This was a very interesting post. Thank you for writing it.
I think it’s worth emphasizing that Rotblat’s decision to leave the Manhattan Project was based on information available to all other scientists in Los Alamos. As he recounts in 1985:
the growing evidence that the war in Europe would be over before the bomb project was completed, made my participation in it pointless. If it took the Americans such a long time, then my fear of the Germans being first was groundless.
When it became evident, toward the end of 1944, that the Germans had abandoned their bomb project, the whole purpose of my being in Los Alamos ceased to be, and I asked for permission to leave and return to Britain.
That so many scientists who agreed to become involved in the development of the atomic bomb cited the need to do so before the Germans did, and yet so few chose to terminate their involvement when it had become reasonably clear that the Germans would not develop the bomb provides an additional, separate cautionary tale besides the one your post focuses on. Misperceiving a technological race can, as you note, make people more likely to embark on ambitious projects aimed at accelerating the development of dangerous technology. But a second risk is that, once people have embarked on these projects and have become heavily invested in them, they will be much less likely to abandon them even after sufficient evidence against the existence of a technological race becomes available.
Thanks Pablo for those thoughts and the link—very interesting to read in his own words.
I completely agree that stopping a ‘sprint’ project is very hard—probably harder than not beginning one. The US didn’t slow down on ICBMs in 1960-2 either.
We can see some of the mechanisms by which this occurs around biological weapons programs. Nixon unilaterally ended the US one; Brezhnev increased the size of the secret Soviet one. So in the USSR there was a big political/military/industrial complex with a stake in the growth of the program and substantial lobbying power, and it shaped Soviet perceptions of ‘sunk costs’, precedent, doctrine, strategic need for a weapons technology, identities and norms; while in the US the oppossite occured.
This was a very interesting post. Thank you for writing it.
I think it’s worth emphasizing that Rotblat’s decision to leave the Manhattan Project was based on information available to all other scientists in Los Alamos. As he recounts in 1985:
That so many scientists who agreed to become involved in the development of the atomic bomb cited the need to do so before the Germans did, and yet so few chose to terminate their involvement when it had become reasonably clear that the Germans would not develop the bomb provides an additional, separate cautionary tale besides the one your post focuses on. Misperceiving a technological race can, as you note, make people more likely to embark on ambitious projects aimed at accelerating the development of dangerous technology. But a second risk is that, once people have embarked on these projects and have become heavily invested in them, they will be much less likely to abandon them even after sufficient evidence against the existence of a technological race becomes available.
Thanks Pablo for those thoughts and the link—very interesting to read in his own words.
I completely agree that stopping a ‘sprint’ project is very hard—probably harder than not beginning one. The US didn’t slow down on ICBMs in 1960-2 either.
We can see some of the mechanisms by which this occurs around biological weapons programs. Nixon unilaterally ended the US one; Brezhnev increased the size of the secret Soviet one. So in the USSR there was a big political/military/industrial complex with a stake in the growth of the program and substantial lobbying power, and it shaped Soviet perceptions of ‘sunk costs’, precedent, doctrine, strategic need for a weapons technology, identities and norms; while in the US the oppossite occured.