A Technological World We Can Live In

In 1966 I graduated from college on the East Coast and immediately headed to the West Coast in quest of history, in two senses. First, I planned to get my Ph.D. in the history of science and technology at Berkeley. Second, and frankly more important, I wanted to go to Berkeley because that was where the historical action seemed to be in 1966. As it turned out, I got more historical action there than was good for me, with the result that I returned east the following spring.

In the meantime, I got to study with Hunter Dupree, and under Hunter I wrote a master's thesis on the response to gas warfare in England during the interwar period. Poison gas was first used in battle in 1915, when chlorine canisters were opened on the front at Ypres, killing five thousand soldiers and sowing panic. Although defensive measures kept poison gas from becoming a decisive weapon in the Great War, the experience haunted the postwar years. It vividly demonstrated, for the first time, that in building a world of complicated and powerful technological systems we are also constructing a world of powerful and ubiquitous weaponry. In the language of interwar England, gas warfare showed the possibility of the "lightning conversion" of civilian industries and products into "uncivilized" weapons.

In the 1920s and 1930s a great effort was made to find a "sound technical scheme" to prevent such conversion. The despairing conclusion, however, was that there was no way to prevent a deadly combination of poison and fire from delivering a "knockout blow" to large cities like London: "the bomber would always get through." The only useful response, then, was civil defense, but in a democracy it was all too easy to focus on providing the sense of security rather than the actuality. The British government overinvested in gas masks and gas-proof shelters for the entire population when it should have provided them only for the city-dwellers most at risk, and should have given equal attention to shelters against nonchemical ordnance.

The research was fascinating, but I had trouble writing a conclusion. In World War II the knockout blows to cities came from conventional--especially incendiary--and atomic weapons, so it seemed that fears of gas warfare had been something of a historical dead end. I submitted a revised version of the thesis to Technology and Culture, which rejected it, no doubt in part because the point was not clear.

I had not thought of this work for years. Then, some weeks ago, driving home from work, I heard a radio commentator discuss the instantaneous conversion of airplanes and letters into weapons of mass destruction on and after September 11, 2001. I almost swerved off the road: I saw the light. The topic of my master's thesis had not been the advent of gas warfare, but the advent of a world where civilian technologies are readily convertible into military ones. I had wanted to tell a story with an upbeat ending: poison gas was not used in World War II, so the anxieties of the interwar period were unwarranted. In fact the story was not at all over, and was much scarier: in the world of 2001, the possibility of converting civilian technologies into weapons is far more widespread (now biological and nuclear weapons are also prime candidates), and those weapons are potentially far deadlier.

Thirty-five years later, I got the point. Disasters have a way of driving home the point. But I must also tell you that as soon as I realized I finally had a conclusion for my thesis, I felt guilty. Here I was thinking about my research and writing, indulging in the intellectual pleasure of solving an old puzzle. It seemed so trivial and selfish.

I would guess that my ambivalence is not untypical. On the one hand, if we ever had any doubts about the importance of our pursuits as students...