans - humans perhaps even with guns and helmets. There was a shooting war on , after all.
This work was to be published in late August 1940 in Lancet.
Chain was soon tasked to try and synthesize the natural active ingredient as fast as possible.
Meyer - I believe correctly - felt that Chain was a far better 'big ideas man' than a working bio-chemist and that Meyer could do the job far better than Chain or the fungi ever could .
He couldn't beat the fungi, as it turned out - no one could - no one ever has.
But Meyer's secret plan to repay Chain for stealing his Lysozyme credit AND secure his family from possible internment with Nazis by synthesizing penicillin was not without its own profound consequences.
Because he badly needed his friend Henry Dawson and his two skills , if his project was to succeed.
Dawson and his co-worker Gladys Hobby were expert micro-biologists.
They were highly skilled in growing large amount of microbes, like the penicillium.
Their skill was needed to provide the huge amounts of raw natural product Meyer had to destructively analyze, all to guide the process of synthesis of penicillin from pure chemical compounds.
Secondly, only Dawson the clinician had the licensed legal access to animal and human subjects to test the biological effectiveness of any new results at synthesis.
Then Dawson abruptly decided Meyer's penicillin might do a lot more than just be tested on human patients.
It might just cure patients otherwise doubly-fated to an inevitable death from the dreaded SBE.
Doubly fated to needlessly die, because in the Fall of 1940, it seemed the medical establishment was using the upcoming war effort as an excuse to treat research upon them as the very lowest priority.
In addition, American Big Pharma had shown no interest in providing any raw starting material of a potential - natural - drug they considered far tougher to work with than the still tractable and still profitable - chemically-oriented - sulfa family of drugs.
And they had no interest in developing a consultant-style relationship with a virtually unknown emigre Jewish biochemist, even with a growing reputation for the quality of his work.
(Meyer did have some sort of relationship with German-controlled Schering but they didn't see the potential - at least for their firm at this time - in the area of fungal-based antibiotics.)
Dawson saw this growing indifference to the sad fate of the poor SBE youths as part and parcel of the growing general meanness of the Modern Age itself, as exemplified by humanity's attitudes to small nations under attack from their big bullying neighbours.
This indifference to the fate of smaller 'others' started in Manchuria in 1931, then extended to Ethiopia and Spain in the mid 1930s and then Austria and Czechoslovakia at the end of the decade.
Now it was Poland, Finland, the three Balt states, Denmark, Norway and Belgium turn to be attacked and generally conquered by bully neighbours.
Still America's population and hence government remained firmly 'neutral' - as did the vast majority of the still sovereign nations of the world.
In hindsight, it is better to regard them all , us all , as being cold-hearted bystanders in the global schoolyard, watching indifferently as bullies beat up babies.
When Dawson decided to use Meyer's penicillin project to confront this indifference to the small of the world, starting with the specific case of the young people needlessly dying of SBE , he eventually set in motion a globe-wide reaction against Modernity's cult of callousness.
But let us never forget it was Winston Churchill's own particular callousness that first set it all in motion , back in May 1940 ....
Granted he was a very complex man, much given to uttering extreme verbal outbursts on whatever position he held that moment, replaces a few hours or weeks later by an equally exaggerated outburst on the opposite view on that same issue.
So it is easy to find vivid quotes from him displaying both humanity and brutality towards the German Jews and Leftists who fled Hitler for Britain before 1939.
For brutal , see his comment 'collar the lot' as soon as he became PM in May 1940.
Until then, the UK had sensibly only interned ( interned gently) those it deemed as obviously pro-Nazi.
But as he threw pro Nazi Aryans and very anti Nazi Jews together in internment camps, those few (because judged potentially 'valuable' to the war effort) German Jews still free in the English-speaking democracies could see dire times ahead for them too.
If they didn't move from being potentially valuable to 'actually valuable' and soon, they and their families would be interned with all the rest.
