How a Hollywood film reveals the reality of drone warfare
As Helen Mirren's new film Eye in the Sky is released, an expert reflects on the morality of how and when to use drones in warG avin Hood's film Eye in the "Sky is a thrillingly intelligent exploration of the political and ethical questions surrounding drone warfare. It has been carefully researched and is on the cutting edge of what is currently possible. (Full disclosure: I offered the screenwriter early advice.) But there's a longer history and a wider geography that casts those issues in a different light.
As soon as the Wright brothers demonstrated the possibility of human flight, others were busy imagining flying machines with nobody on board. In 1910 the engineer Raymond Phillips captivated crowds in the London Hippodrome with a remotely controlled airship that floated out over the stalls and, when he pressed a switch, released hundreds of paper birds on to the heads of the audience below. When he built the real thing, he promised, the birds would be replaced with bombs. Sitting safely in London he could attack Paris or Berlin.
Continue reading...