Sex, Bombs and Burgers

by Peter Nowak

  That said, when it comes to invisibility, the British military isn’t waiting for the technology to creep in slowly. In 2007 the U.K. Ministry of Defence and its contractor QinetiQ announced it had successfully made tanks invisible, albeit not with metamaterials but with more pedestrian technology. Using video cameras and projectors mounted on the tank itself, QinetiQ researchers fooled onlookers into completely missing the vehicle by projecting its surroundings onto its surface, an advanced form of camouflage. “This technology is absolutely incredible. If I hadn’t been present I wouldn’t have believed it,” said a soldier present at the test. “I looked across the fields and just saw grass and trees, but in reality I was staring down the barrel of a tank gun.”23 British military experts expect such tanks to be in the field by 2012—which, from the way things are going, means they could see action in Afghanistan or Iraq.

  And yes, it is deliciously ironic that British scientists, who worked so hard to make things visible with radar sixty years ago, are now putting so much effort into making them disappear from view.

  The Pornography of War

  It’s a paradox that the longer the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq go on, the more technological advances there will be. In a way, the more death and destruction the West visits on the Middle East, the more economic benefits it will reap, since the weapons of today are the microwave ovens and robot cars of tomorrow. Like hunger and poverty, the desire to test out new technologies is a major driving force behind such conflicts. The more politically minded would-be terrorists see this unfortunate cause and effect as a form of imperialism, so they fight it by joining al Qaeda and the Taliban. For the general population, it must also rankle. Rather than creating the inventions, as they’ve done for centuries, the people are instead having foreign technologies tested on them. It’s a far cry from the Islamic Golden Age of science and reason.

  Such is the way of war, however. When two opponents are evenly matched, there is less likelihood of one side trying anything radical; while a crazy new technology may promise ultimate victory, it can also bring disaster. Far-out new technology is usually only deployed after it has been thoroughly tested, or when one side has an apparent advantage. The Second World War is a perfect example. Nazi Germany only started deploying its futuristic weapons, like the experimental and highly volatile V-2 rockets and jet fighters, when the tide of the war had turned against it, while the United States only dropped the atomic bomb once victory was a foregone conclusion. The longer a war goes on, however, the less apparent it is that one side or another has an advantage, which is certainly the case in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  The United States government, however, still believes it has the edge in those conflicts, so it continues the steady rollout of new technologies. For the immediate future, American defence spending will focus on smaller, more flexible and more personal technologies. Small, light robots will be a priority and individual soldiers will get a lot of new equipment to help them find terrorists who have melted into the urban landscape. Some of this technology will be biological, like the DARPA experiments into areas such as regeneration and heightened cognition, while some of it will be oriented around communications and sensors.

  Since the first conflict with Iraq in the early nineties, we in the West have come to believe that technology is a key factor in deciding who wins a war. Images from the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam painted horrific pictures: soldiers suffering in disease-ridden trenches or military hospitals with their limbs blown off, bodies being carried off the battlefield, dirt-smeared faces. Recent conflicts, however, have all but erased those images and replaced them with scenes of laser-guided bombs, futuristic-looking planes, bloodless and victimless destruction, green-tinged battles of lights. War has become sanitized, safer, almost fun. While troops in the Second World War had to sing to each other to raise morale, soldiers in Iraq can now while away their leisure time playing Xbox games. To those of us who are insulated from the day-to-day horror, war is more like a game— or at least it is sold as such, if the Air Force’s video-game-heavy website is any indicator.

  This sanitization and video-game-ification has affected the general public. With his smart bomb video, Norman Schwarzkopf gave rise to the “war porn” phenomenon, which has grown in lockstep with the rise of the web. YouTube is rife with videos depicting American tanks, jets and drones blowing up Iraqi and Taliban targets, many set to rollicking heavy-metal soundtracks. The same is true in reverse, with the website full of videos of insurgents setting off explosives and blowing up American forces. While only a small subset of the population enjoys watching such footage on a regular basis, the reaction of many to a video of a Reaper destroying a building tends to be, “Oh, neat.” Never mind the people inside that building who have just been obliterated.

  I believe this is how we subconsciously want to deal with war. We know it’s happening and we know the real human cost, but we prefer to think of it as a necessity that produces “neat” results. That has certainly been the case in the Middle Eastern desert, where the death of thousands of innocents over the past twenty years has indirectly supplied us with more comfort and convenience than we know.

  CONCLUSION

  The Benevolence of Vice

  Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind, and finds the readiest response.1

  —AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT

  There’s a scene in the movie Fight Club where the camera pans around Ed Norton’s apartment and labels pop up on screen to describe each piece of furniture, telling the viewer what it is and how much it costs. That’s kind of what the world has been like for me during the course of writing this book, only I’m not seeing an Ikea catalogue come to life, but rather the connections to war, sex and food. I see them everywhere I turn, or I end up suspecting connections and looking them up. I’m surrounded by them in my home—a very typical home, I like to think, which means that you’re probably surrounded by them too.

