Dr. Haber, What Have You Done? Sunday, May 11 2008
science 5:09 pm
Fritz Haber (1868 - 1934) is one of the most controversial scientists of all time. A chemist, he developed the Haber process, which provides a way of extracting atmospheric nitrogen for the bulk synthesis of ammonia. Ammonia created by the Haber process is used to produce the world’s synthetic fertilizers, which nurture crops for over a third of the global population, providing food for billions of people who might otherwise not even be alive. The old way of getting fertilizer involved scraping bat poop from the walls of caves, or, later, extracting it from nitrogeneous rocks from Chile. For his invention, Haber received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918.
Unfortunately, being a WWI-era German military scientist, Haber did a lot of other research that could only be construed as evil. He is called the “father of chemical warfare” for developing poison gas for use in World War I, although the practice had been outlawed by the 1907 Hague Conventions. It wasn’t until 1997 that the stockpiling and use of chemical weapons was outlawed globally by the Chemical Weapons Convention. Haber also developed the infamous Zyklon B gas, which was used to murder millions of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals during the Holocaust. The ironic thing is that Haber was actually a converted Jew, and dozens of members of his extended family were killed by Zyklon B in concentration camps.
In 1915, Haber’s wife, a fellow chemist and collaborator, was so distraught about her husband’s research that she shot herself in the chest with his army pistol, right in their home garden. Haber didn’t seen to care much: he got a new wife who had no problem with his vile pursuits. He died in a Swiss convalescent home in 1933, never having an opportunity to see the genocide that his poisonous gas wrought during World War II. His son, Hermann, who emigrated to the United States during the war, subsequently committing suicide in 1946.
Dr. Haber’s story is a cautionary tale for the scientists of the present. In the next 20 years, if not sooner, military researchers will develop weapons much more destructive than mere nuclear bombs. The development of such weapons may be unavoidable. The necessity of the global arms race demands it. If democratic countries do not acquire the technology, elite-ruled countries will. This is an unpleasant reality that some fail to recognize.
At the same time, the scientists who develop this technology have a grave responsibility to stop their work if the leaders of their countries obviously turn sour, and to boycott contributions to any especially untoward projects. Whether or not the Bush administration (with its appointment of the warmongering fanatic John Bolton to the position of Permanent US Representative to the UN) qualifies as such leadership is subject to debate. But scientists have an obligation to take ethical responsibility for their work. If they are put to task on secret projects that are obviously vile, such as weaponized synthetic life, or artificial general intelligence for autonomous military robots, they should quit immediately and go into business, academia, or retire.
The global arms race must stop, or we are all doomed. Especially when we acquire technologies that are nigh-magical in their destructive capabilities. The solution could be a singleton, defined by Nick Bostrom as follows:
In set theory, a singleton is a set with only one member, but as I introduced the notion, the term refers to a world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level. Among its powers would be (1) the ability to prevent any threats (internal or external) to its own existence and supremacy, and (2) the ability to exert effective control over major features of its domain (including taxation and territorial allocation).
In the paper, Bostrom further adds “Singletons could be good, bad, or neutral”, and lists their possible benefits, including:
- Avoiding arms races, which can be costly even if they don’t lead to war.
- Avoiding a space colonization race that burns up the cosmic commons.
- Avoiding outcomes characterized by extreme inequality.
- Avoiding evolutionary pathways that lead to radically dystopian outcomes.
Bostrom warns against necessarily conceiving of a singleton as a dystopian tyrant, writing, “A singleton need not be monolithic. It could contain within itself an enormous variety of independent agents each pursuing their own disparate goals, just as is the case in a liberal democratic state. The goals and actions of the singleton could be decided by its inhabitants or their elected representatives.” He also argues why the eventual creation of a singleton seems likely in the context of the past: “Historically, we have seen an overarching trend towards the emergence of higher levels of social organization, from hunter-gatherer bands, to chiefdoms, city-states, nation states, and now multinational organizations, regional alliances, various international governance structures, and other aspects of globalization. Extrapolation of this trend points to the creation of a singleton.”
Maybe scientists could better spend their time working towards a benevolent singleton instead of weapons that could one day be turned on them and their families.

(Fritz Haber with his friend and colleague Dr. Einstein, who had the foresight to tell President Roosevelt in 1939 that the Nazis were working on the nuclear bomb, and that the Allies would need to develop their own bomb or risk being annihilated.)

