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Thank you.

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It's a real pleasure to be here.

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I last did a TEDTalk

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I think about seven years ago or so.

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I talked about spaghetti sauce.

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And so many people, I guess, watch those videos.

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People have been coming up to me ever since

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to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce,

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which is a wonderful thing in the short term --

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(Laughter)

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but it's proven to be less than ideal

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over seven years.

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And so I though I would come

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and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me.

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(Laughter)

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The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make.

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And so I thought I would tell a story

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about someone

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who made one of the most precious objects

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of his era.

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And the man's name is Carl Norden.

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Carl Norden was born in 1880.

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And he was Swiss.

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And of course, the Swiss can be divided

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into two general categories:

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those who make small, exquisite,

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expensive objects

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and those who handle the money

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of those who buy small, exquisite,

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expensive objects.

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And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp.

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He's an engineer.

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He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich.

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In fact, one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin

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who would go on

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to break small, expensive, exquisite objects.

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And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl.

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And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word.

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He wears three-piece suits;

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and he has a very, very small, important mustache;

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and he is domineering

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and narcissistic

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and driven

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and has an extraordinary ego;

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and he works 16-hour days;

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and he has very strong feelings about alternating current;

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and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness;

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and he drinks lots of coffee;

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and he does his best work

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sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours

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in complete silence

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with nothing but a slide rule.

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In any case,

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Carl Norden emigrates to the United States

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just before the First World War

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and sets up shop on Lafayette Street

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in downtown Manhattan.

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And he becomes obsessed with the question

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of how to drop bombs from an airplane.

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Now if you think about it,

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in the age before GPS and radar,

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that was obviously a really difficult problem.

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It's a complicated physics problem.

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You've got a plane that's thousands of feet up in the air,

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going at hundreds of miles an hour,

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and you're trying to drop an object, a bomb,

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towards some stationary target

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in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud cover

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and all kinds of other impediments.

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And all sorts of people,

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moving up to the First World War and between the wars,

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tried to solve this problem,

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and nearly everybody came up short.

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The bombsights that were available

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were incredibly crude.

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But Carl Norden is really the one who cracks the code.

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And he comes up with this incredibly complicated device.

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It weighs about 50 lbs.

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It's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight.

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And it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings

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and gadgets and gauges.

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And he makes this complicated thing.

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And what he allows people to do

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is he makes the bombardier take this particular object,

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visually sight the target,

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because they're in the Plexiglas cone of the bomber,

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and then they plug in the altitude of the plane,

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the speed of the plane, the speed of the wind

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and the coordinates

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of the target.

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And the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb.

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And as Norden famously says,

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"Before that bombsight came along,

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bombs would routinely miss their target

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by a mile or more."

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But he said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight,

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he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel

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at 20,000 ft.

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Now I cannot tell you

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how incredibly excited

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the U.S. military was

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by the news of the Norden bombsight.

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It was like manna from heaven.

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Here was an army

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that had just had experience in the First World War,

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where millions of men

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fought each other in the trenches,

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getting nowhere, making no progress,

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and here someone had come up with a device

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that allowed them to fly up in the skies

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high above enemy territory

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and destroy whatever they wanted

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with pinpoint accuracy.

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And the U.S. military

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spends 1.5 billion dollars --

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billion dollars in 1940 dollars --

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developing the Norden bombsight.

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And to put that in perspective,

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the total cost of the Manhattan project

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was three billion dollars.

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Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight

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as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project

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of the modern era.

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And there were people, strategists, within the U.S. military

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who genuinely thought that this single device

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was going to spell the difference

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between defeat and victory

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when it came to the battle against the Nazis

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and against the Japanese.

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And for Norden as well,

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this device had incredible moral importance,

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because Norden was a committed Christian.

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In fact, he would always get upset

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when people referred to the bombsight as his invention,

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because in his eyes,

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only God could invent things.

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He was simply
the instrument of God's will.

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And what was God's will?

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Well God's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war

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be reduced to as small an amount as possible.

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And what did the Norden bombsight do?

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Well it allowed you to do that.

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It allowed you to bomb only those things

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that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb.

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So in the years leading up to the Second World War,

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the U.S. military buys 90,000

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of these Norden bombsights

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at a cost of $14,000 each --

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again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money.

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And they trained 50,000 bombardiers on how to use them --

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long extensive, months-long training sessions --

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because these things are essentially analog computers;

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they're not easy to use.

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And they make everyone of those bombardiers take an oath,

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to swear that if they're ever captured,

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they will not divulge a single detail

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of this particular device to the enemy,

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because it's imperative the enemy not get their hands

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on this absolutely essential piece of technology.

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And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane,

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it's escorted there by a series of armed guards.

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And it's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it.

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And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards.

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It's never allowed to be photographed.

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And there's a little incendiary device inside of it,

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so that, if the plane ever crashes, it will be destroyed

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and there's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it.

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The Norden bombsight

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is the Holy Grail.

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So what happens during the Second World War?

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Well, it turns out it's not the Holy Grail.

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In practice, the Norden bombsight

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can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft.,

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but that's under perfect conditions.

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And of course, in wartime,

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conditions aren't perfect.

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First of all, it's really hard to use -- really hard to use.

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And not all of the people

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who are of those 50,000 men who are bombardiers

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have the ability to properly program an analog computer.