  In the living room, there’s the plasma television, which saw its origins as a computer display. In their early days, computers were the exclusive domain of the military. My TV’s manufacturer, Panasonic, known as Matsushita in Japan, was shut down briefly after the Second World War when the Allies realized it had profited throughout the conflict by building everything from radios to bicycles for the Japanese government. The DVD/CD player sitting under the TV, plus all of my discs that play in it, are based on lasers, the first of which was created by Hughes Research Laboratories, a defence contractor, back in the late fifties. Lasers are everywhere now, but like computers they were once primarily meant for military use. There’s also the fact that the whole home entertainment market got a healthy kick-start from porn. Back when Hollywood was busy suing VCR makers, porn producers were pumping out videotapes. It’s not too crazy to suggest that if they hadn’t done so, the home video market, and therefore DVD players, may never have developed.

  Next to the DVD player sit perhaps my two favourite pieces of electronics, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. For both, we can thank Ralph Baer and his defence contractor employer, Sanders Associates. Every time I sit on the couch and blow people up online while playing Call of Duty, I can’t help but think of the irony. I don’t think Vint Cerf, when he was helping to launch the ARPAnet, imagined that’s what people would eventually be using it for. (Or maybe he did?)

  Speaking of my couch, it is stuffed with memory foam, a substance designed by NASA in the sixties to improve aircraft cushions. The mattress in the bedroom also contains it. Then there’s the air conditioner in the window, which owes a good deal of its history to Willis Carrier, an American inventor who perfected his cooling methods during the Second World War when he came up with a system that could simulate the freezing, high-altitude temperatures found on military planes. After the war, he used the techniques to help launch a boom in residential air conditioners. I’m glad he did because the summer months can get really sticky here in Toronto.

  In my office, just abou
t everything is derived from war and sex. The computer is perhaps the best example. Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got their start as summer interns at Hewlett-Packard, which by the seventies was a big supplier of computers and electronics to the military. In fact, the duo left and started Apple because HP didn’t want to get into consumer products. That’s ironic now, given that HP is the biggest personal computer manufacturer in the world. Of course, what’s a computer without an internet connection? As we’ve seen, that’s a technology that was military made and porn perfected. Heck, even the mouse was created with DARPA funding.

  Over on the wall hangs a whiteboard on which I scribble my thoughts and to-do lists. The main ingredient in it is melamine, a plastic that, like many plastics, was first put to wide use during the Second World War as dishware aboard navy ships. Recently, melamine acquired a bad rap because some Chinese food makers sneaked it into baby formula. The plastic shows up in chemical tests as a protein, so it’s the perfect filler for unethical food makers looking to cut corners. Yum ... plastic!

  Just about everything in the bathroom is made by large conglomerates that also have significant food operations. The Dove soap and Q-tips are from Unilever, which counts Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Lipton drinks and Ragu spaghetti sauce among its many food brands. The Pantene shampoo, Crest toothpaste, Gillette razors and shaving gel, Oral-B toothbrush and floss are all from Procter & Gamble, which also makes Pringles potato chips and Folgers coffee. It’s a little discomforting to know that the same companies that are formulating my shampoo are also concocting what I put in my belly. I’m also a little wary of using my Right Guard deodorant now that I know where it comes from. The brand is owned by Henkel, which, like many German companies, used concentration-camp prisoners as labour during the Second World War. The product name is a little off-putting knowing that.

  The kitchen, meanwhile, may as well be a lab. There is, of course, the microwave, supplemented by the ancient Westinghouse stove and refrigerator. Westinghouse is a company rich in military history, having designed radar systems, jet engines and scores of other war technologies. All the cleaners and detergents under the sink are made by chemical companies that became wealthy supplying the military. Even the humble aerosol can, which houses air fresheners, spray paints and other fun substances, was derived from that most fearful of war weapons, the flame thrower. The food itself is a cornucopia of technology, from the frozen fries and strawberries in the fridge to the retort pouches of soup on the shelves, not to mention the chemicallyladen Little Debbie’s chocolate Swiss rolls I love so much. Even the fresh apples have a thin veneer of wax to make them look shinier, while the bananas and tomatoes have been artificially ripened with ethylene gas (don’t worry, it’s harmless—these fruits produce the gas naturally anyway).

  That’s my home, in a nutshell. I suspect it’s pretty typical, a real-world example of the comforts that have evolved from the technology of humanity’s vices. It’s proof that technology is neutral—it’s what we do with it that matters.

  The Good That Bombs Do

  The atomic bomb, the most destructive invention in history, is a good example of technology’s dual nature. The bombs dropped on Japan during the Second World War killed hundreds of thousands and instilled a chill that caused millions to live in fear for decades. But the technology behind the weapon has evolved over the years to the point where it now promises to heal as well as harm.

  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about eighty kilometres west of San Francisco, has been researching nuclear weapons for more than half a century. The lab was founded in 1952, in the midst of the Cold War, to augment the work being done at the Los Alamos base in New Mexico, where the original bomb was created. Physicist Ernest Lawrence, a key figure in the building of the weapon, had set up a lab at the Berkeley campus of the University of California modelled on the process used in the Manhattan Project. His multidisciplinary team of scientists pursued large-scale research, leading to some early successes including the creation of small nuclear warheads that could be launched from submarines, more powerful computers and strides in fusion energy.

