The Technological Republic summary

In 1942, J. Robert Oppenheimer was appointed to lead Project Y, an ultra-secretive project to develop an atom bomb. He would spend the next three years in the New Mexico desert working on the most destructive weapon in human history. When you see something that’s “technically sweet,” Oppenheimer told the government agents who vetted him for his security clearance, “you go ahead and do it.” In other words: build the damn thing and figure out what you’re going to do with it later. That, he said, was how it was with the atom bomb. 

Oppenheimer changed his mind after his invention’s use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. Project Y’s scientists, he said, had “known sin.” They couldn’t shake this knowledge; there was no way back. But what was the alternative? As a 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed by Albert Einstein and other scientists noted, Nazi Germany had already begun research into the construction of such a weapon. That someone was going to build this terrible, technically sweet thing was certain; the only question was who’d do it first.  

Who’s going to build the software upon which America’s hard power will depend in the twenty-first century? There’s a tried-and-true answer to that question: an alliance of scientists, technicians, engineers, and Uncle Sam himself. It was that union, after all, which laid the foundations for Silicon Valley’s very own era-defining products and services. 

Take just two major breakthroughs, GPS and the internet. Both were bankrolled by the Department of Defense, designed for military applications, and only later opened up for civilian use. Both transformed our world. Without GPS, the fitness trackers on our wrists, the maps on our phones, and the automated tractors plowing American fields would be useless. Without the internet, much of what we take for granted in our world simply wouldn’t exist. 

The Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel found something technically sweet: a safer, more stable form of nitroglycerin, a notoriously volatile explosive. He called it dynamite, a reference to the Greek word for “power.” He hoped it would make mining and construction safer; the governments who became his most loyal customers prized its ability to efficiently eliminate human life on the battlefield. Realizing he was going to go down in history as a “merchant of death,” Nobel reinvented himself as a prize-bestowing humanist. 

What’s usually forgotten in the telling of this story is Nobel’s idea that the sheer destructiveness of his invention might prove a blessing in disguise. The only thing that prevents nations going to war, he said, is “terror.” Nobel’s comment anticipated the strategic doctrine of the United States in the twentieth century. As the game theorist Thomas Schelling said, the power to hurt is bargaining power; to exploit that power is diplomacy. It may be “vicious diplomacy,” but it’s diplomacy none the less. Put differently, the unprecedented peacefulness of the post-war order has a simple explanation: America’s possession of weapons made it a terrifying potential “destroyer of worlds.” 

What is a nation? In 1882, French philosopher Ernest Renan offered a now-famous answer to that deceptively simple question during a lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris.

A nation, he argued, cannot be defined by race, ethnicity, or even language. What truly binds a nation together, he said, is a “vast solidarity” between past and future – a shared belief that the sacrifices made for the common good, both before and ahead, are meaningful and justified. A nation is not a fixed entity; it lives – or dies – through the daily renewal of this collective spirit. In Renan’s words, a nation is nothing less than a “daily plebiscite.”