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Entry: The Arsenal Of Time Link: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/the_arsenal_of_time#25933 Post contents: My point, already stated, is that some components of technological advance cannot be willed into existence. Once nations go to war, the tendency to direct finite material resources at solving military problems competes with the desire to develop better arms. Blessed with the resources of a continent and secure behind two oceans, America could ,and did ,simultaneously expand production and research, albeit we still had to scour the wartime world for materials- somebody will eventually wring a doctoral thesis out of Paul Nitze's first real job-- forget uranium or rubber --our boys in Brazil and Africa had to chase theirs around to keep tantalite, carbonado, electronic quartz and the rest of the Right Stuff out of Speer's pipeline. The career of Gustave Herz's ( as in Gigaherz) staunchly patriotic physicist grandson affords a cautionary example of the will-and-reality disconnect internalizing the Hitlerian brain drain. Asked to brief Admiral Canaris on metal "isotopes", he didn't get as far as uranium. Told of how the density difference between iron 56 and iron 58 might shift several hundred tons of metal into the armor belt of treaty-compliant fixed tonnage pocket battleships, Canaris plucked the promising vacuum tube designer from radar development and consigned him to the office where Russian headhunters found him still busily writing memoranda in 1945. He got home from Siberia in 1964. End of story, but though Napoleon warned against interrupting opponents making mistakes, it would be unsporting not to throw a weasel to the whigwhackers-- Lente cursus vi scientorum currite qui bellum magnopere desiderat. Sent at: 2008 07 24