There's a reason the Americans discovered how to make atomic weapons first and it's because their researchers were living under a less oppressive state that wasn't motivated by anti-intellectualism and dumb ideology.
While I agree in spirit on the concern about political interference in science, the Manhattan Project was actually one of the most secretive, tightly controlled government programs in US history.
In addition many scientists involved (like Oppenheimer) later faced political persecution during the McCarthy era.
American atomic research succeeded despite, or perhaps because of, intense state control and funding
The "raw material" of the Manhattan Project was a flourishing community of researchers, including many European exiles; "secretive, tightly controlled" management is simply the only reasonable way to run such a military program.
Consider that at the same time the Third Reich also had a nuclear weapons research program, and it went nowhere.
Well, many of the researchers would have been killed if they stayed in Germany. It kinda helps being alive when researching how to build a nuclear bomb.
The Manhattan project was an engineering project, not so much a scientific one. It was only made possible because the science and theories behind it were discovered first.
Yeah it probably isn't the best project to highlight the sentiment, but it was well known one and immediately came to mind in a period that had the contrasting factor.
I don't particularly think that the secrecy or control of a single group really reflects on the overall culture however. We wouldn't call phreakers authoritarian just because they weren't publishing their exploits in the newspaper or letting any new person fully into their circle.
Also the prosecution and harassment of communists/leftists and minorities in the US during that era is why I stipulated less oppressive rather than unoppressive.
An Australian nuclear scientist working for the UK Rutherford (New Zealander) labs | Tube Alloys | MAUD program told them how to.
It took a while to convince the US scientists who were mainly interested in making big hot piles for power.
The actual building of atomic weapons (Trinity, Fat Man and Little Boy) took place under a fully authoritarian ultra secret State directed militarily controlled program that cost a significant chunk of national GDP.
The example you chose appears to be both incorrect and the very opposite of whatever point you wanted to make.
The jingoist dream of America is falling apart. It must seem, to some who are very dependent on it existing, as if the sky actually is falling. Perhaps it's just a good opportunity for them to study history that has been untouched by North American propaganda.
Anyways, we have the Internet, I'm not sure it matters _where_ innovations are created anymore. It certainly does not seem to be stopping China on any level.
America is going to have to give up the "World Police" (a.k.a. The Military Industrial Complex) badge and move into it's relative political middle age with a little more care and aplomb than the last 6 decades have allowed for. The haze of WW2 is far behind us now.
You're asking for sea shipping to stop working because naval piracy is going to come back. The "military industrial complex" isn't real and isn't a significant part of the economy (military spending as % US GDP has continually fallen over time), but the Navy patrolling the entire world's oceans for free has been real until now.
> You're asking for sea shipping to stop working because naval piracy is going to come back.
That's a huge exaggeration. Who would commit naval piracy in the current age? Somalia, with their little boats and AK-47s? China already has a bigger fleet than the US and can easily take on the burden of securing trade routes, since they are the biggest beneficiary.
You are mistaken. If the US decided to give up its role, there would be a void, a void that anyone who filled it would gain soft power from. China would be very interested in taking the place of the US in securing global trade routes, because doing so would not only provide soft power but also signal that China had replaced the US as the world’s hegemon.
China (at least its current incarnation with Xi) doesn't care about soft power and thinks the only reason anyone else tries it is they're overly sentimental losers. That's why they have that wolf warrior diplomacy program where they just had diplomats insult everyone.
We already have piracy coming back with the Houthis; China didn't join the alliance with other countries, defended their own ships and ignored everyone else.
> China (at least its current incarnation with Xi) doesn't care about soft power
That’s just wrong. Xi has explicitly ordered cadres to "tell China’s story well"[1] and build "discourse power" that’s textbook soft-power ambition. Surveys show it’s working, China jumped to #3 in 2024 and #2 in 2025 on brand finance’s global soft power index.
> We already have piracy coming back with the Houthis; China didn't join the alliance with other countries, defended their own ships and ignored everyone else.
This is NOT piracy. Under UNCLOS Art. 101, piracy requires acts "for private ends" on the high seas. The Houthi campaign is openly political/armed-conflict behavior, so it doesn’t meet the piracy definition (even though it looks like it to laypeople).
Nonsense. I'm asking for other nations to pay for their own defense. You seem to believe, without any evidence, that if the US Navy can't patrol the oceans, then no one can. Which is such an insane position to take I can't believe you're being anything but flippant or perhaps that you work for the Navy itself.
The "military industrial complex" is absolutely real. You just don't seem to realize that the MIC is into buying software and social media networks these days and not so much carriers and jet fighters. So your spending analysis is flawed and your outcome analysis is wildly out of touch with actual reality.
It's an extremely infantile view. Bought and paid for by the MIC itself. No wonder you can't recognize the reality of it.
No one else is going to because no one else has a deep water navy they're going to use for this. Whereas it's the first thing the US ever did (in the Barbary Wars). Everyone else pays for it by using our currency and trading with us for cheap.
> Bought and paid for by the MIC itself.
One thing you can always use to spot low-trust conspiratorial types is they insist that all bad things are caused by "corporations" and involve money in some vague way, but then they never believe any actual specific information if it conflicts with their vague ideas of evil corporations doing things out there, vaguely.
Interesting. How about we replace the USA (I mostly highlighted the US because that's where this site and the population that use it is based) with the Allies. And being authoritarian isn't about having secretive or highly controlled group (which makes sense given what they were working on and the stakes), but rather the general cultural interpretation of freedom perceived by those who are likely to be doing research. And while you can argue that the USA had authoritarian overtones then as well, the key point is that they weren't as overt as having to greet everyone with good tidings for your supreme leader and keep all your opinions strictly in line with the party's. Notes released from the German scientists (I think Heisenberg comes to mind?) revealed they weren't highly motivated by the regime's philosophy despite supporting it outwardly while those who were the most invested into the Nazi ideology never published much of note.
