The Haber Effect

"He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention." Thus writes Michael Pollan of Vaclav Smil's conclusions regarding Fritz Haber's work. The moral relationship between scientific invention and the uses to which inventions are put is one most of us are familiar with in the context of Einstein's, and, later, the Los Alamos crowd's more direct contributions to the development of nuclear weapons. Is Einstein to be blamed for the bomb? The end result of the debate for most of us is to conclude, along with the gun lobby, that ideas don't kill people, people do. It is even difficult to blame figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer who worked directly to develop the bomb when one considers the frightening consequences of allowing extremist nation-states sole access to such weaponry. The moral debates around atomic weapons, however, usually share consensus on one essential point, namely, that every effort must be made to avoid their actually being used. Is Einstein's work per se to be considered evil? Few would argue that this is the case. At the same time, the results of Einstein's and the other physicists' ideas make it painfully obvious that with power, comes responsibility. And few can imagine scenarios in which the actual use of nuclear weapons against populations could be characterized as anything other than a human tragedy.