WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.000 Thank you. 00:00:02.000 --> 00:00:04.000 It's a real pleasure to be here. 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:06.000 I last did a TEDTalk 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:10.000 I think about seven years ago or so. 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:13.000 I talked about spaghetti sauce. 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:16.000 And so many people, I guess, watch those videos. 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:18.000 People have been coming up to me ever since 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:20.000 to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce, 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:23.000 which is a wonderful thing in the short term -- 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:25.000 (Laughter) 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:27.000 but it's proven to be less than ideal 00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:29.000 over seven years. 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:31.000 And so I though I would come 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:34.000 and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:36.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:39.000 The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make. 00:00:39.000 --> 00:00:41.000 And so I thought I would tell a story 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:43.000 about someone 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:45.000 who made one of the most precious objects 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:47.000 of his era. 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:50.000 And the man's name is Carl Norden. 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:52.000 Carl Norden was born in 1880. 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:54.000 And he was Swiss. 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:56.000 And of course, the Swiss can be divided 00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:58.000 into two general categories: 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:00.000 those who make small, exquisite, 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:02.000 expensive objects 00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:04.000 and those who handle the money 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:07.000 of those who buy small, exquisite, 00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:09.000 expensive objects. 00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:12.000 And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp. 00:01:12.000 --> 00:01:14.000 He's an engineer. 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:17.000 He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich. 00:01:17.000 --> 00:01:20.000 In fact, one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:22.000 who would go on 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:26.000 to break small, expensive, exquisite objects. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:26.000 --> 00:01:29.000 And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl. 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:32.000 And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word. 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:34.000 He wears three-piece suits; 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:39.000 and he has a very, very small, important mustache; 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:41.000 and he is domineering 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:43.000 and narcissistic 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:45.000 and driven 00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:47.000 and has an extraordinary ego; 00:01:47.000 --> 00:01:50.000 and he works 16-hour days; 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:53.000 and he has very strong feelings about alternating current; 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:57.000 and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness; 00:01:57.000 --> 00:01:59.000 and he drinks lots of coffee; 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:01.000 and he does his best work 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:03.000 sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours 00:02:03.000 --> 00:02:05.000 in complete silence 00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:07.000 with nothing but a slide rule. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:09.000 In any case, 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:12.000 Carl Norden emigrates to the United States 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:14.000 just before the First World War 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:16.000 and sets up shop on Lafayette Street 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:18.000 in downtown Manhattan. 00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:20.000 And he becomes obsessed with the question 00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:23.000 of how to drop bombs from an airplane. 00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:25.000 Now if you think about it, 00:02:25.000 --> 00:02:28.000 in the age before GPS and radar, 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:30.000 that was obviously a really difficult problem. 00:02:30.000 --> 00:02:32.000 It's a complicated physics problem. 00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:35.000 You've got a plane that's thousands of feet up in the air, 00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:37.000 going at hundreds of miles an hour, 00:02:37.000 --> 00:02:40.000 and you're trying to drop an object, a bomb, 00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:42.000 towards some stationary target 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:45.000 in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud cover 00:02:45.000 --> 00:02:47.000 and all kinds of other impediments. 