  In the sixties Livermore scientists broadened their research into peaceful uses of nuclear power and the effects of radiation on humans, and in the seventies they expanded into lasers. Today, the lab is one of the pre-eminent laser facilities in the world, prompting some to joke that LLNL doesn’t actually stand for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory but rather Lasers, Lasers ‘n’ Lasers. In 1992, after the United States stopped nuclear testing, Livermore, Los Alamos and the Sandia lab in New Mexico were charged with overseeing the Stockpile Stewardship Program, an ongoing project to maintain the safety and reliability of the country’s nuclear arsenal.

  Livermore has produced a plethora of weapons technology. But, as with all such science, there has been a considerable upside as well—the lab has churned out beneficial mainstream technologies by the truckload. Dyna, a collision-modelling software program, is just one example. Developed in 1976, the program gave scientists a way to measure how bombs respond to ground impacts, or how the weapons’ nose cones react when they hit. This sort of data is vital in munitions design because engineers need to know how the weapons will explode against different surfaces such as concrete, sand or metal. Early versions of the software did simple numerical analyses, but as the eighties came and computers acquired graphical interfaces, these evolved into visual representations. It didn’t take Livermore scientists long to realize the possible commercial applications of the software, and in 1980 they began sharing it with industry.

  Car companies were the first to jump on board. Because actual car-crash simulations are expensive—up to $1 million or more each—the companies were keen to try out the virtual equivalent. “They realized that they can do practical crash analysis using a simulation tool,” says Ed Zywicz, one of Livermore’s Dyna programmers.2 As the software’s code is available for free, it spread quickly through the industry and has been in perpetual development since, with improvements shuttling back and forth between the lab and companies. So are carmakers contributing to building weapons by giving code improvements back to Livermore? “Definitely,” Zywicz says. “There’s give and go in both directions.”

  The software, and variations such as the French-designed Radios, is now being used by just about every company that needs to predict collisions. It is used by train makers, by Boeing to see how bird impacts affect jet engines and even by Coors to simulate beer-can mishaps on production lines. It’s hard to gauge how many lives Dyna has saved, but it must be many.

  Livermore’s biggest contribution to the civilian sector has been in genetics, a field it got into naturally when it began exploring the effects of radiation on human physiology. In the early nineties, scientists at the lab made a huge breakthrough with the invention of “chromosome painting,” a process that allows researchers to label individual chromosomes with fluorescent “tags,” thereby making them more visible. The technology, which was licensed and made available to industry relatively cheaply—one “painting kit” for twenty tests sold for just $400 in 1992—greatly simplified the identification of disease and genetic defects. Through the nineties, scientists used kits to identify the genes behind a host of health issues, including muscular dystrophy, kidney disease, migraines and dwarfism, which helped in the development of many treatments.

  Livermore’s genetic research was a key factor in launching the Human Genome Project, an initiative to map the full human DNA sequence. Scientists at the lab began mapping out chromosome nineteen, one of the twenty-three pairs humans have, in 1987. When the worldwide project was launched in 1990, Livermore was given the responsibility of mapping out three full chromosome pairs. The project was completed in 2000, ahead of schedule, and the results are only now starting to be understood. This research has deepened our fundamental understanding of human biology, and its potential applications are vast. In the years ahead, scientists may use the knowledge that stems from it to stamp ou
t many diseases, with the ethical debates about whether they should do so sure to follow.

  Today, Livermore sprawls over a 333-hectare campus and employs more than seven thousand people, half of whom are scientists, with an annual budget of about $1.5 billion. Researchers there are now promising to revolutionize treatment of that ageold scourge of humanity: cancer. With all sorts of lasers and other beams at their disposal, they have developed a cancer treatment method that uses protons instead of x-rays. The technology was first used to determine the safety of nuclear missiles by scanning their insides with proton beams, but researchers eventually discovered the same trick could be applied to humans.

  The problem with x-rays, according to George Caporaso, who leads the lab’s proton project, is that they aren’t very accurate when blasting cancer cells. If you hit someone with an x-ray beam, a lot of the rays are absorbed by the surface of the skin while others penetrate beyond the cancer cells, deeper into the body than desired. Proton beams can be modulated so that they enter the body at a low frequency, spike in intensity just as they hit the cancer cells, then quickly wane afterward. The difference, which is “revolutionary, not evolutionary,” is akin to using a scalpel rather than a baseball bat to slice away cancer cells, Caporaso says.3 “I’m not a medical physicist, but from what I know about it, it is paradigm-changing.”

  In 2007 Livermore commercialized the technology through a licensing agreement with TomoTherapy, a Wisconsin-based cancer treatment company. The proton-accelerator machines are still huge and expensive—they’re as big as a basketball court and cost upward of $200 million, which means that as of 2009, there were fewer than thirty treatment centres worldwide and therapy was generally only available to the wealthy. Caporaso and his team are working to bring the size and price tag down over the next few years. They’re aiming for a machine that is only two metres long and costs $20 million, which will make proton cancer therapy available to the general public.