Authoritarian science
Where substantive criticism of the US government is strictly off-limits
During COVID, the US rulers introduced the premise that questioning the effectiveness of any vaccine was a threat to public health. In an extreme measure, US rulers even went so far as to declare such speech a terrorist activity. As many have argued, the suppression of discussion of COVID vaccination short-circuited the scientific process. As a result, the devastating array of adverse effects from this vaccination were effectively hidden from the American public.1
A similar dynamic has led the American public to falsely believe that the childhood vaccination schedule has been studied robustly for safety. Even more egregiously, the public is largely unaware of the deeply troubling association between childhood vaccination and autism.2
The absence of scientific debate on the feasibility of nuclear weapons is even more conspicuous; there has never been a scientific debate about the feasibility of nuclear weapons. The US government simply announced that nuclear weapons exist and that was the end of the story.3 Publishers, including social media, dutifully do their part to shut down such discussion including a recent thread on this topic.4
A robust discussion of the feasibility of nuclear weapons would reveal that there really is no scientific reason to believe in the existence of nuclear weapons - especially with respect to the essential claim of that extremely high reaction rates are achievable in highly enriched uranium.5 The relevant scientific literature boils down to a handful of studies that imply the feasibility of nuclear weapons by extrapolation - over about 8 orders of magnitude - of the experimental findings from small-scale nuclear chain reactions.6
The question is: Why does all scientific discourse begin and end with the presumption of the fundamental goodness of the US government? Why is it unthinkable, in the course of scientific debate, to suggest malfeasance of the US government? Why are dissident scientific views dismissed as conspiracy theories? In a word, why does the US government dictate what scientists can and cannot say?