00:02:47.000 --> 00:02:49.000 And all sorts of people, 00:02:49.000 --> 00:02:51.000 moving up to the First World War and between the wars, 00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:53.000 tried to solve this problem, 00:02:53.000 --> 00:02:55.000 and nearly everybody came up short. 00:02:55.000 --> 00:02:57.000 The bombsights that were available 00:02:57.000 --> 00:02:59.000 were incredibly crude. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:59.000 --> 00:03:02.000 But Carl Norden is really the one who cracks the code. 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:05.000 And he comes up with this incredibly complicated device. 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:07.000 It weighs about 50 lbs. 00:03:07.000 --> 00:03:11.000 It's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:13.000 And it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:16.000 and gadgets and gauges. 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:19.000 And he makes this complicated thing. 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:21.000 And what he allows people to do 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:25.000 is he makes the bombardier take this particular object, 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:27.000 visually sight the target, 00:03:27.000 --> 00:03:31.000 because they're in the Plexiglas cone of the bomber, 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:34.000 and then they plug in the altitude of the plane, 00:03:34.000 --> 00:03:37.000 the speed of the plane, the speed of the wind 00:03:37.000 --> 00:03:39.000 and the coordinates 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:41.000 of the target. 00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:45.000 And the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb. 00:03:45.000 --> 00:03:48.000 And as Norden famously says, 00:03:48.000 --> 00:03:50.000 "Before that bombsight came along, 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:52.000 bombs would routinely miss their target 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:54.000 by a mile or more." 00:03:54.000 --> 00:03:57.000 But he said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, 00:03:57.000 --> 00:03:59.000 he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel 00:03:59.000 --> 00:04:01.000 at 20,000 ft. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:03.000 Now I cannot tell you 00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:05.000 how incredibly excited 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:07.000 the U.S. military was 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:10.000 by the news of the Norden bombsight. 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:12.000 It was like manna from heaven. 00:04:12.000 --> 00:04:14.000 Here was an army 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:16.000 that had just had experience in the First World War, 00:04:16.000 --> 00:04:18.000 where millions of men 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:20.000 fought each other in the trenches, 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:22.000 getting nowhere, making no progress, 00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:26.000 and here someone had come up with a device 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:28.000 that allowed them to fly up in the skies 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:30.000 high above enemy territory 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:32.000 and destroy whatever they wanted 00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:34.000 with pinpoint accuracy. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:36.000 And the U.S. military 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:38.000 spends 1.5 billion dollars -- 00:04:38.000 --> 00:04:41.000 billion dollars in 1940 dollars -- 00:04:41.000 --> 00:04:43.000 developing the Norden bombsight. 00:04:43.000 --> 00:04:46.000 And to put that in perspective, 00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:48.000 the total cost of the Manhattan project 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:50.000 was three billion dollars. 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:53.000 Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight 00:04:53.000 --> 00:04:57.000 as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project 00:04:57.000 --> 00:04:59.000 of the modern era. 00:04:59.000 --> 00:05:02.000 And there were people, strategists, within the U.S. military 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:04.000 who genuinely thought that this single device 00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:06.000 was going to spell the difference 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:08.000 between defeat and victory 00:05:08.000 --> 00:05:10.000 when it came to the battle against the Nazis 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:12.000 and against the Japanese. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:12.000 --> 00:05:14.000 And for Norden as well, 00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:17.000 this device had incredible moral importance, 00:05:17.000 --> 00:05:19.000 because Norden was a committed Christian. 00:05:19.000 --> 00:05:21.000 In fact, he would always get upset 00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:24.000 when people referred to the bombsight as his invention, 00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:26.000 because in his eyes, 00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:28.000 only God could invent things. 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:30.000 He was simply the instrument of God's will. 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:32.000 And what was God's will? 00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:35.000 Well God's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:38.000 be reduced to as small an amount as possible. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:38.000 --> 00:05:40.000 And what did the Norden bombsight do? 00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:42.000 Well it allowed you to do that. 00:05:42.000 --> 00:05:44.000 It allowed you to bomb only those things 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:48.000 that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb. 00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:51.000 So in the years leading up to the Second World War, 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:54.000 the U.S. military buys 90,000 00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:56.000 of these Norden bombsights 00:05:56.000 --> 00:05:58.000 at a cost of $14,000 each -- 00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:01.000 again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money. 00:06:01.000 --> 00:06:04.000 And they trained 50,000 bombardiers on how to use them -- 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:08.000 long extensive, months-long training sessions -- 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:10.000 because these things are essentially analog computers; 00:06:10.000 --> 00:06:12.000 they're not easy to use. 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:15.000 And they make everyone of those bombardiers take an oath, 00:06:15.000 --> 00:06:18.000 to swear that if they're ever captured, 00:06:18.000 --> 00:06:20.000 they will not divulge a single detail 00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:22.000 of this particular device to the enemy, 00:06:22.000 --> 00:06:25.000 because it's imperative the enemy not get their hands 00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:27.000 on this absolutely essential piece of technology. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:27.000 --> 00:06:30.000 And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane, 00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:33.000 it's escorted there by a series of armed guards. 00:06:33.000 --> 00:06:36.000 And it's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it. 00:06:36.000 --> 00:06:39.000 And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards. 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:41.000 It's never allowed to be photographed. 00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:44.000 And there's a little incendiary device inside of it, 00:06:44.000 --> 00:06:47.000 so that, if the plane ever crashes, it will be destroyed 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:50.000 and there's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it. 00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:52.000 The Norden bombsight 00:06:52.000 --> 00:06:55.000 is the Holy Grail. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:55.000 --> 00:06:58.000 So what happens during the Second World War? 00:06:58.000 --> 00:07:01.000 Well, it turns out it's not the Holy Grail. 00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:03.000 In practice, the Norden bombsight 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:06.000 can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft., 00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:08.000 but that's under perfect conditions. 00:07:08.000 --> 00:07:10.000 And of course, in wartime, 00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:12.000 conditions aren't perfect. 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:15.000 First of all, it's really hard to use -- really hard to use. 00:07:15.000 --> 00:07:17.000 And not all of the people 00:07:17.000 --> 00:07:19.000 who are of those 50,000 men who are bombardiers 00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:23.000 have the ability to properly program an analog computer. 00:07:23.000 --> 00:07:25.000 Secondly, it breaks down a lot. 00:07:25.000 --> 00:07:27.000 It's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys 00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:29.000 and gadgets and ball-bearings, 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:31.000 and they don't work as well as they ought to 00:07:31.000 --> 00:07:33.000 in the heat of battle. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:36.000 Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations, 00:07:36.000 --> 00:07:38.000 he assumed that a plane would be flying 00:07:38.000 --> 00:07:41.000 at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes. 00:07:41.000 --> 00:07:43.000 Well in a real war, you can't do that; 00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:45.000 you'll get shot down. 00:07:45.000 --> 00:07:48.000 So they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds. 00:07:48.000 --> 00:07:50.000 And the Norden bombsight doesn't work as well 00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:52.000 under those conditions. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:52.000 --> 00:07:54.000 But most of all, 00:07:54.000 --> 00:07:56.000 the Norden bombsight required the bombardier 00:07:56.000 --> 00:07:59.000 to make visual contact with the target. 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:01.000 But of course, what happens in real life? 00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:04.000 There are clouds, right. 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:07.000 It needs cloudless sky to be really accurate. 00:08:07.000 --> 00:08:09.000 Well how many cloudless skies 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:11.000 do you think there were above Central Europe 00:08:11.000 --> 00:08:14.000 between 1940 and 1945? 00:08:14.000 --> 00:08:16.000 Not a lot. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:18.000 And then to give you a sense 00:08:18.000 --> 00:08:20.000 of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was, 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:22.000 there was a famous case in 1944 00:08:22.000 --> 00:08:26.000 where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna, Germany. 