Ironically, existing restrictions on their current activities actually helped many succeed in becoming valuable ( very,very,very valuable) to the Allied cause.
We already well know about all those Jewish physicists, denied the right to work on important war efforts like Radar, who fell back upon the then scientific backwater of a possible engine of atomic energy.
Their energetic development (hello Simon, Szilard and others) led directly to the idea of a possible A-Bomb becoming not the last but the first priority of the war.
It is not often thought of in the same way, but the Penicillin project (often twinned with the A-Bomb as one of the two big discoveries of the war) was push-started by two German Jewish emigres also facing possible internment for themselves and their families in the Spring and Summer of 1940, after Churchill's churlish actions.
Ernst Chain had to push and pull Howard Florey into realizing their peacetime, long term, basic research on microbe on microbe warfare could have huge wartime implications.
He probably pushed and pulled a little too hard in claiming credit on a back up project - this one on the chemical nature of the activity of the (mildly anti-bacterial) connective cellwall-destroying enzyme Lysozyme.
This had the effect of rousing the anger of , and the fear within, of another German Jewish emigre in America who had additional fears as he was also an WWI veteran of the Central Powers.
Karl Meyer had worked with (Martin) Henry Dawson among many others,to do the initial work on the chemical nature of Lysozyme and on some other important connective tissue destroying enzymes.
He saw himself as the pioneer in this small but valuable new field in bio-chemistry.
Meyer heard of Chain's forthcoming exaggerated claims for his Lysozyme efforts via the American-born Jew Leslie A Epstein (later Falk).
Like Meyer and Chain in those days, Epstein was a left-winger in politics and in medicine.
He got along with both of these two fellow Jews.
He had been forced, by general government order, to flee Oxford University and a Rhodes scholarship before his year and PhD was completed.
So he completed his work, begun under Chain in Oxford, with Meyer in New York, because he was the other recognized expert on the topic.
He there mentioned Chain's part in the recent successful demonstration (May 1940) that the twelve year old nigh-on useless penicillin actually could cure bacterial disease inside mice without harming them.
This meant it probably could do likewise inside humans - humans perhaps even with guns and helmets. There was a shooting war on , after all.
This work was to be published in late August 1940 in Lancet.
Chain was soon tasked to try and synthesize the natural active ingredient as fast as possible.
Meyer - I believe correctly - felt that Chain was a far better 'big ideas man' than a working bio-chemist and that Meyer could do the job far better than Chain or the fungi ever could .
He couldn't beat the fungi, as it turned out - no one could - no one ever has.
But Meyer's secret plan to repay Chain for stealing his Lysozyme credit AND secure his family from possible internment with Nazis by synthesizing penicillin was not without its own profound consequences.
Because he badly needed his friend Henry Dawson and his two skills , if his project was to succeed.
Dawson and his co-worker Gladys Hobby were expert micro-biologists.
They were highly skilled in growing large amount of microbes, like the penicillium.
Their skill was needed to provide the huge amounts of raw natural product Meyer had to destructively analyze, all to guide the process of synthesis of penicillin from pure chemical compounds.
Secondly, only Dawson the clinician had the licensed legal access to animal and human subjects to test the biological effectiveness of any new results at synthesis.
Then Dawson abruptly decided Meyer's penicillin might do a lot more than just be tested on human patients.
It might just cure patients otherwise doubly-fated to an inevitable death from the dreaded SBE.
Doubly fated to needlessly die, because in the Fall of 1940, it seemed the medical establishment was using the upcoming war effort as an excuse to treat research upon them as the very lowest priority.
In addition, American Big Pharma had shown no interest in providing any raw starting material of a potential - natural - drug they considered far tougher to work with than the still tractable and still profitable - chemically-oriented - sulfa family of drugs.
And they had no interest in developing a consultant-style relationship with a virtually unknown emigre Jewish biochemist, even with a growing reputation for the quality of his work.
(Meyer did have some sort of relationship with German-controlled Schering but they didn't see the potential - at least for their firm at this time - in the area of fungal-based antibiotics.)
