On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein sent a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt which said in part:
{Source] In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -- that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
Thus, the Manhattan Project was born. And the United States developed the atomic bomb before Germany or the USSR.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched a tiny beeping ball into orbit. Again American ingenuity was brought to bear. President John F. Kennedy upped the ante in September 1962 saying:
[Source] Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first ... We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard ...
A few years later, the world watched as the mighty Saturn V hurled a tiny capsule called Apollo 11 to the Sea of Tranquility, and one small step for man turned into one giant leap for mankind.
On September 11, 2001, we were no longer Republicans or Democrats, black or white, poor or wealthy. On that day we were Americans. On that day and for months after, we would have done anything our leaders asked of us. What did our President advise? Handed the greatest opportunity for leadership since Pearl Harbor, George Bush alternated between telling us to buy stuff and visit Disney World, while spooking an anxious nation in to a war against people that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. How different might it have been, had George Bush followed in the footstep of FDR or John Kennedy? What might have transpired had he chosen to spend that costly endowment of unity differently? We'll never know. And here we are.
[Seattle Times] America's unchecked appetite for oil is seriously jeopardizing U.S. security, despite the billions of dollars the U.S. spends to safeguard steady access to cheap oil. Americans spend $1 billion every weekday on imported oil. Many of those dollars are used to frustrate critical U.S. diplomatic goals, underwrite terrorist organizations and finance jihadist movements in the Middle East and southern Asia.
The energy problem is, at its core, a scientific and engineering problem. And America knows how to solve scientific and engineering problems better than any country in history. We still have the talent, we still have the resources, we still have the spirit, just as we did in WW2 or the space race. If anything, we have more. What we lack is leadership.