Suicide and Technology for War (Scholars Award)

Suicide warfare—a timely topic in post-9/11 world— has occupied important space around the world, especially since the twentieth century. Internationally comparative in scope, this project explores the ethics of engineering for homeland security. In any country at war, it may be rational to act in what appears to be an irrational matter, and suicide missions are a key instance of this phenomenon.

Suicide warfare for homeland defense, albeit against enemy forces, first requires human sacrifice, thus raising far more ethical issues than technological ones. Focusing on engineering communities in two nations that used suicide as a form or warfare, the project aims to answer a set of inter-related questions: (1) How and why did engineers support organized suicide attacks for homeland defense? (2) How was the moral sensitivity of peacetime reduced to support the desperate act as evil but necessary? (3) At what cost (and to whom) does society in war benefit from a given engineering project? and, (4) What are the acceptable costs of suicide as a technology acceptable for national defense?

Project results will be used to create educational materials, public presentations, and publications in popular outlets.

This project uses historical methods to analyze the period from 1914 to 1961, during which World War I, World War II, and the Cold War each elevated the importance of patriotic self-sacrifice for national causes. Critical analyses of these materials enable a series of comparisons of social practices and technological dimensions by which different nations created their versions of suicide warfare in the air by actively shaping the notions of suicide for homeland defense.

Popular literature, posters, government publications, and more are used to uncover the socio-technological context in which suicide warfare in the air took shape, and how and why this differed across social contexts. Overall, this project contributes to scholarship on engineering ethics, the history of technology, and Science and Technology Studies.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.