Dawson saw this growing indifference to the sad fate of the poor SBE youths as part and parcel of the growing general meanness of the Modern Age itself, as exemplified by humanity's attitudes to small nations under attack from their big bullying neighbours.
This indifference to the fate of smaller 'others' started in Manchuria in 1931, then extended to Ethiopia and Spain in the mid 1930s and then Austria and Czechoslovakia at the end of the decade.
Now it was Poland, Finland, the three Balt states, Denmark, Norway and Belgium turn to be attacked and generally conquered by bully neighbours.
Still America's population and hence government remained firmly 'neutral' - as did the vast majority of the still sovereign nations of the world.
In hindsight, it is better to regard them all , us all , as being cold-hearted bystanders in the global schoolyard, watching indifferently as bullies beat up babies.
When Dawson decided to use Meyer's penicillin project to confront this indifference to the small of the world, starting with the specific case of the young people needlessly dying of SBE , he eventually set in motion a globe-wide reaction against Modernity's cult of callousness.
But let us never forget it was Winston Churchill's own particular callousness that first set it all in motion , back in May 1940 ....
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
"Pax Penicillia" : how Churchill's Britain won the war and lost the peace
The decision by Winston Churchill's (Tory) Minister of Supply (MoS) not to divert the money for one additional Lancaster squadron, used to bomb civilians in Europe, towards providing enough penicillin for British (and European) civilians resulted in Churchill's Tories winning the war for Britain --- but at the cost of losing the peace.
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
Friday, January 18, 2013
The morality of good - temporary - military secrets and bad - semipermanent - military secrets
There is little morally to fear for all of us agreeing to keep traditional (and temporary) military secrets such as all troop movement before the planned big invasion.
By their very nature, such secrets are no longer a secret two or three days into battle.
But Enigma code-breaking, The (atomic) Bomb, the Proximity Fuse and Wartime Penicillin were all military secrets with huge moral costs attached.
Enigma was only kept secret for so long by sometimes deliberately not revealing to the effected military units the grim fate before them that the code-breaking revealed --- all in an attempt to keep the code-breaking secret from the enemy long enough for code-breaking to reveal (and foil) huge plans by the enemy.
This moral dilemma has kept the Enigma industry churning out lots of books and movies, 75 years after the events.
Proximity fuses were so wonderful that we couldn't use them against the Germans, convince they would find one unexploded and quickly duplicate it and then use it to horrible effect against our bomber streams because it was actually more useful to them than to us.
This is the same dilemma that the Germans faced about the nerve gas they invented, because they rightly feared we could make better use of it than they could --- so they never used it and kept it secret.
(At least the Germans didn't put much effort into producing nerve gas because it more or less fell into their laps- while proximity fuses were one of the single biggest scientific and engineering effort of the entire war - in my view, a mammoth mis-allocation of scarce war resources.)
The Atomic Bomb could not remain a 'secret' for very long once it was used, because it was seemingly so war-endingly successfully.
Hence nations big enough to afford it simply felt they had to pour immense amounts of money, expertise and national willpower into duplicating what the Americans had hoped to keep secret for at least a generation.
The entire American civic culture changed, for the worse, when the American atomic establishment decided atomic information could actually be "born secret and kept secret government property", even at the moment a new concept first formed in a scientist's mind !
What really kept the Bomb a 'secret' , quote unquote , is the expense and complexity of making it consistently successfully.
Everyone on Earth had heard of The Bomb, knew what it did , what it was made up and even basically how it worked : the American government had showed them all this in the public Smythe Report.
But a successful Bomb, like the Devil , was in the details ; these were complicated, expensive and remained secret to all but the best foreign spies.
And this - presumably - was how the Allies expected to keep the "Penicillin Secret" once they unleashed it as a secret medicine weapon only for Allied frontline casualties on D-Day (if Patty Malone and that damned beta-lactam ring hadn't spoiled the plan).
