> To the extent that high value workers knew that they were treasure to be looted they might have decided that the US was a least worse option.
Yes, that lines up with von Braun's account of his motivations.
> We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
I'm not particularly convinced by this man's praise of America and talk of Christianity, I think he was brown-nosing just a little bit... but it does seem clear he preferred America to the Soviets.
Allied bombings of Germany began in 1939, the information is even present in the Wikipedia link you provided. V-2 launches against Allies started in September 1944, well after commencement of large scale strategic bombing of German cities, and the name was given to it after successful test launches, also in 1944.
von Braun and his team specifically sought out Americans to surrender to. Characterizing a surrender as "theft" (as though people are property?!) is truly bizarre.
What is this whitewashing? The Soviet Union never stopped assassinating people, and the practice clearly continued into present day Russia. Boris Yeltsin was one whim away from being assassinated in 1991 on orders from the KGB; the only reason it didn't happen is because the Alfa group commanders decided not to be bloodthirsty that day.
The gist of it is in August of 1991, hardline Soviet leaders, opposed to political reform, attempted a coup. As part of this coup, the elimination of Yeltsin was planned. Yeltsin was inside the Russian White House, which was surrounded by a very large crowd of civilians who opposed the coup. KGB chairman and leader of the coup, Vladimir Kryuchkov, ordered the KGB's spetzna (Alfa) to fight their way through the crowd of civilians into the Russian White House to eliminate Yeltsin. Alfa showed up to do the job, but upon seeing and mingling with the crowd of civilians, decided against slaughter.
Incidentally, Alfa is also the group that in 1979 stormed the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and assassinated Hafizullah Amin, starting the Soviet-Afghan War.
Getting in a car is fraught with peril. Every time somebody gets in a vehicle they're dicing with death.
I think it's important to contextualise the risk. The risk of dying from an anaesthetic is about 1 in 100,000. Compare with risk of dying in a car accident in a given year for example.
And again, it comes down to risk:benefit. Anaesthetics are not given out willy-nilly. The reason for the anaesthetic is considered along with the patient's co-morbidities and personal physiological parameter where relevant. Based on this a reasonable estimate of the personalised risks for that patient for that operation can be given for the patient to choose if they wish to proceed or not.
> Shouldn’t they have a paper-based/offline downtime procedure for this?
If they did, I would expect their employees to be out of practice with such methods since they weren't working that way day-to-day. Unless they're running regular "all computers are down"-drills to keep their employees sharp, downtime was probably inevitable.
Hence the monthly planned downtimes. Some organizations require you to take your vacation time every year, and it’s partly because they want to make sure they know how to operate without you.
Does it really make a difference, with respect to whether they should be kicked off HackerOne? Incompetence and disorganization is no excuse for what is essentially (if not literally) wage theft.
Depleted uranium has indeed been used in airplanes. Some models of 747 have a ton or so of depleted uranium, though I believe this practice was phased out in later models.
It's not just planes though. Some sailboats have been made with DU keels. Usually lead is used, but DU would presumably allow for a smaller (thinner?) keel.
> Also, slightly unrelated but Cloudflare protected websites are almost impossible to access via tor, the captcha never succeeds.
Yes, I've never understood why it's seemingly so important to CAPTCHA me before serving me less than 100kb of read only plain jane HTML. What sort of "attack" is this stopping? I'm pretty sure the CAPTCHA itself is bigger than half the sites it blocks me from reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to...