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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

But they didn't.

An Australian nuclear scientist working for the UK Rutherford (New Zealander) labs | Tube Alloys | MAUD program told them how to.

It took a while to convince the US scientists who were mainly interested in making big hot piles for power.

The actual building of atomic weapons (Trinity, Fat Man and Little Boy) took place under a fully authoritarian ultra secret State directed militarily controlled program that cost a significant chunk of national GDP.

The example you chose appears to be both incorrect and the very opposite of whatever point you wanted to make.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Oliphant

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The jingoist dream of America is falling apart. It must seem, to some who are very dependent on it existing, as if the sky actually is falling. Perhaps it's just a good opportunity for them to study history that has been untouched by North American propaganda.

Anyways, we have the Internet, I'm not sure it matters _where_ innovations are created anymore. It certainly does not seem to be stopping China on any level.

America is going to have to give up the "World Police" (a.k.a. The Military Industrial Complex) badge and move into it's relative political middle age with a little more care and aplomb than the last 6 decades have allowed for. The haze of WW2 is far behind us now.

You're asking for sea shipping to stop working because naval piracy is going to come back. The "military industrial complex" isn't real and isn't a significant part of the economy (military spending as % US GDP has continually fallen over time), but the Navy patrolling the entire world's oceans for free has been real until now.

> You're asking for sea shipping to stop working because naval piracy is going to come back.

That's a huge exaggeration. Who would commit naval piracy in the current age? Somalia, with their little boats and AK-47s? China already has a bigger fleet than the US and can easily take on the burden of securing trade routes, since they are the biggest beneficiary.

China isn't going to secure anyone /else's/ trade routes, only theirs. They only protect their own ships in those routes too.

You are mistaken. If the US decided to give up its role, there would be a void, a void that anyone who filled it would gain soft power from. China would be very interested in taking the place of the US in securing global trade routes, because doing so would not only provide soft power but also signal that China had replaced the US as the world’s hegemon.

China (at least its current incarnation with Xi) doesn't care about soft power and thinks the only reason anyone else tries it is they're overly sentimental losers. That's why they have that wolf warrior diplomacy program where they just had diplomats insult everyone.

We already have piracy coming back with the Houthis; China didn't join the alliance with other countries, defended their own ships and ignored everyone else.

> China (at least its current incarnation with Xi) doesn't care about soft power

That’s just wrong. Xi has explicitly ordered cadres to "tell China’s story well"[1] and build "discourse power" that’s textbook soft-power ambition. Surveys show it’s working, China jumped to #3 in 2024 and #2 in 2025 on brand finance’s global soft power index.

1. https://www.iseas.edu.sg/articles-commentaries/iseas-perspec...

> We already have piracy coming back with the Houthis; China didn't join the alliance with other countries, defended their own ships and ignored everyone else.

This is NOT piracy. Under UNCLOS Art. 101, piracy requires acts "for private ends" on the high seas. The Houthi campaign is openly political/armed-conflict behavior, so it doesn’t meet the piracy definition (even though it looks like it to laypeople).

Nonsense. I'm asking for other nations to pay for their own defense. You seem to believe, without any evidence, that if the US Navy can't patrol the oceans, then no one can. Which is such an insane position to take I can't believe you're being anything but flippant or perhaps that you work for the Navy itself.

The "military industrial complex" is absolutely real. You just don't seem to realize that the MIC is into buying software and social media networks these days and not so much carriers and jet fighters. So your spending analysis is flawed and your outcome analysis is wildly out of touch with actual reality.

It's an extremely infantile view. Bought and paid for by the MIC itself. No wonder you can't recognize the reality of it.

No one else is going to because no one else has a deep water navy they're going to use for this. Whereas it's the first thing the US ever did (in the Barbary Wars). Everyone else pays for it by using our currency and trading with us for cheap.

> Bought and paid for by the MIC itself.

One thing you can always use to spot low-trust conspiratorial types is they insist that all bad things are caused by "corporations" and involve money in some vague way, but then they never believe any actual specific information if it conflicts with their vague ideas of evil corporations doing things out there, vaguely.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat...

Interesting. How about we replace the USA (I mostly highlighted the US because that's where this site and the population that use it is based) with the Allies. And being authoritarian isn't about having secretive or highly controlled group (which makes sense given what they were working on and the stakes), but rather the general cultural interpretation of freedom perceived by those who are likely to be doing research. And while you can argue that the USA had authoritarian overtones then as well, the key point is that they weren't as overt as having to greet everyone with good tidings for your supreme leader and keep all your opinions strictly in line with the party's. Notes released from the German scientists (I think Heisenberg comes to mind?) revealed they weren't highly motivated by the regime's philosophy despite supporting it outwardly while those who were the most invested into the Nazi ideology never published much of note.

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