Bravo, point taken, as an American I consider Braun as simply a pioneer not a not hero. My point was, after personally witnessing the disgusting Bush-era U.S. occupation of Iraq with its power of propaganda over a receptible public, how public opinion can be manipulated, including the smarty-pants scientists.

As much an entertaining a point-specific debate of his past and the greater historical context could go on ad infinitum ...would you agree the core theme is the black & white vs grey philosophical stance we take upon great scientific minds that are tasked building ground breaking technologies that are intended to be weaponized could be distilled to this: are they all evil mad scientists or just smart people duped by the political consequences of their times?

I think you'd also, and perhaps rightly so, label Oppenheimer and his band as war criminals for building the A-bomb, the subsequent use of which they had zero control of when or if it was to be used (which killed many more thousands of Japanese civilians than Brits from the V rockets). Now I will never say that their conscience is absolved for passing the responsibility solely to the politicians but I will say this, they have always been granted zero autonomy over their inventions. The old "thanks for playing, we'll take it from here, egghead." B.S. Problems is, where does an essentially militant species solely fix the blame post tragedy? The leaders who use war as a negotiating tool from advantage to revenge? The scientists whose discoveries spur fresh ways to exact costly bodycounts? The masses for believing the packaged info and killing each wholesale? & so the hand feeds the mouth and back again...eightfold way.

Perhaps WvB and his colleagues ceased to think about the battle of idologies we so conveniently have the bigger picture of now in the era of easily accessible mass information, but became as self-protective as the rest of the world at that time and just wanted to use their smarts to attack their attackers in a primitive defensive response? It's doubtful that the Nazi propaganda machine really touted things like the death squad EinsatzKommandos marauding around eastern Europe and Russia or killing many fellow German "degenerates" in death camps, in much the same vein modern black ops don't laud their brutal victories to the populace of their own countries.

It was an era filled with unbelievable homocidal viciousness where only the strongest nations that could absorb the most attrition dictated who was right. I'm not saying Braun was just a starry eyed idealist, he obviously fashioned himself man of his times, and I'm not absolving him of all wrong doing but he was a scientist, who most likely believed he was helping his countrymen, much like Oppenheimer. That's my stance, no more no less. We can look in hindsight at such blind nationalistic displays with embitterment, but calling a scientist a murdering piece of trash during WW2 is like handing out speeding tickets during a Formula 1 race.

That's why I wish nationalism would diminish so we would see all fellow humanity as one, so the world's Brauns of our era would join together to strive collectively for Mars & wonderous possibilities beyond, instead being tasked to make better killing machines or increase profits for the elite who don't care about any country but themselves. That's the core of Arcas's journal post, I'd say.