Fabricated Planet

[Steelhead]

I want to thank Daniel Bump for excavating the passages from Norbert
Wiener's autobiography and pointing out the intriguing article on the
"decimation of German mathematics." (More on that later.)

I particularly appreciated Wiener's denunciation of the Communist
witch-hunts. That section took courage to write in 1955, as Owen Lattimore
and many others could attest.

Two prefatory comments. Nothing in this rebuts my original assertion that
Wiener's worldview, as expressed in The Nation article on nukes, and in his
oft cited treatise on cybernetics, The Human Use of Human Beings, resembles
in many ways the thinking patterns of the Nazi "scientists."

Second, many of the passages Bump cites raise as many questions as they
answer. For example, Wiener titles, in the "second volume" of his
autobiography, "I am a mathematician" with an innocent aire that utterly
belies the untold miseries unleashed upon the planet by this occupation. He
also shows a chilling indifference toward the homocidal purpose of the
Manhattan Project.

I will take issue with two of Bump's assertions. First that Wiener had
nothing to do with the development of nuclear power. This is false.

According to records from the former Atomic Energy Commission, Norbert
Wiener had two contracts with the federal government to work on the
development of nuclear power from 1953 through 1957. One of the contracts
was with the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Washington.  Wiener's
task was to help develop the fast-flux reactor at Hanford designed *solely*
to generate plutonium for nuclear weapons.

The early Hanford, as you are probably aware, produced the plutonium used
by "scientists" in the Manhattan Project, for the first nuclear test in New
Mexico, and for the atomic bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The fast-flux breeder reactor was envisioned for the production of hydrogen
class weapons of unimaginable destructiveness.

The Hanford contract was deemed classified information for more than forty
years and only became available in February 1993 when 190,000 pages of
documents charting the lethal history of the plant were released as the
result of a lawsuit filed against the Department of Energy by HEAL, a group
of citizens--many suffering from thyroid cancer--living downwind from the
"State's" plutonium factory.  The Hanford reactors not only contributed to
the horrific and senseless deaths of 100s of thousands of Japanese, but
also to cancers in tens of thousands of residents of Idaho, Oregon and
Washington as a result of more than 40 years of releases of radioactive
materials into the air and the Columbia River (the cooling water for the
plant was diverted from the Columbia into the plant and then back into
this, then the world's most productive salmon river, loaded with Zinc-65,
Arsenic-76, Phosphorous-32, Sodium-24, and Neptunium-239) including
Iodine-131, Ruthenium-103 and 106, Strontium-90, Plutonium-239, and
Cerium-144. (Only some kinda math whiz would come up with and keep straight
all these damn numbers!)

Second, Wiener was a scientist, not a humanitarian. Perhaps, these two
categories are occasionally compatible. But not in Wiener's case. His
vision is of a cold world dominated by human machines, and machine humans,
where nature has been eliminated and replaced with human constructions. A
fabricated planet run by a society of automatons, designed to function with
a machine-like efficiency. Slothful oddballs need not apply.

Flip/flop, just as in V.

For Wiener, and many other "scientists," nuclear power was the new Dynamo
that would keep the species (though likely dramatically mutated) running
for, as he puts it, millions of years. Why this is a good idea, natch, is
never addressed.

Steelhead