Fogbank and the virtues of open source warfare

This is a fascinating story of "lost knowledge" as nuclear warhead technologies go walkabout:

Knowledge can be lost. Sometimes this is perfectly reasonable: No one knows how to kill and skin a mastodon anymore, for obvious reasons. And cultures frequently lose knowledge as they evolve past it--you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who could write a computer program on punch-cards today. But there is something worrisome about misplacing knowledge that is only a generation or two old. And this happens more often than you might think.

"You know the old saying about 'If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we cure cancer, have world peace, whatever?' " muses Rand Simberg, a former Rockwell manager and now an aerospace consultant. "Space enthusiasts say, 'If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put a man on the moon?' "

One more convincing reason, perhaps, for society to share as much of what it knows with as many people as possible.

But open source warfare? A curious idea if there ever was one. Just think how quickly the science of warfare could develop if the principles of the open source software movement could be applied to its advancement.

If, that is, advancement is the word we should rightly use here.