Phase Two outrage

[dragonfly]

I was rewatching Avengers and it occurred to me to wonder why Captain America, of all people, showed any outrage on discovering that SHIELD was trying to create weaponry out of tesseract technology. Stark, yes, we know about his about-face wrt selling weapons technology. Banner spent a lot of time trying not to be a weapon for the U.S. military, so he makes sense, too. But Captain America was involved in a nearly-global conflict where superior technology was coveted and prized and it wasn't at all obvious that the good guys were going to win. I now blink at that scene where he slams some gun-thing down on the table and confronts Fury with what Phase Two was. I'm really not convinced he should be that upset.

On an unrelated note, it appears that plastic didn't have widespread use until the 1950s. So Cap came from a world before plastic. FWIW.

Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114331762

Could I have a "context:technology" tag?

Comments

[liviapenn]

I think the problem was that SHIELD was potentially making weapons of *mass destruction* with the Tesseract, not just better versions of battlefield weapons that Steve would already be familiar with, like rifles or tanks.

SHIELD's justification is that humanity needs weapons that are powerful enough to go up against enemies like the Hulk or Asgardians or other "heightened" threats, which can't be fought with the current level of technology... but I don't think Steve is naive enough to believe that, once these weapons exist, SHIELD (or its individual nation members) wouldn't find some excuse to deploy them against "conventional" armies made of human soldiers. (Or even civilian populations, like how the security council decided that it was ok to use nuclear weapons in NYC in order to stop the Chitauri.)

[brownbetty]

I read a story where Cap is wrapping someone's broken arm in a plastic bag, so they can take a shower, and he says he learnt it taking care of Bucky, and I went "... that seems off," but good to know that my vague sense of the history of plastics is correct.

I tend to agree with you that from Steve Rogers' point of view, science is a lot less suspect: you could easily argue that if it weren't for the Super Soldier experiment, he had a pretty foreshortened life-expectancy. (I can't find the screen-cap, but I think he has asthma, a heart murmur, and like five other possibly life-threatening conditions.) Science saved his life!

Also, keep in mind, when he finds the super-duper ray-guns that Hydra is using, the Commandos nab a couple and keep using them for the rest of the film. There doesn't seem to be any kind of idea that the technology itself is inherently suspect because of its source.

I think re: phase two, it would depend on how much of the history of the world since WWII Steve is aware of. Is he aware that the allies bombed civilian targets even during the war? (There's no reason he would, I don't think. They weren't exactly putting that stuff in the newsreels. Not just Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also things like bombing Dresden) Is he aware of the Tuskegee experiment, or even the Marvel Universe fictionalized analogue, the experiment Isaiah Bradley participated in?

If he's aware of some of the atrocities science has been involved with, though, he might feel that science has reneged on its promise. There are no flying cars, and he might have thought that once the war was over, science could turn its attention to making things better, but they're still using Hydra's old guns to shoot people.

A possible fanwank, at least.

[ellid]

Depends on the definition of plastic. *Vinyl* is new, but Bakelite was invented in 1907 and was commercially available by the 1920s.

[ellid]

I think at least part of it is that he's furious that once again, SHIELD has lied to him.