Who could really expect to keep the good news about penicillin's life-saving powers away from the general public (aka the relatives of frontline troops), as soon as millions of Allied casualties were coming back home alive, while enemy POWs from the same battle were dying like flies ?
No, like The Bomb, penicillin would quickly become uniquely famous all around the world and only remain a 'secret', quote unquote, because the Allied scientific elite figured that the information as how to make it could remain secret from the enemy for at least a year, because it was complex and expensive.
Remember, even the atomic bomb secret was broken in the end, but only about six years after it became first known to Britain, France and Russia that an A-Bomb would likely work.
That's the length of the entire (long drawn-out) WWII.
So a permanent military secret kept for as short a time as a year long, might still be viewed as long enough to be militarily effective.
But penicillin was no where as complex or as expensive as proximity fuses or nuclear weapons : in fact, it is a piece of cake for every and any hospital bacteriology lab to make safely and cheaply, in amounts sufficient to save the lives of all the people in that hospital dying of infections no other medication could help.
In normal situations, those really are not large numbers, spread over an entire year and over an entire country: in peacetime, there needn't ever be a penicillin crisis, for least for the dying of infections would get it when they really needed it.
But a huge invasion like D-Day requires an extraordinary amount of penicillin over a few days or weeks, in a small area , under fluid combat conditions that obviously doesn't allow much in the way of crude penicillin-making labs in sedate base hospitals.
So war weapon (frontline battle) penicillin really did require a lots of stable penicillin in a dry power, to be useful.
But in fact, even without Patty Malone to tip them off, as soon as word of penicillin great success got about, the enemy would start making it by the crude means known in the vast amount of public literature on penicillin.
But the cost of keeping penicillin a non-public success before unleashing it on D-Day, was in denying it for civilians in Allied,Neutral, Occupied and Enemy countries for years and in fact, in denying it to ordinary soldiers dying of infections penicillin could cure, again between 1940 and 1944.
That is literally millions of needless deaths --- at least as much as the Jewish Holocaust.
It was and is , a horrific moral crime, a deliberate crime promoted by doctors.
And it is why I write about wartime penicillin , 75 years after its events...
By their very nature, such secrets are no longer a secret two or three days into battle.
But Enigma code-breaking, The (atomic) Bomb, the Proximity Fuse and Wartime Penicillin were all military secrets with huge moral costs attached.
Enigma was only kept secret for so long by sometimes deliberately not revealing to the effected military units the grim fate before them that the code-breaking revealed --- all in an attempt to keep the code-breaking secret from the enemy long enough for code-breaking to reveal (and foil) huge plans by the enemy.
This moral dilemma has kept the Enigma industry churning out lots of books and movies, 75 years after the events.
Proximity fuses were so wonderful that we couldn't use them against the Germans, convince they would find one unexploded and quickly duplicate it and then use it to horrible effect against our bomber streams because it was actually more useful to them than to us.
This is the same dilemma that the Germans faced about the nerve gas they invented, because they rightly feared we could make better use of it than they could --- so they never used it and kept it secret.
(At least the Germans didn't put much effort into producing nerve gas because it more or less fell into their laps- while proximity fuses were one of the single biggest scientific and engineering effort of the entire war - in my view, a mammoth mis-allocation of scarce war resources.)
The Atomic Bomb could not remain a 'secret' for very long once it was used, because it was seemingly so war-endingly successfully.
Hence nations big enough to afford it simply felt they had to pour immense amounts of money, expertise and national willpower into duplicating what the Americans had hoped to keep secret for at least a generation.
The entire American civic culture changed, for the worse, when the American atomic establishment decided atomic information could actually be "born secret and kept secret government property", even at the moment a new concept first formed in a scientist's mind !
What really kept the Bomb a 'secret' , quote unquote , is the expense and complexity of making it consistently successfully.
Everyone on Earth had heard of The Bomb, knew what it did , what it was made up and even basically how it worked : the American government had showed them all this in the public Smythe Report.
