Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsight

1,680,745 views ・ 2011-10-26

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00:15
Thank you.
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It's a real pleasure to be here.
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I last did a TED Talk
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I think about seven years ago or so.
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I talked about spaghetti sauce.
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And so many people, I guess, watch those videos.
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People have been coming up to me ever since
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to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce,
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which is a wonderful thing in the short term --
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(Laughter)
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but it's proven to be less than ideal
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over seven years.
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And so I though I would come
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and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me.
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(Laughter)
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The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make.
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And so I thought I would tell a story
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about someone
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who made one of the most precious objects
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of his era.
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And the man's name is Carl Norden.
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Carl Norden was born in 1880.
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And he was Swiss.
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And of course, the Swiss can be divided
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into two general categories:
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those who make small, exquisite,
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expensive objects
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and those who handle the money
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of those who buy small, exquisite,
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expensive objects.
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And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp.
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He's an engineer.
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He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich.
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In fact, one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin
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who would go on
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to break small, expensive, exquisite objects.
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And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl.
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And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word.
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He wears three-piece suits;
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and he has a very, very small, important mustache;
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and he is domineering
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and narcissistic
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and driven
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and has an extraordinary ego;
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and he works 16-hour days;
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and he has very strong feelings about alternating current;
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and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness;
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and he drinks lots of coffee;
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and he does his best work
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sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours
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in complete silence
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with nothing but a slide rule.
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In any case,
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Carl Norden emigrates to the United States
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just before the First World War
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and sets up shop on Lafayette Street
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in downtown Manhattan.
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And he becomes obsessed with the question
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of how to drop bombs from an airplane.
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Now if you think about it,
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in the age before GPS and radar,
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that was obviously a really difficult problem.
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It's a complicated physics problem.
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You've got a plane that's thousands of feet up in the air,
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going at hundreds of miles an hour,
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and you're trying to drop an object, a bomb,
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towards some stationary target
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in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud cover
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and all kinds of other impediments.
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And all sorts of people,
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moving up to the First World War and between the wars,
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tried to solve this problem,
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and nearly everybody came up short.
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The bombsights that were available
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were incredibly crude.
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But Carl Norden is really the one who cracks the code.
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And he comes up with this incredibly complicated device.
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It weighs about 50 lbs.
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It's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight.
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And it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings
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and gadgets and gauges.
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And he makes this complicated thing.
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And what he allows people to do
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is he makes the bombardier take this particular object,
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visually sight the target,
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because they're in the Plexiglas cone of the bomber,
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and then they plug in the altitude of the plane,
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the speed of the plane, the speed of the wind
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and the coordinates
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of the target.
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And the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb.
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And as Norden famously says,
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"Before that bombsight came along,
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bombs would routinely miss their target
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by a mile or more."
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But he said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight,
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he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel
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at 20,000 ft.
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Now I cannot tell you
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how incredibly excited
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the U.S. military was
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by the news of the Norden bombsight.
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It was like manna from heaven.
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Here was an army
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that had just had experience in the First World War,
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where millions of men
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fought each other in the trenches,
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getting nowhere, making no progress,
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and here someone had come up with a device
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that allowed them to fly up in the skies
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high above enemy territory
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and destroy whatever they wanted
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with pinpoint accuracy.
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And the U.S. military
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spends 1.5 billion dollars --
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billion dollars in 1940 dollars --
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developing the Norden bombsight.
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And to put that in perspective,
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the total cost of the Manhattan project
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was three billion dollars.
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Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight
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as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project
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of the modern era.
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And there were people, strategists, within the U.S. military
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who genuinely thought that this single device
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was going to spell the difference
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between defeat and victory
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when it came to the battle against the Nazis
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and against the Japanese.
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And for Norden as well,
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this device had incredible moral importance,
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because Norden was a committed Christian.
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In fact, he would always get upset
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when people referred to the bombsight as his invention,
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because in his eyes,
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only God could invent things.
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He was simply the instrument of God's will.
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And what was God's will?
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Well God's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war
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be reduced to as small an amount as possible.
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And what did the Norden bombsight do?
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Well it allowed you to do that.
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It allowed you to bomb only those things
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that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb.
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So in the years leading up to the Second World War,
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the U.S. military buys 90,000
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of these Norden bombsights
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at a cost of $14,000 each --
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again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money.
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And they trained 50,000 bombardiers on how to use them --
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long extensive, months-long training sessions --
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because these things are essentially analog computers;
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they're not easy to use.
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And they make every one of those bombardiers take an oath,
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to swear that if they're ever captured,
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they will not divulge a single detail
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of this particular device to the enemy,
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because it's imperative the enemy not get their hands
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on this absolutely essential piece of technology.
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And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane,
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it's escorted there by a series of armed guards.
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And it's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it.
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And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards.
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It's never allowed to be photographed.
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And there's a little incendiary device inside of it,
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so that, if the plane ever crashes, it will be destroyed
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and there's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it.
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The Norden bombsight
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is the Holy Grail.
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So what happens during the Second World War?
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Well, it turns out it's not the Holy Grail.
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In practice, the Norden bombsight
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can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft.,
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but that's under perfect conditions.
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And of course, in wartime,
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conditions aren't perfect.
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First of all, it's really hard to use -- really hard to use.
