Deploying technology - nukes included - to escape a quagmire in which the West is stuck
 The old American adage - "shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations" - describes the building of family fortunes, the wasting of those fortunes by the next generation, and the rebuilding of those fortunes by the generation after that.
But it also describes the differing priorities set by succeeding generations, the first efforts of the patriarch in his shirt sleeves, his wastrel son frittering away the patrimony, and finally the grandson, back in shirt sleeves, rebuilding what has been lost.
One could not imagine a movie made today like the British wartime classic, "Sink the Bismarck", in which almost everybody on screen was smoking cigarettes.
Just as today, we cannot imagine such a scenario in a modern film, it may be difficult for some to imagine a shipping world that is crewless on autopilot and nuclear powered. But trends point in that direction.
Wedded as we are to the past it is difficult for the established governing class, be they carriage makers or tobacco giants, to accept that their ways - and often they, themselves - must be replaced.
Today, South Korea's Hyundai plans nuclear-powered 15,000-TEU containerships to be equipped with next-generation small nuclear reactors.
Such a design was unveiled at the New Nuclear for Maritime Houston Summit. Earlier, HD KSOE (HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering) secured the American Bureau of Shipping's (ABS) Approval in Principle for a 15,000-TEU containership design using small modular nuclear reactors.
Said ABS technology chief Patrick Ryan: “Nuclear-powered vessels can be a game-changer in the current shipbuilding market. ABS and HD KSOE contribute to accelerating the commercialisation of marine nuclear technology in the global shipbuilding market."
Lloyd’s Register, CORE POWER and Maersk launched a study regarding regulatory feasibility and frameworks for a nuclear-powered containership using a fourth-generation reactor. While these developments indicate the way forward, a vast bureaucracy - in fact, many bureaucracies - stand in the way of rapid development.
Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has often said he could build California's long-projected high-speed rail system long before he could get permission to build it. "Everything you do today is illegal."
Dispensing with overregulation risks underregulation that risks accidents when things go wrong as they likely will when cumbersome safeguards are removed while engaging in draining the swamp. This in an operation, the complexities of which, plus the limited time in which it must done, rivals D-Day's Operation Overlord in organisational challenges.
War, at least existential war, is a time when we quickly dispense with that safety first and always mentality that dominates peacetime. Wartime is when one must take chances to defeat whatever challenges our vital interests. Such decisions will result in failures and mistakes, some catastrophic like Dunkirk or the fall of Singapore and Bataan. But such failures do not mean surrender because that would mean accepting the unacceptable.
No such physical threat faces the West today, though there are those who fear Russia and China's aggressive intentions. No, the real threat is from within, a feminised state bureaucracy and corporate elite, that is looking increasingly like the long-gone and unlamented Soviet bureaucracy that held eastern Europe in inert stasis for decades until it could be borne no longer. When it could no longer rival the Western world it feared and despised, it collapsed.
Innovation survives in the West. To Hyundai's nuclear ship project, there is the growth of driverless machines. Thus, ships can ply the waters of the world without crews. Not only ships but trains, trucks and buses.
As they are gradually introduced, these modes of transport will be accompanied by statistical studies showing that autonomous conveyances are safer than those operated by humans. After a while all will feel as safe in them as they do stepping into an elevator without an operator.
Then there are non-mechanical issues, that is, our attitudes to the way we do things and resist ways they might be done. Even supreme neo-modernist Donald Trump suffers from a hankering for old ways, a latent Luddism, when he condemned working from home, or telecommuting.
But just as the 1908 Model T Ford was a far cry from a Tesla today, our home computer systems are still at a rudimentary stage of development, perhaps equivalent to the 1927 Model A Ford. What's wanted is multiple of screens that would plug into a laptop, enabling one to cut and paste from one screen to another. Another screen would show one's workmates live so they can be consulted - and supervised. It would also have easy global video phone access.
This would meet Trump's objection that those working from home are likely skiving on the employers' dime. It is rather like the 1890s debate in the British Army between close-order advocates and open-order advocates.
The debate was brought on by technological change. Open-order advocates quite rightly said it was foolish having close ordered troops stand shoulder to shoulder. If a bullet aimed at one missed, it would likely hit the man beside him.
There was a time when close-order made sense. Before 1838 when the flintlock Brown Bess musket was the weapon of choice, close order was only way to make an impression on a body of men similarly arrayed. The flintlock only fired three shots a minute, and massed volley fire was the only way to make an impression on an enemy similarly arrayed.
But close-order made less sense with the breech loading Martini-Henry rifle, firing eight to 10 rounds a minute in 1870, and no sense at all with the bolt action Lee Enfield firing 20 to 30 rounds a minute in 1900.
But close-order advocates fought on. Their argument was the much the same as Trump's. That is, having troops spread out one loses command and control. Just as the nogoodniks in high school congregate at the back of the class, the shirkers and skivers in the army are found at the far-flung edges of any formation.
And that is the problem with working from home. The army solved the problem by having the number of officers per 100 men increase from one in 1820 to four by 1950.
In the case of office workers working from home, one could upgrade the technology to lighten the supervisory burden, and one could pay workers less as their expenses would be less. Heretical as this might sound, this would not diminish their quality of life because they would be spared the expense of going to work each and every day.
Ironically, drastically cutting expenses incurs new unavoidable expenses. Thus, cost savings must be treasured from where ever they come. A portion of what a worker saves from telecommuting should accrue to the employer.
The imperative that substitutes for war in this case, is the monstrous debt western countries have amassed since the 1960s. Western world public debt alone stands at US $98 trillion, or 94 per cent of global GDP.
Private debt (including household and non-financial corporate debt) is about $150 trillion, or 143 per cent of global GDP.
Add to that problem, is the need to spend fortunes on what has been long neglected and needs repair. The military, the roads and bridges and the education system to name a few. If a substantial tax cut in on the cards, then money must be found to cover it.
Two sources come to mind. One is freeing the imaginative and industrious to innovate and take the initiative without having clouds of inspectors harassing their every move. Nuclear power will painlessly cut costs to the bone and increase GDP. This wild west approach will undoubtedly result in accidents, but as long as the net good exceeds the net bad, then it is onward and upward from there. |
