I’ve just finished Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. It’s about Project Mercury, America’s first manned spaceflight program, which paved the way for Gemini and Apollo.

Too much of it focused on the relationships between the astronauts than I liked, though I wouldn’t have enjoyed it more if it went harder on the technical details. I wish that I knew enough physics and engineering to appreciate its details about propulsion. I don’t, and instead I most enjoyed reading about the environment that produced technology. (This is also how I felt when I read The Idea Factory, a book about the inventions that came out of Bell Labs.)

What’s most striking is how easy it was then to run experiments with unpredictable consequences. It’s almost unbelievable to read about everything that the American government was willing to try in order to beat the Soviets. Reciting anything like a precautionary principle to a scientist at that time would probably provoke incredulity and contempt. The sixties were a time when people won funding and permission for trying out really radical things, on a scale that’s hard to grasp today. Here are some examples of what I mean, by no means an exhaustive list of interesting projects of that time.

1. The rockets that put the first American astronauts into orbit were modified intercontinental ballistic missiles. NASA made some tweaks to the Redstone and Atlas missiles, stuck astronauts on top of them, and shot them up. That was how Alan Shepard entered space in the first Mercury flight in 1961. Someone thought that you can send astronauts into space and bring them back to earth on missiles designed to deliver warheads, and they were right.
2. The sound barrier was broken by an experimental rocket plane in 1947. The X-1 reached Mach 1.06 by being drop-launched from the bomb bay of a B-29 Superfortress. The X-planes managed to enter space, and the Air Force endeavored (unsuccessfully) to get them to be considered alternatives to NASA’s missions. Someone thought that you can break the sound barrier by launching a plane from the air rather than from the ground, and they were right.
3. Then I learned that scramjets take this to a whole new extreme. Scramjets are drop-launched from about 50,000 feet, travel at around Mach 5 (~4,000 miles per hour), and can theoretically reach Mach 20. If I understand them correctly, scramjets don’t exactly have engines; instead they suck in a huge amount of oxygen, and “ram” that into a combustor to produce thrust. They travel fast enough that you can get from New York to London in less than an hour. Experimental flights were conducted in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and a patent for its design was first submitted in 1964. Alas it doesn’t look like there hasn’t been much more research and experiments with scramjets for the last few decades.
4. Project Orion, an investigation into nuclear propulsion, was started in the late ‘50s. Physicists thought that you can travel through space by continuously blowing up atomic bombs behind a spacecraft, which would be protected from these explosions by a copper- or lead-tinted plate. This was however mostly theoretical, and no experiments were ever conducted.
5. Speaking of nuclear explosions, perhaps the single best representative of the spirit of the times is the Starfish Prime test. In 1962, James Van Allen announced to the world his discovery of a layer of radiation by the earth’s magnetic field. The military promptly decided to detonate a thermonuclear bomb inside it. It was around 1960, when the military had begun conducting nuclear tests in high altitudes and outer space. Starfish Prime involved detonating a 1.45 megaton bomb (100 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb) in what’s now known as the Van Allen radiation belt. The detonation temporarily altered the shape of the belt, destroyed a lot of satellites, and created an artificial aurora borealis that could be seen from New Zealand to Hawaii. Only later did we learn more about the belt and discover, for example, that it plays a crucial role in shielding us from solar winds. Here’s James Fleming, a science historian, on Starfish Prime: “This is the first occasion I’ve ever discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow it up…” and no less with a hydrogen bomb.

It wasn’t just the government and the military that conducted experiments. Ordinary people more broadly were impacted by innovations from the ‘60s. Microwave ovens were becoming commercially available, Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution produced food for millions, people debated the merits of massive civil engineering projects.

The precautionary principle is now being invoked to stop people from drilling a hole in the ground to force up natural gas. Imagine learning about these innovations with the attitude of today. “Bring into our homes a machine that heats food by means of electromagnetic radiation? We need decades to study the effects of this.”  “Break the sound barrier? Why do we need to break stuff?” “Engineer new types of crops? Let’s stick with what’s natural.”

We shouldn’t detonate thermonuclear bombs in something we immediately discover. Still it feels like we’ve lost something important. In the ‘60s, people thought about how something should work in theory, designed experiments, and ran them to to test their ideas. Their successes were the bases for new inventions, and ordinary people were able to accept them for commercial use.

With so many leaps in technology what a thrill it must have been to live in the sixties and look forward to the things to come. But something changed, and it feels like we’re no longer so eager to run experiments or accept even not-so-radical inventions. Commercial flight hasn’t gotten faster for decades. Our kitchens haven’t changed much in 50 years. The most successful commercial applications of military technology, namely GPS and the internet, both came from the ‘60s. What a pity that the moon landings in 1969 marked not a new era for human ingenuity, but a capstone for the old one.

Herman Kahn is the kind of eccentric whom you no longer publicly see. In his capacity as an analyst at the RAND Corporation, he made a vast effort to get the public to consider his ideas: What happens next after thermonuclear exchange.

The thought of nuclear war was mostly too grim to behold, and Kahn acknowledged that head on by writing a book called Thinking About the Unthinkable. With morbid humor he challenged people to think about deterrence strategies, mineshaft shelters, and the hydrogen bomb. He loved debate, and he reached out to the public with “twelve-hour lecture, split into three parts over two days, with no text but with plenty of charts and slides.”

Kahn was the main inspiration for Dr. Strangelove. He was supposed to have the highest I.Q. ever recorded, and he made real contributions in shaping U.S. nuclear strategy through his commentary and analysis. He was accused by his colleagues and by the public of treating the annihilation of millions with far too much levity than the subject deserved. Some of the things he said have been really shocking, but it’s a bit of a shame that we don’t really see brilliant oddballs like him much in public, to listen to his ideas and then debate them.