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Secondly, it breaks down a lot.

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It's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys

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and gadgets and ball-bearings,

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and they don't work as well as they ought to

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in the heat of battle.

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Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations,

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he assumed that a plane would be flying

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at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes.

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Well in a real war, you can't do that;

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you'll get shot down.

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So they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds.

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And the Norden bombsight doesn't work as well

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under those conditions.

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But most of all,

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the Norden bombsight required the bombardier

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to make visual contact with the target.

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But of course, what happens in real life?

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There are clouds, right.

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It needs cloudless sky to be really accurate.

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Well how many cloudless skies

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do you think there were above Central Europe

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between 1940 and 1945?

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Not a lot.

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And then to give you a sense

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of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was,

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there was a famous case in 1944

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where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna, Germany.

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And the chemical plant comprised

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757 acres.

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And over the course of 22 bombing missions,

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the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs

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on this 757 acre chemical plant,

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using the Norden bombsight.

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Well what percentage of those bombs

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do you think actually landed

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inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant?

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10 percent. 10 percent.

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And of those 10 percent that landed,

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16 percent didn't even go off; they were duds.

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The Leuna chemical plant,

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after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war,

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was up and running within weeks.

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And by the way, all those precautions

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to keep the Norden bombsight out of the hands of the Nazis?

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Well it turns out

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that Carl Norden, as a proper Swiss,

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was very enamored of German engineers.

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So in the 1930s, he hired a whole bunch of them,

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including a man named Hermann Long

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who, in 1938,

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gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the Nazis.

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So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war --

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which also, by the way, didn't work very well.

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(Laughter)

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So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight?

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Well because we live in an age

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where there are lots and lots

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of Norden bombsights.

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We live in a time where there are all kinds

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of really, really smart people

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running around, saying that they've invented gadgets

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that will forever change our world.

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They've invented websites that will allow people to be free.

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They've invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing

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that will make our world forever better.

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If you go into the military,

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you'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well.

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If you go to the Pentagon, they will say,

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"You know what, now we really can

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put a bomb inside a pickle barrel

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at 20,000 ft."

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And you know what, it's true; they actually can do that now.

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But we need to be very clear

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about how little that means.

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In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War,

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the U.S. military, the air force,

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sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles

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to the Iraqi desert

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equipped with these five million dollar cameras

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that allowed them to see the entire desert floor.

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And their mission was to find and to destroy --

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remember the Scud missile launchers,

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those surface-to-air missiles

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that the Iraqis were launching at the Israelis?

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The mission of the two squadrons

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was to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers.

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And so they flew missions day and night,

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and they dropped thousands of bombs,

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and they fired thousands of missiles

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in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge.

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And after the war was over, there was an audit done --

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as the army always does, the air force always does --

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and they asked the question:

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how many Scuds did we actually destroy?

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You know what the answer was?

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Zero, not a single one.

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Now why is that?

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Is it because their weapons weren't accurate?

279
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Oh no, they were brilliantly accurate.

280
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They could have destroyed this little thing right here

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from 25,000 ft.

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The issue was they didn't know where the Scud launchers were.

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The problem with bombs and pickle barrels

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is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel,

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it's knowing how to find the pickle barrel.

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That's always been the harder problem

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when it comes to fighting wars.

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Or take the battle in Afghanistan.

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What is the signature weapon

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of the CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan?

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It's the drone. What is the drone?

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Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight.

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It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision.

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And over the course of the last six years

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00:12:02,000 --> 00:12:05,000
in Northwest Pakistan,

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the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles,

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and it's used those drones

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to kill 2,000 suspected

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Pakistani and Taliban militants.

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Now what is the accuracy of those drones?

301
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Well it's extraordinary.

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We think we're now at 95 percent accuracy

303
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when it comes to drone strikes.

304
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95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed, right?

305
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That is one of the most extraordinary records

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in the history of modern warfare.

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But do you know what the crucial thing is?

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In that exact same period

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that we've been using these drones

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with devastating accuracy,

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the number of attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks,

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against American forces in Afghanistan

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has increased tenfold.

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As we have gotten more and more efficient

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in killing them,

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they have become angrier and angrier

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and more and more motivated to kill us.

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I have not described to you a success story.

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I've described to you

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the opposite of a success story.

321
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And this is the problem

322
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with our infatuation with the things we make.

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We think the things we make can solve our problems,

324
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but our problems are much more complex than that.

325
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The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have,

326
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it's how you use the bombs you have,

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and more importantly,

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whether you ought to use bombs at all.

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There's a postscript

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to the Norden story

331
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of Carl Norden and his fabulous bombsight.

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And that is, on August 6th, 1945,

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a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay

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flew over Japan

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and, using a Norden bombsight,

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dropped a very large thermonuclear device

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on the city of Hiroshima.

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And as was typical with the Norden bombsight,

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the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft.

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But of course, it didn't matter.

341
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And that's the greatest irony of all

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when it comes to the Norden bombsight.

343
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the air force's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight

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was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb,

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which didn't need a bombsight at all.

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Meanwhile, back in New York,

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no one told Carl Norden

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that his bombsight was used over Hiroshima.

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He was a committed Christian.

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He thought he had designed something

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that would reduce the toll of suffering in war.

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It would have broken his heart.

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(Applause)