But a successful Bomb, like the Devil , was in the details ; these were complicated, expensive and remained secret to all but the best foreign spies.
And this - presumably - was how the Allies expected to keep the "Penicillin Secret" once they unleashed it as a secret medicine weapon only for Allied frontline casualties on D-Day (if Patty Malone and that damned beta-lactam ring hadn't spoiled the plan).
Who could really expect to keep the good news about penicillin's life-saving powers away from the general public (aka the relatives of frontline troops), as soon as millions of Allied casualties were coming back home alive, while enemy POWs from the same battle were dying like flies ?
No, like The Bomb, penicillin would quickly become uniquely famous all around the world and only remain a 'secret', quote unquote, because the Allied scientific elite figured that the information as how to make it could remain secret from the enemy for at least a year, because it was complex and expensive.
Remember, even the atomic bomb secret was broken in the end, but only about six years after it became first known to Britain, France and Russia that an A-Bomb would likely work.
That's the length of the entire (long drawn-out) WWII.
So a permanent military secret kept for as short a time as a year long, might still be viewed as long enough to be militarily effective.
But penicillin was no where as complex or as expensive as proximity fuses or nuclear weapons : in fact, it is a piece of cake for every and any hospital bacteriology lab to make safely and cheaply, in amounts sufficient to save the lives of all the people in that hospital dying of infections no other medication could help.
In normal situations, those really are not large numbers, spread over an entire year and over an entire country: in peacetime, there needn't ever be a penicillin crisis, for least for the dying of infections would get it when they really needed it.
But a huge invasion like D-Day requires an extraordinary amount of penicillin over a few days or weeks, in a small area , under fluid combat conditions that obviously doesn't allow much in the way of crude penicillin-making labs in sedate base hospitals.
So war weapon (frontline battle) penicillin really did require a lots of stable penicillin in a dry power, to be useful.
But in fact, even without Patty Malone to tip them off, as soon as word of penicillin great success got about, the enemy would start making it by the crude means known in the vast amount of public literature on penicillin.
But the cost of keeping penicillin a non-public success before unleashing it on D-Day, was in denying it for civilians in Allied,Neutral, Occupied and Enemy countries for years and in fact, in denying it to ordinary soldiers dying of infections penicillin could cure, again between 1940 and 1944.
That is literally millions of needless deaths --- at least as much as the Jewish Holocaust.
It was and is , a horrific moral crime, a deliberate crime promoted by doctors.
And it is why I write about wartime penicillin , 75 years after its events...
Sunday, January 13, 2013
"A Rare Breed Indeed" : US wartime Int'l treaties on the A-Bomb, Lend-Lease, Bases for Destroyers ... and synthetic penicillin
Most of the antibiotics we use today (beta-lactams) are still the close relatives of the first and best-ever antibiotic, Penicillin G.
They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.
They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.
But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.
Instead another - exceedingly rare - international treaty was negotiated by the wartime American government --- a nation historically very loath to sign any sort of international treaty.
It focused exclusively on the post-war perfection of what had been - at one time - intended to be a timely wartime secret weapon of war : that elusive and illusionary phantom known as synthetic penicillin.
So it was that if between 1943 and 1946, a individual scientist had increased the amount of penicillin retained from the initial crude penicillin medium from 50% to 100% on first purification run through, she or he would have been classed be a war-hero and covered under this Acheson-Halifax Treaty, via its clause on the purification of penicillin.
(Even if success in this case might merely mean that the scientist retained 2 units of semi-purified penicillin per 2 units of initial crude penicillin rather than just the normal 1unit semi-refined from 2 units of initial crude penicillin.)
But if a scientist or firm increased the production of crude penicillin from the 2 crude units per ml of starting medium (as was common in the first 14 years of penicillin production) to 80,000 units of crude penicillin per ml of starting medium (as is common today) , they won't be considered important enough to be covered under this treaty !
