"Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department. Says Werner von Braun." - from the song "Werner von Braun" by Tom Lehrer.
I recently found in my campus mail a letter asking that I support those graduating seniors who will be taking a "...pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job [they] consider or any organization for which [they] work." This seemed reasonable, if innocuous, to me since the document added that "students may define for themselves what they believe to be socially and environmentally responsible."
But as I continued to think about the pressures that young people face as they seek work and try to balance ideals against money or other attractions, I decided that a consistent adherence to a pledge even this mild might demand considerable sacrifice. So I thought that those signing it might like to hear, and perhaps gain inspiration from, a Tufts graduate who, in a different time and under (superficially) different circumstances took a similar pledge.
It is a story which should be better known at this school. Norbert Wiener was a child prodigy. Intensively trained by his demanding father, he entered Tufts at the age of nine in 1906, graduated three years later, received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1913, and, after further study in Europe, took a position in the mathematics department at MIT in 1919. He remained there until his death in 1964 doing basic work in many fields and gaining for himself (and MIT) world fame.
His physical appearance - rotund, myopic, frequently puffing on a large cigar - fit the public stereotype of the "absent-minded professor" perfectly. He was always interested in applications of mathematics. During World War II, he helped to design tracking mechanisms for anti-aircraft guns. This led him to formulate a mathematical description of what we now call "feedback loops" where the information that a mechanism receives changes its actions, which in turn changes the further information it gets. He recognized this phenomenon as one which is wide-spread in organisms and in cooperation with biologists elaborated this insight into a field called "cybernetics."
In the years which followed the war, Wiener wrote books such as The Human Use of Human Beings and God and Golem (in the Tufts library) in which he attempted to explain to the public some of the potential consequences of technologies (such as the computer) which the war had spawned. He was so concerned by what he foresaw would be the job-loss created by factory automation that he wrote to Waiter Reuther, head of the United Automobile Workers offering to advise him on the matter. For, he pointed out, "any labor which is in competition with slave labor, whether the slaves are human or mechanical, must accept the conditions of slave labor."
The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seems to have appalled Wiener and to have strengthened his pacifist leanings. In 1946 he received a letter from an engineer working on missiles for Boeing who asked for a copy of one of his papers. Wiener's reply, which he published in the January 1947 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, is remarkable for its contemporary relevance: "...It is perfectly clear also that to disseminate information about a weapon in the present state of our civilization is to make practically certain that weapon will be used... The practical use of guided missiles can only be to kill foreign civilians indiscriminately, and it furnishes no protection whatever to civilians in this country. If, therefore, I do not desire to participate in the bombing or poisoning of defenseless peoples - and I most certainly do not - I must take a serious responsibility as to those to whom I disclose my scientific ideas."
Wiener did not send the paper and from that time until his death did not (knowingly) do any war-related research. His continued writing about the social responsibility of scientists drew considerable ill-will towards him from the Cold Warriors of the day.
Today's graduates may not be called upon to design new weapons (although that is still a growth industry), but they will face ethical choices in abundance. Wiener, I think, would be proud if he knew that, a century after he graduated from Tufts, there would be new graduates who also cared "where their rockets came down."
