M. Susan Lindee - Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War

Military machines and sciences are often beautiful, seductive, creative. Submarines, fighter jets, missiles and even tanks can have an enchanting ferocity, a quality sometimes captured in stirring World War II images from the sky of thousand bomber raids or Cold War photos of astonishing nuclear detonations with palm trees waving in the foreground. Contemporary marketing images of drones and fighter jets depict gleaming metal surfaces that are almost sexual in their allure, so-called techno-porn. Many military technologies truly do look amazing, and they can draw us in with their cleverness, their lines, their remarkable capabilities. They are interesting to look at, visually arresting, sometimes fascinating.

At some point my own personal fixation became tanks. I visited the Armed Forces Ordnance Museum when it used to be at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and brought my students there for visits with the unforgettable Dr. William Atwater (now retired but still an active speaker and scholar). Atwater knew a lot about weapons. He would walk us around the old tanks from all over the worldRussian, British, Japanesetelling us how they worked, why they were vulnerable, and how they changed over time. I learned that women drove early Russian tanks because the spaces were too small for men, and I wanted to learn to drive a tank. My students gave me toy tanks presumably intended for male children (certainly not for an adult female scholar with feminist and pacifist inclinations) ( ). But tankspudgy, awkward, and not really all that safedo have their seductive qualities. In a tank, it seems to me, one could move forward through life without risk. Perhaps like other military technologies, they seem to promise security, power, and safety in an unsafe world.

FIGURE 1.At the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Spring 2004, with a group of PhD students enrolled in my class that semester: From left, Christopher Jones, me, and Dr. William Atwater; in rear, Eric Hintz, Perrin Selcer, Damon Yarnell, Roger Turner, and Matt Hersch; and leaning down, Daniel Fehder and Corinna Schlombs. Photo by the author.

This book is a study of the rise of technoscientific war, and beautiful technologies play a key role in the story I tell. This is because they seduce us, pull us in, and often promise more than they can deliver.