Security, Revenge, and Danger

Chapter 9 in Technology Matters: Questions to Live With is titled as “More Security or Escalating Danger?” It discusses many different issues pertaining to individuals, different states, a country, and the world. Technology is being made continuously. Every time a new weapon is made, a country thinks that that particular weapon will stop the war; but it does the exact opposite. It encourages other countries to make new weapons so they are equal.

“More security or Escalating danger?” also talks about human errors. One example is building a home on the beach. Many think it is an awesome idea; it solves one problem but causes another. The problem may be the need to build a new house but not have any space. The solution is building it on the oceanfront or the beach. However that can cause an even bigger problem. When a hurricane comes and destroys the houses there is even more damage in that area than if there were no houses there to begin with. New technology allowed us to build a house on the beach, but that new technology also allowed more destruction to happen.

The first book I read was Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner. I read the parts of the first chapter “Ever Since Frankenstein” that pertained to revenge. Nye, the author of Technology Matters, takes Tenners idea of how human error and natural disasters and runs with it. In Why Things Bite Back Tenner talks about a solution to one problem could cause a worse problem later on down the road, thus being revenge. In the chapter I read, it doesn’t really talk about technology. He talked about the affects of technology without really saying it was because of technology.

The next book I read was War and Public Health written by Levy Sidel. I read the chapter called “War, Children, and the Responsibility of the International Community”. In this chapter Sidel mainly focuses on how war affects children. How they lose father, mothers, family, and friends in general. "Someone once said that the trouble with modern war is that it does not kill the right people. I am not certain who the right people might be, but there is no question that children are the wrong people" (12). This is one aspect that Nye, as far as I know, did not consider. How old does someone have to be to be considered a child? Vonnegut brings up a similar point in Cat’s Cradle. He says that boys fight in wars, they aren’t old enough to be considered men; but how do we know that? What is the definition of a man, how old do you have to be?

Nye considers a lot of ways technology pertains to war. How it affects the countries, individuals, and he does in one way talk about how it affects children. He talks about them as a victim of the war, but not a participant in it. It would have added one more level to Nye’s book. It is something that I wish he had talked about a little more.

Nye picked his sources wisely. He found parts of the books that really pertains to his topic and stuck to that. He also took many ideas from his sources. Sometimes it seemed that he just transformed a few words and went from there.

Nye, Tenner, and Sidel talk about similar stakeholders. I feel like that take about the people that are affected immediately by war or natural disasters. They don’t necessarily think about people that are affected by those things shortly after they happen, or how it affects people in other places.

Through my discussion of technology and war I want to see how it affects the army, other countries, children (soldiers that are considered children, and children that aren’t apart of the war), and families. I want to see just how does technology affect war.