Here are a few interesting facts about him, from two sources. First, Fred Kaplan’s book Wizards of Armageddon, which features him for a chapter:

Brodie and Kauffman approached the business of first-use and counterforce strikes uneasily, as acts of desperation among a terrible set of choices. Kahn, on the other hand, dived in eagerly.

At one point, Kahn had calculations on bomb designs plugged into all twelve high-speed computers then operating in the United States.

Calculations suggested that even with a purely countermilitary attack, two million people would die, a horrifyingly high number… (But) as Kahn phrased it, only two million people would die. Alluding almost casually to “only” two million dead was part of the image that Kahn was fashioning for himself, the living portrait of the ultimate defense intellectual, cool and fearless… Kahn’s specialty was to express the RAND conventional wisdom in the most provocative and outrageous fashion possible.

Along with an engineer at RAND, Kahn figured out on paper that such a Doomsday Machine was technologically feasible.

In the early-to-mid 1960s, Kahn would work out an elaborate theory of “escalation, ” conceiving 44 “rungs of escalation” from “Ostensible Crisis” to “Spasm of Insensate War,” with the rungs in between including “Harassing Acts of Violence,” “Barely Nuclear War,” “Justifiable Counterforce Attacks” and “Slow-Motion Countercity War.”

Kahn felt that having a good civil-defense system made the act of going to the nuclear brink an altogether salutary thing to do on occasion.

More than 5,000 people heard (his lectures) before Kahn finally compiled them into a 652-page tome called On Thermonuclear War. It was a massive, sweeping, disorganized volume, presented as if a giant vacuum cleaner had swept through the corridors of RAND, sucking up every idea, concept, metaphor, and calculation that anyone in the strategic community had conjured up over the previous decade. The book’s title was an allusion to Clausewitz’s On War… Published in 1960 by the Princeton University Press, it sold an astonishing 30,000 copies in hardcover, quickly became known simply as OTW among defense intellectuals, and touched off fierce controversy among nearly everyone who bore through it.

Strangelove, the character and the film, struck insiders as a parody of Herman Kahn, some of the dialogue virtually lifted from the pages of On Thermonuclear War. But the film was also a satire of the whole language and intellectual culture of the strategic intellectual set. Kahn’s main purpose in writing OTW was “to create a vocabulary” so that strategic issues can be “comfortably and easily” discussed, a vocabulary that reduces the emotions surrounding nuclear war to the dispassionate cool of scientific thought. To the extent that many people today talk about nuclear war in such a nonchalant, would-be scientific manner, their language is rooted in the work of Herman Kahn.

And from Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker:

In his day, Kahn was the subject of many magazine stories, and most of them found it important to mention his girth—he was built, one journalist recorded, “like a prize-winning pear”—and his volubility.

He became involved in the development of the hydrogen bomb, and commuted to the Livermore Laboratory, near Berkeley, where he worked with Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Hans Bethe. He also entered the circle of Albert Wohlstetter, a mathematician who had produced an influential critique of nuclear preparedness, and who was the most mandarin of the rand intellectuals. And he became obsessed with the riddles of deterrence.

For many readers, this has seemed pathologically insensitive. But these readers are missing Kahn’s point. His point is that unless Americans really do believe that nuclear war is survivable, and survivable under conditions that, although hardly desirable, are acceptable and manageable, then deterrence has no meaning. You can’t advertise your readiness to initiate a nuclear exchange if you are unwilling to accept the consequences. If the enemy believes that you will not tolerate the deaths of, say, twenty million of your own citizens, then he has called your bluff. It’s the difference between saying, “You get one scratch on that car and I’ll kill you,” and saying, “You get one scratch on that car and you’re grounded for a week.”

Kubrick was steeped in “On Thermonuclear War”; he made his producer read it when they were planning the movie. Kubrick and Kahn met several times to discuss nuclear strategy, and it was from “On Thermonuclear War” that Kubrick got the term “Doomsday Machine.”

Kubrick’s plan to make a comedy about nuclear war didn’t bother Kahn. He thought that humor was a good way to get people thinking about a subject too frightening to contemplate otherwise, and although his colleagues rebuked him for it—“Levity is never legitimate,” Brodie told him—he used jokes in his lectures.

Kahn died, of a massive stroke, in 1983. That was the year a group headed by Carl Sagan released a report warning that the dust and smoke generated by a thermonuclear war would create a “nuclear winter,” blocking light from the sun and wiping out most of life on the planet. Kahn’s friends were confident that he would have had a rebuttal.

Thiel delivered lectures on startups at Stanford in 2012. They’re all online here.

These are superbly interesting. I’ve decided to record here my personal favorite parts.

Class 1: The Challenge of the Future

We might describe our world as having retail sanity but wholesale madness. Details are well understood while the big picture remains unclear.

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Michael Lewis said that he wrote Liar’s Poker so that fewer idealistic college kids would dream of working on Wall Street. That is not to be believed. He makes Wall Street seem far too glamourous.

He could have filled the book with the miseries of working at your desk for 16 hours a week. Instead he made it about working in London, about making fun of trainees in hilarious ways, and about making piles and piles of cash. You get amazing stories here. Who can forget the amazing put-down: “Equities in Dallas!”

There are so many vivid characters. You feel that they’re clever, and mean, but not necessarily evil. Most of them seem superbly intelligent.

Lewis is a dazzling writer. Here are my favorite lines.

To succeed on the Salomon Brothers trading floor a person had to wake up each morning “ready to bite the ass off a bear.”

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