Space Race that is why the Cold War was not always bad

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You can tell a lot wrong with the Cold War, but it also contributed to the great technological giant leap.

There was a lot wrong with the Cold War Americans and Russians competed in building hydrogen bombs to be proud of who can more times destroy the earth if I could remember was malicious Freud's theories on masculinity, if you knew what i mean

But the Cold War gave birth space race, which was good so that oversized ego of Russians and Americans may have contributed to something good

I'm sorry if I offended somebody.

technically by technological advancement most wars have contributed something. Now the ammount of death:technology ratio varies from conflict to conflict. The cold war being one of the best if not the best death:technology ratio.

just think, we developed things like steel for the sake of killing each other, just to then see this new thing might have other uses. What developed airplanes? WW1 and 2. The first computers were built to create coordinates for artillery fire. the list goes on and on

The wheel? Fire?

Radar was created to spot enemy planes and send up counter forces. Now it is used for quick heating of our hamburger patties and popping our corn (micro wave overns). And computers are more for commercial use than military use. Our entire system now depends on vast interwoven computer systems.

Bill Whittle has some rather insightful things to say about this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CQQyHBSYyo

ruveyn

And during the Cold War Europe has been mostly at peace, unlike most of the time before that.

It also wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer owned dollars. The innovations that are credited to the military-industrial complex mostly came after the innovations themselves were invented and introduced in the private sector markets. For example computers. Invented (in the U.S) in 1938. Radar invented in Britain in 1920 by private people unfunded by the government. The controllable heavier than air flyers, invented by a pair of bicycle designers and manufactures with their own money. Before there were multi-engine bombers there was the DC-3 build for private airline travel, not military.

And so on....

The military uses what it finds and very rarely invents anything new.

A lot of major scientific advances have been made during wars. Like if WWII had not happened, the atomic bomb would never have been invented. Although that might have been a good thing, so it's probably not the best example.

every cloud has a silver lining.

And technology advances because of wars, hot as well as cold.

Indeed the very thing you're talking about- the space race of the cold war- was made possible by the hot war that preceded it.

Both the soviet and the american space programs were directly build upon hitler's war time rocket program at Penumunde that had the purpose of making "vengence weapons" to hammer the allies.

But I wouldnt recommend us starting a third world war right now-just to jazz up our technology.

Oh yeah, we now have enough nuclear weapons in the world to destroy humanity several times over. I think commercial interests have brought us just as much technology - and not always for the right reasons or with very good results, either. I like technology, but I'm very glad the Cold War is over.

I'm of the mind that knowledge should not be sequestered for either political or commercial reasons. Knowledge belongs to everyone.

That is true. If it were not for war, we might have developed nuclear reactors to generate electricity back in 1940, instead of inventing A-Bombs. The basic truth about the fissioning of U-235 was discovered by Mietner and Hahn in Germany back in the middle 1930s. Fermi and has lads got to the meat of it in 1942.

By the way the Manhattan Project wish initiated BEFORE 7 December 1941. What war?

ruveyn

The rocket boys were in before WWII, They were privately funded,

"I am aiming for the Moon, but sometimes I hit London." Werner von Braun

He would take funding from anyone, but it was not the cheapest path to usable rockets.

Tech moves in back rooms, until funding comes, and the sources of venture capital have other agendas.

Goddard was in in 1928? With liquid fueled. The details were there, before Buck Rogers?

Fifty million dead, the world economy spent on secret weapons, for sixty years, current half of US spending, has not been the best for the economy of building Buck Rogers cities, transportation, using so little of the planet to produce food, that the rest can be maintained as a Park.

It was a bad trade that gave power to the wrong people.

We could be three billion very rich and highly educated by now.

It probably would have just taken a little longer to develop them, is all - given the huge advantage they would give to the first possessor, there would still be considerable incentive to develop them. And personally I think they're a good thing; throughout history, politicians have been perfectly happy to send hundreds of thousands of others to their deaths in wars against other great powers. Having a situation in which the politicians will be among the first to be blown up provides a considerable disincentive for them to start wars.