Quote:
Originally Posted by covingtoncat73
“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.” Kurt Vonnegut - 1970 Bennington College Address
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Your Vonnegut quote really struck me, as I have been grinding my way through Richard Overy's "The Bombing War" this week. In the epilogue, to illustrate how scientific research and methods was becoming integral to modern warfare, Overy cited a report on bombing late in the war:
"A report produced in February 1945 by the British Air Warfare Analysis Section, ‘On a Problem in Maximising the Expectation of Damage to a Target’, showed that with ‘N’ bombs dropped with modulus ‘h’ the outcome would be ‘H = (1−qn)ραρ’"
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Again, thanks so much for the Vonnegut quote. You and Richard Overy have inspired me to have another try at reading Slaughterhouse-5.