It was this loophole that allowed a small soda pop supplier to become, in time, the biggest drug company in the world.
This was when Pfizer incredibly rapidly increased its production of natural penicillin from 2 units over 14 days to 2000 units over 4 days, per ml of starting medium ---- down right under the noses of the treaty negotiators.
As a result, 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches came from this one firm alone - making its world wide reputation over night.
That was because Pfizer's John L Smith, alone among his industry's CEOs, decided to make upping the production levels of natural penicillin his Job One, rather than going full out on synthesizing artificial penicillin and giving just lip service to public claims to be making more natural penicillin for the dying.
When a CUPE local for mental health orderlies and support staff went on strike here in Nova Scotia, I was no longer a mental health employee or union local member but I did devise the winning strike slogan : "Ten Percent of Nothing is Still Nothing !".
The government had told the public these ungrateful employees were getting a hefty 10% pay raise out of your tax dollars : but we came back with the fact some of the employees were earning less than the government's own, mandated by law, legal minimum wage !
Two units of penicillin per ml of starting medium is nothing, for such a lot of time, care and expense. Retaining 100% of it , instead of 50% of it , is still nothing.
The penicillin we use today is exceedingly cheap and abundant : because even if retaining only 50% of the 80,000 units per ml yield it is indeed still a very, very, very, big something....
They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.
They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.
But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.
Instead another - exceedingly rare - international treaty was negotiated by the wartime American government --- a nation historically very loath to sign any sort of international treaty.
It focused exclusively on the post-war perfection of what had been - at one time - intended to be a timely wartime secret weapon of war : that elusive and illusionary phantom known as synthetic penicillin.
So it was that if between 1943 and 1946, a individual scientist had increased the amount of penicillin retained from the initial crude penicillin medium from 50% to 100% on first purification run through, she or he would have been classed be a war-hero and covered under this Acheson-Halifax Treaty, via its clause on the purification of penicillin.
(Even if success in this case might merely mean that the scientist retained 2 units of semi-purified penicillin per 2 units of initial crude penicillin rather than just the normal 1unit semi-refined from 2 units of initial crude penicillin.)
But if a scientist or firm increased the production of crude penicillin from the 2 crude units per ml of starting medium (as was common in the first 14 years of penicillin production) to 80,000 units of crude penicillin per ml of starting medium (as is common today) , they won't be considered important enough to be covered under this treaty !
It was this loophole that allowed a small soda pop supplier to become, in time, the biggest drug company in the world.
This was when Pfizer incredibly rapidly increased its production of natural penicillin from 2 units over 14 days to 2000 units over 4 days, per ml of starting medium ---- down right under the noses of the treaty negotiators.
As a result, 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches came from this one firm alone - making its world wide reputation over night.
That was because Pfizer's John L Smith, alone among his industry's CEOs, decided to make upping the production levels of natural penicillin his Job One, rather than going full out on synthesizing artificial penicillin and giving just lip service to public claims to be making more natural penicillin for the dying.
10% of nothing is ..... still nothing !!
When a CUPE local for mental health orderlies and support staff went on strike here in Nova Scotia, I was no longer a mental health employee or union local member but I did devise the winning strike slogan : "Ten Percent of Nothing is Still Nothing !".
The government had told the public these ungrateful employees were getting a hefty 10% pay raise out of your tax dollars : but we came back with the fact some of the employees were earning less than the government's own, mandated by law, legal minimum wage !
Two units of penicillin per ml of starting medium is nothing, for such a lot of time, care and expense. Retaining 100% of it , instead of 50% of it , is still nothing.
The penicillin we use today is exceedingly cheap and abundant : because even if retaining only 50% of the 80,000 units per ml yield it is indeed still a very, very, very, big something....
Saturday, January 12, 2013
The A-Bomb and synthetic penicillin were attractive war weapons, not because they were easy - but because they were hard
Shades of President Kennedy explaining his decision to push for an all-out effort to land men on the Moon before the end of the decade, "not because it was easy but because it was hard" !