00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:28.000 And the chemical plant comprised 00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:30.000 757 acres. 00:08:30.000 --> 00:08:33.000 And over the course of 22 bombing missions, 00:08:33.000 --> 00:08:38.000 the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs 00:08:38.000 --> 00:08:42.000 on this 757 acre chemical plant, 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:45.000 using the Norden bombsight. 00:08:45.000 --> 00:08:47.000 Well what percentage of those bombs 00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:49.000 do you think actually landed 00:08:49.000 --> 00:08:52.000 inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant? 00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:55.000 10 percent. 10 percent. 00:08:55.000 --> 00:08:57.000 And of those 10 percent that landed, 00:08:57.000 --> 00:09:00.000 16 percent didn't even go off; they were duds. 00:09:00.000 --> 00:09:02.000 The Leuna chemical plant, 00:09:02.000 --> 00:09:05.000 after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war, 00:09:05.000 --> 00:09:08.000 was up and running within weeks. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:10.000 And by the way, all those precautions 00:09:10.000 --> 00:09:13.000 to keep the Norden bombsight out of the hands of the Nazis? 00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:15.000 Well it turns out 00:09:15.000 --> 00:09:17.000 that Carl Norden, as a proper Swiss, 00:09:17.000 --> 00:09:20.000 was very enamored of German engineers. 00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:22.000 So in the 1930s, he hired a whole bunch of them, 00:09:22.000 --> 00:09:24.000 including a man named Hermann Long 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:26.000 who, in 1938, 00:09:26.000 --> 00:09:29.000 gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the Nazis. 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:32.000 So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war -- 00:09:32.000 --> 00:09:35.000 which also, by the way, didn't work very well. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:35.000 --> 00:09:37.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:09:37.000 --> 00:09:40.000 So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight? 00:09:40.000 --> 00:09:42.000 Well because we live in an age 00:09:42.000 --> 00:09:44.000 where there are lots and lots 00:09:44.000 --> 00:09:46.000 of Norden bombsights. 00:09:46.000 --> 00:09:48.000 We live in a time where there are all kinds 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:50.000 of really, really smart people 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:52.000 running around, saying that they've invented gadgets 00:09:52.000 --> 00:09:54.000 that will forever change our world. 00:09:54.000 --> 00:09:57.000 They've invented websites that will allow people to be free. 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:01.000 They've invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing 00:10:01.000 --> 00:10:04.000 that will make our world forever better. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:06.000 If you go into the military, 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:08.000 you'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well. 00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:10.000 If you go to the Pentagon, they will say, 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:12.000 "You know what, now we really can 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:14.000 put a bomb inside a pickle barrel 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:16.000 at 20,000 ft." 00:10:16.000 --> 00:10:19.000 And you know what, it's true; they actually can do that now. 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:21.000 But we need to be very clear 00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:24.000 about how little that means. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:27.000 In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War, 00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:29.000 the U.S. military, the air force, 00:10:29.000 --> 00:10:32.000 sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles 00:10:32.000 --> 00:10:34.000 to the Iraqi desert 00:10:34.000 --> 00:10:36.000 equipped with these five million dollar cameras 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:39.000 that allowed them to see the entire desert floor. 00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:42.000 And their mission was to find and to destroy -- 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:44.000 remember the Scud missile launchers, 00:10:44.000 --> 00:10:46.000 those surface-to-air missiles 00:10:46.000 --> 00:10:48.000 that the Iraqis were launching at the Israelis? 00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:50.000 The mission of the two squadrons 00:10:50.000 --> 00:10:53.000 was to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers. 00:10:53.000 --> 00:10:55.000 And so they flew missions day and night, 00:10:55.000 --> 00:10:57.000 and they dropped thousands of bombs, 00:10:57.000 --> 00:11:00.000 and they fired thousands of missiles 00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:03.000 in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:05.000 And after the war was over, there was an audit done -- 00:11:05.000 --> 00:11:07.000 as the army always does, the air force always does -- 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:09.000 and they asked the question: 00:11:09.000 --> 00:11:11.000 how many Scuds did we actually destroy? 00:11:11.000 --> 00:11:13.000 You know what the answer was? 00:11:13.000 --> 00:11:15.000 Zero, not a single one. 00:11:15.000 --> 00:11:17.000 Now why is that? 00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:19.000 Is it because their weapons weren't accurate? 00:11:19.000 --> 00:11:22.000 Oh no, they were brilliantly accurate. 