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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are
by jemfinch 11y ago
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. … Is there no other way the world may live?"
- omegaworks 11y ago-U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, shortly after the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin How did we get here from there?
- mhurron 11y ago> How did we get here from there? The rest of that speech was unheeded.
- rgbrenner 11y agowhere is that quote from? It sounds old. 500,000 bushels of wheat is only about $4m. What fighter plane is this a comparison to?
- engi_nerd 11y agoFor that era, most likely an F-86 Sabre or equivalent.
- skuhn 11y agoFor those who aren't familiar with it, the parent is quoting from Eisenhower's 1953 Chance for Peace speech [1]. There's an interesting piece from the NY Times in 2013 about what a bomber would buy today [2]. The situation has become considerably worse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech [2] http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/what-would-a-fighter-jet-buy-60-years-after-eisenhowers-speech/ http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/what-would-a-fight...
- stickfigure 11y ago"Software saved the aerospace industry. Every other way of adding cost to an airplane also adds weight."
- rdtsc 11y agoFor fun, looking at numbers today: a B-2 bomber is around $2B/aircraft. A 500MW gas powered power plant could be around $0.5B, and would serve maybe 50K homes. So you could buy 4 power plants today for the cost of one advanced bomber.