New Scientist 9th January 1975. Vol 65 No 931
Before the internet made ‘doom-scrolling’ a thing, the New Scientist issue 931 (9th January 1975) made that possible in print. Revelations about nerve gas and nuclear proliferation cast a shadow over the otherwise optimistic publication. Writing in the comment section, Julian Perry Robinson reported that the recent publication of the patent for VX nerve agent agent described the process that can be used to synthesise the weapon. Surprisingly, the chemical formula had already been published by ICI, Beyer and the Swedish chemical defense laboratories 17 years previously. “VX is the most powerful of the West’s nerve gases, a milligram or so constituting a lethal dose. The two new patents give simple step by step recipes for making it in standard laboratory apparatus using commercial chemicals. No descriptions anything like as detailed have ever been published for VX.”
Robinson expressed surprise that the chemical formula for VX was ever declassified and patented. Anyone in the world can see the documentation of patents, unless they are made secret. He concluded by saying that the only good thing that would come from the revelations was that they might give impetus to renewed negotiations around an international treaty. 50 years ago, it was not a consideration that what we now call (euphemistically) ‘non-state bad actors’ would be interested in VX. It was an unspoken assumption in 1975 that the world order was defined by the relationships between nation states that could negotiate treaties. Terrorists were usually rebellious groups who were against their own government and were not trans- national as they are today. Robinson ends with “It is to be hoped that ratification of the Geneva protocol by the United States later this month will remove the final obstacle to serious negotiations”.
In an addition to the comment piece, the editor Bernard Dixon reported that the United States was looking for a chemical company to manufacture “ton quantities” of non-toxic chemicals which could be combined in artillery shells (after they were fired) to produce the next-generation binary nerve agents. Fortunately, the large-scale deployment of strategic quantities of nerve agents has not occurred.
Page 91 of issue 931 a headline asks, “Will Canadian reactor sales lead to more nuclear bombs?” With the benefit of hindsight we can say, yes. Thomas Land reported that, under the Pierre Trudeau Pierre Trudeau administration Canada had decided that nuclear technology would be sold to countries that had not signed the nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty so long as there were safeguards “in the spirit” of the treaty. 50 years later India has developed a significant nuclear weapons stockpile using plutonium ultimately derived from a Canadian reactor. In response Pakistan has also developed nuclear weapons. Although Canada is a non-nuclear weapons state, it has created a situation where a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could result in the “exchange” of 200 warheads. Let us hope that never happens. The motivation was the prospect of $3000 million in exports.
An altogether more optimistic article by Dr R.S. Bhathak titled” Science museums can be Fun” describes how new science museums such as the Evoluon in Eindhoven were move away from the idea of displaying historical objects to a new concept of education by interaction. In a pre-internet age, a museum with an ever changing programme of interactive exhibits would be a useful addition to the slowly changing school curriculum with decades-old textbooks.
Page 66 of issue 931 has a useful reminder that generation of electricity by nuclear power does use fossil fuel because the mining of uranium uses machinery and vehicles powered by fossil fuels. The article energy analysis of nuclear power has an interesting comparison of a coal fired station and a nuclear-powered station. Over their lifetime the coal powered unit would consume 2200 million tons of coal, versus 400 million tons equivalent for a nuclear station, “assuming that ore containing 3 per cent uranium provided the nuclear fuel.” In today’s terms, nuclear energy is not zero carbon.
Issue 931 has a two-page advertisement by the Digital Equipment Co Ltd proudly announcing that “Graphics computing is no longer a rich man’s tool”. For a mere £8,240 (£62,612 at Nov 2024 prices) you could buy a minicomputer that does graphs on a screen (as opposed to powering a paper plotter). You could buy approximately 225 medium priced laptop computers for the same cost now.
If the cost of computing has fallen enormously in the last 50 years, some things never seem to change. Page 86 of issue 031 has EEC notebook.in which Tony Benn is lambasted for his anti common-market views. “…it was inevitable that Benn, Wigg and Co would make a last desperate attempt to shore up the structure with the finest xenophobic, reactionary-provoking, gut-reacting subject in the whole anti-EEC dogma – the issue of “sovereignty” of the British Parliament…..the EEC Commission is nothing more than a supranational civil service. Though it has the capability to instigate new legislation, when the crunch comes, legislative decisions are made by the Council..it cannot pass any measure if any single country among the Nine objects.”
If a high-profile person, with a ability to argue with this level of conviction, had been in charge of the remain campaign in the 2016 referendum, Britain might still be a member of the E.U.
The Monitor section of issue 931 has two closely related items about the search for a vaccine against cancer. Featuring the work of R. Laufs and H. Steinke in Germany and Robert Gallagher, Robert Gallo and Zaki Salahuddin in America the page concludes “Even if it turns out that leukaemia and perhaps other cancers are the result of infection with a contagious agent, epidemiological evidence indicates that these diseases are not contagious in the usual sense, otherwise cancer would be much more common than it is.” 50 years later the search for a cancer vaccine continues.
Sometimes it feels that history, although not moving in circles, moves forwards in time in a spiral, with the rotation along its axis revisiting things that are similar to the past. An opinion piece on page 87 of issue 931 by Peter Laurie posits that faith in the tendency of developments in information technology to improve society is naïve. Starting his historical overview of information management by government with the role of the Church of England during the time of William of Orange, he described how circular letters to Bishops would set of what the government wanted to be promoted in Sunday sermons.
When the power of the church was eclipsed by newspapers and broadcasting, the control of the flow of information became influenced by a complicated ecology of diverse financial interests and government. “It is not by accident that the Post Office physically handles every broadcast in Britain between studio and transmitter: the government has not forgotten the General Strike, which it won largely by having control of broadcasting while the TUC had only newspapers.”
Differentiating between direct censorship and self-censorship by the internal culture of newspapers, Laurie took a swipe at the National Union of Journalists who he blamed for restricting contributions to print media by non-NUJ members and by implication denying the public a range of opinion. Heaping Government, unions, newspaper owners and broadcasters into one rather disagreeable heap does sound rather like modern conspiracy theorists.
Laurie concluded with: “Consideration of all this makes one wonder what will become of the technologically possible dreams of “free” neighbourhood television, or of telephone clubs using electronic exchanges, which will tend to bypass this elaborate and at times top heavy machinery of control.”
50 years later, with the internet dominated by tech billionaires, algorithms, disinformation and ‘troll farms’ the answer is rather complicated.
No comments:
Post a Comment