00:11:22.000 --> 00:11:24.000 They could have destroyed this little thing right here 00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:26.000 from 25,000 ft. 00:11:26.000 --> 00:11:30.000 The issue was they didn't know where the Scud launchers were. 00:11:30.000 --> 00:11:33.000 The problem with bombs and pickle barrels 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:35.000 is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel, 00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:38.000 it's knowing how to find the pickle barrel. 00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:40.000 That's always been the harder problem 00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:42.000 when it comes to fighting wars. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:45.000 Or take the battle in Afghanistan. 00:11:45.000 --> 00:11:47.000 What is the signature weapon 00:11:47.000 --> 00:11:49.000 of the CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan? 00:11:49.000 --> 00:11:52.000 It's the drone. What is the drone? 00:11:52.000 --> 00:11:56.000 Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. 00:11:56.000 --> 00:12:00.000 It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision. 00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:02.000 And over the course of the last six years 00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:05.000 in Northwest Pakistan, 00:12:05.000 --> 00:12:08.000 the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles, 00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:10.000 and it's used those drones 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:12.000 to kill 2,000 suspected 00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:16.000 Pakistani and Taliban militants. 00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:19.000 Now what is the accuracy of those drones? 00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:21.000 Well it's extraordinary. 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:24.000 We think we're now at 95 percent accuracy 00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:26.000 when it comes to drone strikes. 00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:29.000 95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed, right? 00:12:29.000 --> 00:12:31.000 That is one of the most extraordinary records 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:33.000 in the history of modern warfare. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:33.000 --> 00:12:35.000 But do you know what the crucial thing is? 00:12:35.000 --> 00:12:37.000 In that exact same period 00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:39.000 that we've been using these drones 00:12:39.000 --> 00:12:41.000 with devastating accuracy, 00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:44.000 the number of attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks, 00:12:44.000 --> 00:12:46.000 against American forces in Afghanistan 00:12:46.000 --> 00:12:49.000 has increased tenfold. 00:12:49.000 --> 00:12:51.000 As we have gotten more and more efficient 00:12:51.000 --> 00:12:53.000 in killing them, 00:12:53.000 --> 00:12:56.000 they have become angrier and angrier 00:12:56.000 --> 00:12:59.000 and more and more motivated to kill us. 00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:02.000 I have not described to you a success story. 00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:04.000 I've described to you 00:13:04.000 --> 00:13:06.000 the opposite of a success story. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:08.000 And this is the problem 00:13:08.000 --> 00:13:10.000 with our infatuation with the things we make. 00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:13.000 We think the things we make can solve our problems, 00:13:13.000 --> 00:13:16.000 but our problems are much more complex than that. 00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:19.000 The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have, 00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:21.000 it's how you use the bombs you have, 00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:23.000 and more importantly, 00:13:23.000 --> 00:13:26.000 whether you ought to use bombs at all. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:29.000 There's a postscript 00:13:29.000 --> 00:13:31.000 to the Norden story 00:13:31.000 --> 00:13:34.000 of Carl Norden and his fabulous bombsight. 00:13:34.000 --> 00:13:37.000 And that is, on August 6th, 1945, 00:13:37.000 --> 00:13:40.000 a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay 00:13:40.000 --> 00:13:42.000 flew over Japan 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:44.000 and, using a Norden bombsight, 00:13:44.000 --> 00:13:47.000 dropped a very large thermonuclear device 00:13:47.000 --> 00:13:50.000 on the city of Hiroshima. 00:13:50.000 --> 00:13:53.000 And as was typical with the Norden bombsight, 00:13:53.000 --> 00:13:56.000 the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft. 00:13:56.000 --> 00:13:59.000 But of course, it didn't matter. 00:13:59.000 --> 00:14:01.000 And that's the greatest irony of all 00:14:01.000 --> 00:14:04.000 when it comes to the Norden bombsight. 00:14:04.000 --> 00:14:08.000 the air force's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight 00:14:08.000 --> 00:14:12.000 was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb, 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:15.000 which didn't need a bombsight at all. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:17.000 Meanwhile, back in New York, 00:14:17.000 --> 00:14:19.000 no one told Carl Norden 00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:22.000 that his bombsight was used over Hiroshima. 00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:24.000 He was a committed Christian. 00:14:24.000 --> 00:14:26.000 He thought he had designed something 00:14:26.000 --> 00:14:29.000 that would reduce the toll of suffering in war. 00:14:29.000 --> 00:14:32.000 It would have broken his heart. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:32.000 --> 00:14:39.000 (Applause)