The Manhattan project succeeded because it was consuming a significant portion of the US GDP at the time, the scientists were forced to live on site with their families and every word they said was monitored.
Projects such as these consume large sums of money no matter who funds them. But the scientists that worked on it were not forced to work on it, a large number of them were refugees from exactly the kind of regime that the OP contrasts the United States with, which at the time, side-by-side would definitely be favorable for the US.
Military projects, especially making the most powerful weapon in history for use in the largest war up to that point, are always done with as much secrecy as is feasible. Living on-site was also practical: the reason the site was as isolated as it was was in part because of secrecy, the families being there was both to improve security and for convenience. Finally, yes, every word they said was monitored. But they were scientists and their families working on top secret machinery of war, which ended up changing the course of history in a significant way, they quite literally ushered in a new age. They knew they were monitored and that this was one part of the price to pay for working on that project.
In contrast with that age: now all our words are monitored, even inane ones that are exchanged between people who would have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Nationalist populism sacrifices academics and intellectuals to create a divide between “the people” and the presumed said “elite,” which is then weaponized for political gain by the actual “elite” (political, economical, etc). These movements rely on emotional resonance and simplified narratives, as opposed to educated, informed discourse.
My crude take on the underlying root cause is resentment, discontent, and similar feelings. Happiness is reality minus expectations, and a whole lot of folks are unhappy life did not turn out how they thought it would.
My take is that it's a bit of a two-way street. "Regular" people resent the elites, yes. But the regular people perceive (correctly) that the elites aren't all that interested in the regular people, either.
If the Democrats had been (and had messaged themselves as being) the party of the working class, they would have drained the swamp that Trump's support comes from. Instead, the message was "if you're working class, and you don't support gay marriage and trans people in sports, and you think that abortion is morally wrong, then you are a moral outcast and we are going to destroy your entire culture." They may have been pro-working-class, but they were pro other things more, and those other things were not big concerns for the working class. And many of the working class took a different stance on the cultural issues than the Democratic leadership.
In fact, the Democrats quit cultivating their base, and so their base walked away from them to someone who at least pretended to care about them.
Nationalist populism harvested that. But there has to be something growing before it can be harvested, and nationalist populism didn't sow the seeds.
Indeed, but that’s why humiliating them is so effective as a response (think South Park’s latest season). Their outlet for the humiliation and resentment they feel is anger and attempts at grasping power, and when that doesn’t lead to the desired outcome, they have no way to cope with the consequences of not reaching the expected status outcome. They demand respect and control, and to deny them that is to deny them their validation and belief of their value. A bully or authoritarian without control is like a dethroned monarch; still convinced of their right to rule, but forced to live in a world that no longer bends to their demands.
This is circumlocution. Who is they? Them? What? You're just reciting words. What dialectic is this? Ok let me try in random generalization speak...
Nothing in physics requires us to buy into the political documents; if the average person isn't owed anything under the rules, no one is.
Either we're science driven where only politics makes someone special and we should then moderate that because in reality, they are not special, just a button pusher, just a signature. Or we're a bunch of idiots living in a trailer park.
Seems you subscribe to the whole "everything is a mystery to politics" when it's just biology self-selecting and we should fucking moderate that. With violence if necessary. Because fuck them. They aren't owed anything either, they're just manipulating politics.
It's somewhat more complicated given that much of the significant work passed on by Klaus Fuchs to the Soviets that they acknowledge was responsible for the first Soviet fission bomb was Fuchs own work .. he shared with the British, the Americans, the Canadians, and the Soviets .. who were all ostensibly allies at the time.
The Soviets had the first flying object in space, the first animal in space, the first human in space, first spacewalk, first woman, first space station. I doubt those plans were all in the US, and if they were, the US didn’t use them.
This is complete moral bankruptcy. You're saying it would be better, rather than developing excellency, to instead become a parasite. I understand that in a world where winning is all that matters, this might be a viable strategy... For a while, until everyone adopts it or you otherwise kill your host. But this is not what being a human is about. I wouldn't want you near anything I care about
Moral bankruptcy is probably a bridge too far here: in weapons, especially with weapons of such power, espionage should be expected. Besides, upon first use you advertise the possibility and that alone will be an enabler, an existential proof that something is possible but you don't know how is a completely different story than groping in the dark while wondering if a thing is possible or not. Any kind of lead will surely be sooner or later be squashed. Note that nobody thought that using the patent system to get IP protection on the Atomic Bomb was a good idea: our friendly ways to establish who gets to make bank on an invention like that would simply fail and would actually pass valuable information to the perceived opponents.
When applied to medicine that same attitude becomes parasitic: you may be able to make much more money by restricting the distribution of the knowledge that could save people or prevent their suffering. This is where Martin Shkreli and other such characters come in to play.
Nice revisionism you got there. It wasn't Americans that discovered it. It was mostly German scientists working in the US after they fled their own more oppressive state.
Do you really think WWII America was a less oppressive state? Do you know much harder it was to get porn back then? Or be a trans? Japanese internment? Food ration cards? Office of Censorship? Smith Act? The draft? Curfews and blackouts?
All that stuff was bad, especially Japanese internment, but this feels like a whole different category. It's a full-blown ceding control of the country to one man.
Lol what? At the time that was done we were drafting people to fight in foreign wars, taxes were extraordinarily high (after having zero income tax just recently) and those weapons were built specifically to support that.