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And not all of the people
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who are of those 50,000 men who are bombardiers
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have the ability to properly program an analog computer.
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Secondly, it breaks down a lot.
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It's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys
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and gadgets and ball-bearings,
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and they don't work as well as they ought to
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in the heat of battle.
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Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations,
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he assumed that a plane would be flying
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at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes.
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Well in a real war, you can't do that;
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you'll get shot down.
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So they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds.
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And the Norden bombsight doesn't work as well
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under those conditions.
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But most of all,
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the Norden bombsight required the bombardier
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to make visual contact with the target.
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But of course, what happens in real life?
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There are clouds, right.
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It needs cloudless sky to be really accurate.
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Well how many cloudless skies
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do you think there were above Central Europe
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between 1940 and 1945?
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Not a lot.
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And then to give you a sense
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of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was,
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there was a famous case in 1944
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where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna, Germany.
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And the chemical plant comprised
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757 acres.
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And over the course of 22 bombing missions,
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the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs
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on this 757 acre chemical plant,
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using the Norden bombsight.
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Well what percentage of those bombs
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do you think actually landed
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inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant?
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10 percent. 10 percent.
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And of those 10 percent that landed,
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16 percent didn't even go off; they were duds.
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The Leuna chemical plant,
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after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war,
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was up and running within weeks.
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And by the way, all those precautions
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to keep the Norden bombsight out of the hands of the Nazis?
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Well it turns out
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that Carl Norden, as a proper Swiss,
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was very enamored of German engineers.
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So in the 1930s, he hired a whole bunch of them,
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including a man named Hermann Long
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who, in 1938,
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gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the Nazis.
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So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war --
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which also, by the way, didn't work very well.
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(Laughter)
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So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight?
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Well because we live in an age
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where there are lots and lots
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of Norden bombsights.
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We live in a time where there are all kinds
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of really, really smart people
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running around, saying that they've invented gadgets
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that will forever change our world.
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They've invented websites that will allow people to be free.
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They've invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing
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that will make our world forever better.
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If you go into the military,
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you'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well.
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If you go to the Pentagon, they will say,
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"You know what, now we really can
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put a bomb inside a pickle barrel
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at 20,000 ft."
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And you know what, it's true; they actually can do that now.
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But we need to be very clear
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about how little that means.
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In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War,
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the U.S. military, the air force,
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sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles
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to the Iraqi desert
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equipped with these five million dollar cameras
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that allowed them to see the entire desert floor.
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And their mission was to find and to destroy --
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remember the Scud missile launchers,
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those surface-to-air missiles
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that the Iraqis were launching at the Israelis?
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The mission of the two squadrons
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was to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers.
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And so they flew missions day and night,
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and they dropped thousands of bombs,
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and they fired thousands of missiles
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in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge.
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And after the war was over, there was an audit done --
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as the army always does, the air force always does --
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and they asked the question:
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how many Scuds did we actually destroy?
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You know what the answer was?
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Zero, not a single one.
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Now why is that?
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Is it because their weapons weren't accurate?
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Oh no, they were brilliantly accurate.
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They could have destroyed this little thing right here
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from 25,000 ft.
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The issue was they didn't know where the Scud launchers were.
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The problem with bombs and pickle barrels
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is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel,
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it's knowing how to find the pickle barrel.
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That's always been the harder problem
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when it comes to fighting wars.
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Or take the battle in Afghanistan.
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What is the signature weapon
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of the CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan?
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It's the drone. What is the drone?
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Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight.
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It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision.
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And over the course of the last six years
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in Northwest Pakistan,
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the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles,
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and it's used those drones
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to kill 2,000 suspected
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Pakistani and Taliban militants.
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Now what is the accuracy of those drones?
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Well it's extraordinary.
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We think we're now at 95 percent accuracy
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when it comes to drone strikes.
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95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed, right?
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That is one of the most extraordinary records
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in the history of modern warfare.
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But do you know what the crucial thing is?
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In that exact same period
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that we've been using these drones
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with devastating accuracy,
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the number of attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks,
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against American forces in Afghanistan
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has increased tenfold.
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As we have gotten more and more efficient
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in killing them,
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they have become angrier and angrier
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13:11
and more and more motivated to kill us.
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I have not described to you a success story.
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I've described to you
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the opposite of a success story.
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And this is the problem
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with our infatuation with the things we make.
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We think the things we make can solve our problems,
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but our problems are much more complex than that.
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The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have,
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it's how you use the bombs you have,
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and more importantly,
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whether you ought to use bombs at all.
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There's a postscript
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to the Norden story
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of Carl Norden and his fabulous bombsight.
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And that is, on August 6, 1945,
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a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay
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flew over Japan
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and, using a Norden bombsight,
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dropped a very large thermonuclear device
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on the city of Hiroshima.
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And as was typical with the Norden bombsight,
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the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft.
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But of course, it didn't matter.
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And that's the greatest irony of all
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when it comes to the Norden bombsight.
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the air force's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight
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was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb,
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which didn't need a bombsight at all.
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Meanwhile, back in New York,
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no one told Carl Norden
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that his bombsight was used over Hiroshima.
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He was a committed Christian.
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He thought he had designed something
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that would reduce the toll of suffering in war.
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It would have broken his heart.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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