Science, Government, War

Something of a dilemma

Science and Government and A Postscript to Science and Government by C. P. Snow, and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? by Richard Feynman

The second world war was an event not like any other. Perhaps you remember it. Vast fleets of bomber aircraft would scramble from aerodromes across France and southern England, would assemble in large squadrons, and would fly heedless, often slow and laden, hundreds of thousands of miles. All to hit targets their best bomb-sights could not make it easy to hit, and to be raked by ground-based anti-air fire (which was not all that effective) and air-based interception by fighters (which was considerably more so). It was an immense endeavour, supplying the bombers. It took thousands of tonnes of bombs to ensure that the raiders would hit a single serious, significant target. And some targets were very significant.

What C. P., later Lord, Snow, wonders in his two illuminating publications is whether all of this was built on good, solid scientific evidence. Whether the central claims of the advocates of mass bombing, including Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, truly stacked up. If a lot of lives and a lot of productive man hours in the factories were wasted, misallocated, given up to the angels and opportunity cost.

Snow at the very least indicates that as always with science and government, once a policy is agreed upon, it takes herculean determination and strength of character to hold a contrary view. Let alone to change course. Once the policy of ‘dehousing’ – Lindemann’s phrase, the destruction of the homes of German workers, thus rendering them less industrially productive – was agreed upon, it would have taken a very strong mind, a very strong will, to suggest anything else. To suggest, for instance, redirecting those aircraft which would ordinarily have been attacking ball-bearing plants in, for example, Schweinfurt to the front instead. Some people must have, Snow writes, but from the evidence of the outcomes of those discussions, it seems almost as if no one ever did.

The bombing continued, largely against the industrial areas and their accompanying residential populations. It was hard in those days to differentiate the one from the other (and considered by Cherwell and others undesirable to try). We can learn quite a lot from this.

All of it was based on faulty numbers – false assumptions of how effective the bombing was, how many killed, how many made homeless, how much industrial production was affected by individual raids. But the allies never knew that. So with ‘kill counts’ in, for example, the Vietnam War and the war in Ukraine today. Relying on numbers kept by people who are incentivised for those numbers to be impressive – it always produces bad policy.

As the Ukraine war shudders on and Western European governments alternately throw up their hands in dismay and refuse to look at the concrete results of their own failed policies, it’s worth wondering why defence departments continent-wide appear to be staffed by lower-third minds, by liars and cheats and failures, by people who do not know how to do their jobs and hate the people who try to help them. Who pull their thinning hair out at the failures and bloat of procurement but conspire endlessly to sabotage efforts towards reform. Who have pensions to think of, the only battles they want to fight being internal and domestic ones.

This is a wake-up call for Europe, they say, before turning over and very doggedly going back to sleep.

Here’s what we learn, too, about bad decisions. Bad decisions always survive the intercession of bureaucracy because the goal of bureaucracy is to preserve, resuscitate and burnish bad ideas. If bureaucracy did not exist, good ideas would still exist. They wouldn’t need the additional help. Thus the real skill, the real genius, of bureaucracy is the support it affords to the worst ideas.

Once the bureaucrats have intervened, they can survive for many years – all contrary evidence swatted away, all contrary analysts swept aside, demeaned, their research rejected, their bona fides made the stuff of laughter, their good faith investigated, their motives suspected, their telephones tapped, their movements followed, their work withdrawn from journals, their job offers rescinded, their futures closed down. It happens today; it is happening now.

It takes strength to believe in the truth, to propagate the truth, in the face of so much dishonesty. Officialdom can only produce dishonesty. It is the language officialdom speaks, the only currency it understands.

Richard Feynman worked in a brief period of time where the greatest impediment to one’s progress in science was a lack of upper class social mores – not thinking too independently. Luckily for his successors, if they are creeps and bureaucratic climbers, that has turned right around in the years since. Feynman was, in his own telling, more likely to be pulled up on questions of etiquette than he was to be damned for asking questions, for being a curious character. And the scientists of his generation, when given immense resources and fine leadership, they built the atomic bomb. But that’s all over now. It’s all over now, indeed.