Michael Kelly Quotes

This was in the middle of the Cold War and the political leaders had to face the fact that their major military nuclear weapons, as a practical matter, could not be used. The result was not only too destructive but retaliation would produce MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction.

After the First World War, the United States and other countries were very conscious of the possibility of foreign arms sales encouraging and facilitating war and aggression. Therefore, arms shipments were very limited. The exception allowed tyrannical governments often to suppress, and often kill, their own citizens. By the end of the 20th century, the United States would sell arms to almost anyone and was the largest arms supplier in the world. Much of the flip flop of position on arms exports was caused by the fact that other nations were shipping arms and getting the jobs and profits associated with those exports and almost anyone in the world with money could buy arms. So the United States allowed its arms manufacturers to compete in this lucrative business to all but a few arms embargoed nations with whom we were having international difficulty.

There were many who thought that the Russians would view the Mutual Security Act as aggressive and they might respond with some kind of aggressive retaliation and this could lead to war. Others felt that containment would reduce the likelihood of war.

Later, he felt that the offense had become almost invincible. See {626741}. Tesla was one of the great American immigrant scientists. He found in America the kind of intellectual and operational freedom that did not exist in the rigid, monarch-controlled, Austro-Hungarian Empire. He developed patents and techniques that formed the technological bases of radio, telephone long distance, TV, cell phones, Wi Fi, just to name a few. Most important he was Thomas Edison’s great nemesis. Edison invented DC electric generators that could power factories or entire streets in a neighborhood. Tesler invented and developed AC electrical technology which could power entire cities and he could move electricity over long distances which Edison could not. Tesler was one of the first scientists to conceive of and try to implement “Big Science” where there were huge capital investments to develop machines and systems to do what had never been done before—philosophically like the CERN Hadron Collider. Tesler even convinced a large corporation to finance the construction of a massive building and tower so he could experiment with the wireless transmission of electricity. However, as the industrial democracies have learned, Big Science can only be funded by governments and it often takes sever working in consort to afford the huge investment that is required. In Tesler’s era, the federal and state governments did not fund scientific research so his work was not only technically ahead of his time but also conceptually. He anticipated most of the problems and need for a national power grid that was challenging America even at the beginning of the 21st century.

The speaker was specifically referring to the situation in Manipur India where there were several warring factions fighting for control.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. His view was that the quality of statesmanship at the time was bellicose and imperialistic. We had annexed Puerto Rico and Cuba and then occupied the Philippines. He argued that if we did not have the bombastic and expansionist statesmen like McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, we would not need so much armament to back them up.

Some think that for Europe, Nuclear Weapons performed this function.

Not only did the Radio fail to inhibit war, but Marconi completely missed the way demagogues like Hitler and Mussolini would use propaganda via the radio to induce war in their societies. They did not justify war; they made it a national duty. Media inventors seem to have an overly optimistic view of the invention’s effect. See {635261}.

Military robots including drones are very inexpensive as military hardware goes. And like other hi-technology devices, the prices go down steadily as volume grows. Almost any government can afford to buy military robots from the U. S., France, Russia or Israel. As a result, there can be many more nations who can have a modern military, even if small. Thereafter, they can conduct modern warfare readily.