"Hard" attracted lots of top (alpha male) scientists who could graceful forget about doing something boringly useful in this current war by focusing instead on daydreams of achieving eternal scientific glory.
The glory of building a new bomb that would fire-bomb entire cities just as good as existing fire bombs already were and the glory of artificially synthesizing an already existing - and already useful- natural substance.
"Hard" also meant that A-Bombs and synthetic penicillin would remain a dark secret to the enemy for at least a year or three, even after their first use at the front revealed their existence : this is the reason why the OSRD and their British equivalent were so interested in these "hard" projects....
"Hard" attracted lots of top (alpha male) scientists who could graceful forget about doing something boringly useful in this current war by focusing instead on daydreams of achieving eternal scientific glory.
The glory of building a new bomb that would fire-bomb entire cities just as good as existing fire bombs already were and the glory of artificially synthesizing an already existing - and already useful- natural substance.
"Hard" also meant that A-Bombs and synthetic penicillin would remain a dark secret to the enemy for at least a year or three, even after their first use at the front revealed their existence : this is the reason why the OSRD and their British equivalent were so interested in these "hard" projects....
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Like synthetic penicillin, the harder the A-Bomb was to make, the more attractive it was to the OSRD
Late in 1942, Britain's highest political, military and Intelligence leadership decided that the Atomic Bomb was almost certainly too difficult and too expensive for Hitler's Germany to produce during World War II ---- if only because it would take too many resources from more pressing necessities for the Nazi war machine.
But they decided not to tell the scientists who had only agreed to build an atomic bomb because that seemed the only way to stop the Germans from doing it first and using it first to win the war.
These British leaders had also come to the same conclusion about their own Atomic Bomb program taking too many scarce resources as well.
(Like the mostly emigre Jewish scientists pushing hardest to build an Allied A-Bomb, the British had been originally willing to commit all the needed resources and more, if it seemed that Germany might actually make The Bomb ---- and make it first.)
But if Germany couldn't pull it off in time to influence this war, it seemed reasonable to put the British program on the back burner , keeping Britain's hand in, but no more.
They didn't tell the atomic scientists this, but they told Washington.
But the moment the British signalled these joint -and obviously closely related- conclusions to America's leadership, a paradoxical response happened.
Washington's military-political-scientific elite had long been cool to seeing the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of this war and hence something worth diverting billions in scarce war resources towards.
Indeed that elite - centred in and around Vannevar Bush's OSRD war weapon agency - had even been skeptical The Bomb would become a weapon in any future war.
But now the possibility of an all-powerful strategic weapon so complex and expensive only the US could afford to build it and still play a full part in the current war made it an exceedingly attractive diplomatic weapon for what Washington saw as its new role as the world's new global policeman in the post war world.
America decided to share (and even there reluctantly) only information in areas of atomic bomb research that Britain and Canada were already equal scientific partners in.
Meanwhile America would command by force majeure all the vital Canadian resources crucial to making The Bomb, denying them both to Canada and Britain.
Canada's uranium wasn't vital, just useful, but its processing plants and expertise for making uranium oxide and heavy water were vital in the sense that replicating them might add nine months to the path to the first successful atomic blast, possibly taking it outside the timeline of the war.
(The OSRD was praying that the Germans and Japanese didn't surrender too fast, because then Congress would instantly stop spending billions on a merely possible atomic bomb.)
I have never accepted the conventional explanations as to why America suddenly pushed their atomic bomb program into high gear at the same time they cut out Britain from the originally-planned team effort.
But as I came to see how synthetic penicillin's very difficult nature made it more - not less - attractive as a secret war weapon to the OSRD, I began to see how the same could apply to the A-Bomb as well.
You see, cutting out Britain from A-Bomb research during the war would not make any sense at all, if Germany had a well developed A-Bomb effort.
Because at the end of the war, all the leading Allies would have an equal moral right to profit off of Germany's scientific treasures.
