🚀 go-pugleaf

Jerry Anderson asks:

> Would the world be a better place if we were carpet-bombing Baghdad with
> B-52s full of dumb bombs?  Would the world be a better place if our F-177-A
> Nighthawk stealth fighters were not able to destroy Scud missiles in their
> stores?  Would we as a nation be better off if there were no spy satellites
> to help us find the Scuds, or to help us verify nuclear peace treaties?

The world might be a better place if there were no Scud missiles to blow
up in the first place; if we didn't know how to make nuclear bombs, we
wouldn't need nuclear peace treaties.  We are involved in a spiralling
need to make new weapons to defend ourselves from the old weapons we
were selling last year.  Perhaps the only way out is to jump out and say
no, I won't build any smarter bombs.  Perhaps we can't get out now.

But these questions don't just fall in the lap of computer people, and
I'm not sure that computer people have any more responsibility to work
or not to work on these projects for moral reasons.  In the end, I think
it is a matter of changing the attitudes of our governments that
spending on defence is not a good investment (here in NZ, it isn't
really a problem, the government doesn't spend any money on anything :-).  
Then we might slow the spiral down and start spending our time working 
out neat ways of keeping each other alive, and happy.

Steve Cassidy