World War I Vickers FB5, One Of The First Planes To Carry A Machine Gun
Photo Source: Public Domain

One has to wonder who was the first person that thought of turning airplanes into weapons? People just can't resist creating machines to use to kill each other.In the beginning of World War I it was "let's drop a grenade out of the side", or maybe it didn't even start with that much technology? Maybe somebody was flying along and they had a stone or rock in the airplane to hold down their paperwork and tried to drop that on the head of an enemy soldier below them? I don't think anybody can answer this question, but weaponizing planes certainly did evolve, and today one airplane with a nuclear weapon can take out an entire city. Can you imagine what someone in World War I would have thought if you told them that this would be possible someday? They would have probably rushed you off to the booby hatch.

When we think about the time period when we first acquired nuclear weapons, doesn't it seem strange that a technology this advanced came to a people that were so far behind? What I mean to say is that you would think that there would be some progression leading up to this. Why wasn't the rest of our technology that advanced? This invention seemed far in excess of where our technology was in World War II. We had learned how to split the atom using a stone axe, so to speak. When you look back on this advancement it is almost like finding a ballpoint pen from the Stone Age. It really doesn't seem to make that much sense. Sure we had the world's top scientists working on this project for a couple of years, but given the state of technology, you wouldn't have thought that they would have had enough knowledge to accomplish this task, because technology is something that is built upon other technology. Some may argue and say that many little steps were taken over the years before the invention of nuclear weapons that guaranteed their invention by the mid-1940s, but then I have to say why weren't we further ahead in other areas? Again some would say that was because we didn't have huge teams working on these problems. They might even point to the Germans to show how far ahead they were in their weapons, which almost everybody agrees was about 20 years ahead of the allies.

French Calvary. They Look Pretty, But Do They Look Advanced Enough For A World Possessing Nuclear Weapons?
Photo Source: GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version

Is this really a valid argument? The Germans, although advanced, did not invent the first jet engine. Some give that credit to the ancient Greeks and claim that the invention of the aeolipile in the first century was really the first jet engine. The aeolipile was a rotating steam powered ball with one nozzle at each end. An actual running gas turbine engine ran successfully in 1903 and was built by a Norwegian engineer named Jens William Ægidius Elling. In 1921 of French patent was issued to Maxime Guillaume for a gas turbine to power an aircraft. This engine was called the axial flow turbojet. In 1928 a cadet in the RAF college named Frank Whittle submitted his idea for the creation of a turbojet engine to his superiors. The reason that I mention all of this, and believe me there were far more people involved, is to show you that anybody could have created a jet plane if they really wanted to, most of the technology was there for the entire world to enjoy. I believe the Germans just wanted it more than anyone else and put their resources where their ideas were. It was a matter of perfecting something, not so much inventing it.

When we entered the nuclear age, where were all those spaceships we were promised? Where was the domed houses with the portholes and the flying cars , the two-way wrist radios? According to all the comic books of the day, this is the way things should have looked when atomic power was discovered, but it didn't look that way at all. People were still riding around in crude automobiles that had no amenities such as power steering, power brakes, automatic transmissions, power windows, or air conditioning. Heck many of the cars in those days didn't even have radios in them. Shouldn't we have been flying around with backpacks and maybe traveling back and forth to Mars to visit some friends by then? Maybe that was the problem, maybe we were the cavemen that were handed automatic weapons and didn't have the intelligence to really control them? One thing I think that is quite obvious, and that is that we were certainly not ready to possess nuclear weapons. We just weren't advanced enough either socially, culturally, or mentally. and it is a miracle that we all have not blown ourselves up by now, and left the Earth a smoking mass of radioactive ashes.

B-52. Easy To Remember Because Its First Flight Was In 1952
Photo Source: USAF

There have been countless movies that have stated as their theme that we were not prepared to possess nuclear weapons. The problem with this train of thought is that if you have a powerful military they are going to want every weapon you could ever create no matter how dangerous it is. Look at what we have done to ourselves. In the beginning we thought we needed nuclear weapons to win World War II and save a lot of lives, but what was the outcome of creating nuclear weapons? The outcome was that we are in more danger now than we have ever been since the history of the earth. As time goes by, sooner or later someone is going to get their hands on nuclear material and build a bomb. I am not talking about other countries such as Russia red China, because they already have many nuclear weapons and are responsible enough not to use them. The problem is that individuals, or rogue nations with dictators might eventually get nuclear weapons and they won't care about exploding them. There is also the ever dangerous radical religious people who believe that killing millions of people is what God wants. I guess in the long run you have to say that by creating the nuclear weapons to be used in World War II, we have endangered the entire world.

We had no way of knowing this in 1945, or did we? The government is always conducting studies, to see what the effects of different things are on society. Is it possible that they conducted a study on what would happen if they built and deployed a nuclear weapon? I truly don't know, but I do know that from 1940 through 1996 the United States spent $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and their related programs. I am talking about 1996 dollars, not 2010 dollars. This was money that could have been used for social programs and if it was we might not have been in the mess that we are in today. Out of all this money it was not the actual explosives that cost the most, it was the system that was designed to safeguard and launch nuclear weapons and these systems accounted for 86% of the expenditures. We actually went from 1400 nuclear weapons in 1953 to 24,000 in 1961. There is a certain irony connected with all of this, it is the fact that there are now conventional weapons that are as powerful as small nuclear weapons and they are a lot cheaper, and easier to maintain.

Did we discover an advanced technology far too early? Would we have been better able to handle it 100 years down the road, or maybe several hundred years? If we hadn't had the technology gap that seem to come about after many of the inventions of the ancient Greeks that were never followed through with, we might have been several hundred years more advanced than we are now and we might have been better able to handle having nuclear capability. Maybe we would have even been smart enough to know that we should not have had it at all and not invented it?