No Consolation For Kalashnikov | Issue 59 | Philosophy Now - 0 views
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The legendary AK 47 assault rifle was invented in 1946 by Mikhail Kalashnikov. It was issued to the armies of the old Warsaw Pact countries and has been used in many conflicts, eg by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, and even this year by Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq.
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Whatever interpretation one puts on those two conflicts, almost no-one sane would condone the use of the AK 47 in killing civilians, for instance Shiites in Iraq.
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Mikhail Kalashnikov has come to have some doubts about his invention. He told The Times in June 2006, “I don’t worry when my guns are used for national liberation or defence. But when I see how peaceful people are killed and wounded by these weapons, I get very distressed and upset. I calm down by telling myself that I invented this gun 60 years ago to protect the interests of my country.”
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Weapons research produces in the first place not guns, bombs, bullets and planes and the various command, control and communications hardware and software needed to use these things, but plans, blueprints and designs – knowledge and know-how. Unless these useful plans are lost or destroyed, they can be implemented or instantiated many times over, and thus project unforeseen into the future.
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If any one person invented the atomic bomb, it was Leo Szilard. It seems he had the idea, and he made great efforts from 1935 until 1942, when the Manhattan Project was set up, to get the research done that would show whether an atomic bomb was possible; how to make one; and if need be, to provide the basis for actually making one.
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This perception was greatly strengthened when Hahn and Strassmann discovered nuclear fission in Berlin in 1938. So Szilard, worried about the Nazis getting an atomic bomb, thought that the Allies should do the research to see if and how one could be made, in order to deter or otherwise prevent the Nazis from using one.
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As far as Szilard and a good number of other atomic scientists were concerned there was no longer a rationale for the bomb project. Szilard, Philip Franck and others wrote The Franck Report in June 1945, which among other things advocated a demonstration of the power of the atomic bomb by dropping one on an uninhabited island. The Franck Report was ignored.The project was not abandoned, of course, and two of its products were used on Japanese cities, to kill mostly Japanese civilians.
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The point of this example is to show how scientists lose control of their work when they take part in weapons research – they lose control of it in other settings besides, but this case is the most problematic.
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One way out of the dilemma is to refuse to do war research under any circumstances. I’d like to endorse this option, especially as it does not imply that we should judge Kalashnikov, Szilard, Watson-Watt and other well-intentioned researchers harshly, since we can argue that the dilemma has only become evident recently.
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Another possibility is to deny that weapons research must take place within history, as a good Marxist might put it. That is, as I would put it: Perhaps weapons research is not an activity that must take account of historical contingencies.
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We must acknowledge that there is no such thing as an inherently defensive weapon, something that can only be used for the morally acceptable purpose of responding against an aggressor. Doing weapons research for defensive systems is therefore not morally acceptable, as any weapons might feasibly be used as part of an unjust war of aggression.
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Kalashnikov’s preferred description of what he did when he designed the AK 47 is something like “providing the means for liberation,” or “defending my country,” not “providing the means to kill innocents.” However, he acknowledges that the latter description applies to his situation equally well. Nevertheless, J might try to portray her actions as something like “provide the means for deterrence,” the idea being that what she is helping to create is intended to deter, and hence prevent harm rather than cause it.
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You might say that this is utopian, and it would never work, but then it might console Kalashnikov, who, after all, was a Marxist, and perhaps also a utopian.