A 1930s RCA engineer conceived the kamikaze as the drone’s distant ancestor

Evidence

In the mid-1930s, an engineer working for the RCA read an article about the Japanese army that greatly alarmed him. From that article he learned that the Japanese were training squadrons of pilots for suicide aircraft. Long before the tragic surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Vladimir Zworykin understood the scale of this threat: “The efficiency of this method, of course, is yet to be proven but if such a psychological training of personnel is possible, this weapon will be of the most dangerous nature. We hardly can expect to introduce such methods in our country and therefore have to rely on our technical superiority to meet the difficulty.” At that time the United States already possessed prototypes of “radio-controlled planes” that could be used as air torpedoes. Bur the problem was that these remote-controlled devices were blind. Noted Zworykin, “They lose their efficiency as soon as they are beyond visual contact with the directing base. The solution to this problem was evidently found by the Japanese.” That solution was the kamikaze: since the pilot has eyes and is ready to die, he is able to guide the machine right to its target. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 314

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Kamikaze and drone emerged simultaneously, not sequentially; The kamikaze and drone emerged simultaneously as opposed tactics

Related

• Kamikaze and drone emerged simultaneously, not sequentially (similarity 0.94)
• The kamikaze and drone emerged simultaneously as opposed tactics (similarity 0.88)
• The suicide weapon and the drone emerged together, not in sequence (similarity 0.82)
• Remote-controlled machines were proposed as a third option beyond protected men or autonomous machines (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The kamikaze and drone emerged simultaneously as opposed tactics #contradicts (0.60)