Britain and Russia would then learn - from the Germans - the 'devil in the details' knowledge to take the atomic bomb from university lab theory to successful factory production.
Believing that neither Britain and Germany would make an atomic bomb easily (let alone Russia, Japan, Italy and France) feed Washington's early-senility induced delusion that the atomic bomb secret really existed.
That 'secret' only existed for a short period - during the war itself - rather like the DDT secret.
Still, a useful period if it really was to be a war-ending weapon ( which no one in Washington believed) but useless if post-war secrecy was key to its success as a diplomatic weapon.
Poor old Washington and poor old London and poor old Berlin.
Always forced to fight a three front war.
Two minor fronts (against your darkest enemies) and then a major one ---- against your dearest friends......
But they decided not to tell the scientists who had only agreed to build an atomic bomb because that seemed the only way to stop the Germans from doing it first and using it first to win the war.
These British leaders had also come to the same conclusion about their own Atomic Bomb program taking too many scarce resources as well.
(Like the mostly emigre Jewish scientists pushing hardest to build an Allied A-Bomb, the British had been originally willing to commit all the needed resources and more, if it seemed that Germany might actually make The Bomb ---- and make it first.)
But if Germany couldn't pull it off in time to influence this war, it seemed reasonable to put the British program on the back burner , keeping Britain's hand in, but no more.
They didn't tell the atomic scientists this, but they told Washington.
But the moment the British signalled these joint -and obviously closely related- conclusions to America's leadership, a paradoxical response happened.
Washington's military-political-scientific elite had long been cool to seeing the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of this war and hence something worth diverting billions in scarce war resources towards.
Indeed that elite - centred in and around Vannevar Bush's OSRD war weapon agency - had even been skeptical The Bomb would become a weapon in any future war.
But now the possibility of an all-powerful strategic weapon so complex and expensive only the US could afford to build it and still play a full part in the current war made it an exceedingly attractive diplomatic weapon for what Washington saw as its new role as the world's new global policeman in the post war world.
America decided to share (and even there reluctantly) only information in areas of atomic bomb research that Britain and Canada were already equal scientific partners in.
Meanwhile America would command by force majeure all the vital Canadian resources crucial to making The Bomb, denying them both to Canada and Britain.
Canada's uranium wasn't vital, just useful, but its processing plants and expertise for making uranium oxide and heavy water were vital in the sense that replicating them might add nine months to the path to the first successful atomic blast, possibly taking it outside the timeline of the war.
(The OSRD was praying that the Germans and Japanese didn't surrender too fast, because then Congress would instantly stop spending billions on a merely possible atomic bomb.)
I have never accepted the conventional explanations as to why America suddenly pushed their atomic bomb program into high gear at the same time they cut out Britain from the originally-planned team effort.
Lessons from the attractiveness of difficult-to-synthesize penicillin
But as I came to see how synthetic penicillin's very difficult nature made it more - not less - attractive as a secret war weapon to the OSRD, I began to see how the same could apply to the A-Bomb as well.
You see, cutting out Britain from A-Bomb research during the war would not make any sense at all, if Germany had a well developed A-Bomb effort.
Because at the end of the war, all the leading Allies would have an equal moral right to profit off of Germany's scientific treasures.
Britain and Russia would then learn - from the Germans - the 'devil in the details' knowledge to take the atomic bomb from university lab theory to successful factory production.
Believing that neither Britain and Germany would make an atomic bomb easily (let alone Russia, Japan, Italy and France) feed Washington's early-senility induced delusion that the atomic bomb secret really existed.
That 'secret' only existed for a short period - during the war itself - rather like the DDT secret.
Still, a useful period if it really was to be a war-ending weapon ( which no one in Washington believed) but useless if post-war secrecy was key to its success as a diplomatic weapon.
Poor old Washington and poor old London and poor old Berlin.
Always forced to fight a three front war.
Two minor fronts (against your darkest enemies) and then a major one ---- against your dearest friends......
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)