THE AGE OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL WARFARE.
Science is seen as benign, but around the world the military and the arms industry does much of the world’s most advanced scientific and technical work. Probably a million scientists and technicians are a highly funded elite running the world’s most sophisticated R and D programme. Military science does space, nuclear, ballistics, explosions, ‘intelligence’, materials, flight, metals, propaganda, information, speed, chemical and biological warfare, communications, encryption, logistics and a large number of other specialities where it is at the “edge” of science. Universities, research institutes and special units often receive money directly from governments to “spearhead” much of world science and technology in military directions.
Of course, many scientists see their research as neutral and impartial in relation to the subject matter. That is an important principle, but it does not address the shape of scientific research. For science travels. One discovery leads to another. Money is put into areas of research. It is like a tree which is cut back or has overladen branches. And technology makes demands of science. It creates direction. Ballistics is science and weaponry. Fritz Haber, poison gas, WW1 Gas and the gas chambers are direction. The Atom Bomb led to the H Bomb. WW1 biplanes led through to the F35 costing more than a trillion dollars with a lot of practical science involved.
Overall, Militarism may be the main direction of world science and technology. This is not surprising. WW1 saw about seven years of frenetic build up to war and WW2 ten years of fairly total preoccupation with it. We focus on Alan Turing, the person and mathematician, but he was merely one of a vast number sucked into the military machine. In these periods weapons and war was the fierce focus of almost all scientific research. That continued through the Cold War to 1990 with heavy expenditure and the competitive technical development of weapons which bankrupted the USSR. So, for 60 years of the last century, weapons were heavy drivers of science and technology. We should feel little surprise if it is still dominant.
THE IGNORED BIAS
Of course, this is camouflaged. We see science as neutral, investigating everything openly, and so it partly is in schools and some universities. Scientists look away from this military focus, and pretend it does not exist. But money talks. Research funds, the recruitment of scientists, the technical work where the money is, the companies and webs of military related developments channel recruits into their domain. Both in democracies and dictatorships the weapons’ people find “good” careers and the direction of research is turned towards the required ends and away from normal useful humane science.
We do not easily see this bias. Rockets were sophisticated; bikes were ignored. Explosives were developed; house insulation was slow. Poison gas was opened up, solar energy was unthought. Nuclear bombs were tested round the world; its dangers were slowly investigated. Aircraft carriers were developed, but fresh water carriers were not. Star Wars technology was developed, although it could not work, while the science of trees was underfunded. The pre-occupation with military science and technology had to be right, because we were under threat from someone else’s weapons. The obvious conclusion that threatening science and technology is dumb for all of us was drowned in Cold War propaganda, which carried on even when the Cold War bathwater had drained away. Some scientists protested, but they were drowned out by the System. This great bias was unaddressed and is unaddressed in West and East. Budgets of trillions keep the military science and technology juggernaught expanding.
THE BY-PRODUCT MYTH.
Of course, we were all taught that Teflon, used on rockets, was also great on non-stick frying pans. Military scientific research produced good by-products and was therefore part of useful science. Nuclear weapons research led to useful nuclear power. Most of these arguments are special pleading. Aside the decommissioning problems, we now find that good old windmills do the job better than nuclear power and copper bottomed frying pan does quite well. The big by-product story is space exploration arising from military rockets, which of course it did. The formation of NASA is interesting. Partly, it resulted from the Cold War competition with the USSR’s Spitnuk launch. Partly, it was Werner van Braun’s tortured conscience, but more widely the military rocket people realised that space exploration was a PR coup because space rockets might be useful rather than just destructive. So, the landing on the Moon was related to military research, and has helped astronomical knowledge, but it was also PR for an industry that otherwise had a load of killer rockets in silos and subs which were at best going nowhere. Meanwhile rush hour traffic is unbelievably slow and telescopes tell us a great deal. By-products are usually less important than products, and we should therefore focus not on military technology by-products, but on the central focus of the products which is to kill.
THE TECHNOLOGIES OF KILLING, MAIMING AND DESTROYING.
Really, military scientific and technical research has been directed towards killing and destruction; that is indisputable. It has been successful with 200 million dying through war and weapons. The gas used in WW1 was horrific, and developed by all sides. One and a half billion shells were used in WW1, killing millions and producing PTSD, or shell shock, in tens of millions. Planes were developed where you could push bombs over the side, then bombers, then carpet bombers. Machine guns allowed a hundred to be killed in one spray of firing. In WW2 we had the horrific concentration camp gassing of Jews and other minorities, and finally nuclear weapons arrived where the lucky children who had not been killed held their eyeballs in their hands and tried to put their flesh back. Now we can destroy the human race many times over. They have not yet been used but their purpose is killing. One nuclear bomb wipes out the people in Greater Manchester well into the Pennines.
This death and destruction go right up to the present. The 21st century has seen Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other territories bombed with large loss of life, destruction, tens of millions of refugees, and failed states. The US and UK played a large part in these calamities. Trillions has been spent on these wars and trillions of damage has been done. So, this investment in the advanced technologies of death and destruction has produced its straight line outcome. Now drones will fight instead of soldiers, at vast costs, and conflict in space will add to potential tensions. Improved military technologies are merely more destructive. Technologies of death are what it says on the tin.
THE GREAT COVER-UP.
Except it does not say it on the tin. This vast scientific and technological investment is for death and destruction. It has done what it was for, yet we have the myth. Weapons of death and destruction produce peace and security through “defence”. The weapons people and the scientists would say that wouldn’t they. But let us examine what they say. Since the time of Hannibal or earlier weapons on one side produce weapons on another. A new technology on one side is soon picked up by the other, whether it be chariots, lances, crossbow, longbow, cannon, armour, muskets, rifles, bayonets, radar, dynamite, gun turrets, barrel rifling, explosive shells, gas, mines, torpedoes, nuclear weapons and so on. Whatever one side develops, another side develops. We have had two hundred years of the modern era to work out that wars do not work. All sides lost World War One and World War Two. America was winning in Vietnam and then lost in Vietnam. They won in Iraq and then lost in Iraq. The CIA won in Afghanistan and then faced 9/11 by way of reprisal. What is the point of two sides fighting to death and destruction without learning the lesson? WW1 was the War To End All Wars for obvious reasons, but then it was not. The Great Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932 which could have prevented Hitler coming to power was defeated by the militarists, including those who wanted to work on new planes and ships. Since then the wars have gone on. It requires the intellect of someone banging their head against the wall to see the whole enterprise of competitive military technology is dumb for everyone. But it is not challenged, because at present scientists and technologists compromise with the military establishment and do not challenge the lie.
ENDING THE LIE. THE SCIENTIFIC/TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLT.
The lie is that the next bit of technological development and its supporting science will win the next war. Always the hope is dangled there. Usually, it is unspoken, because explicit it is so silly. Satellites in space will win us the next war, or prevent a war with a power who has also put satellites in space. All the moves have the same character as giving two boys who are quarrelling a bigger gun each to help sort out their quarrel. Even thick aristocrats quit duels a couple of centuries back. Wars do not work, but the arms companies keep persuading us that it is the “way forward”., simply because they make the money and they have the technologies. They would say that wouldn’t they, backed by the militaries. They tame politicians, demanding loyalty through blind patriotism and we do weapons, war, weapons, war, decade after decade, destroying the planet, messing up the lives of hundreds of millions and wasting science and technology on death and destruction. This oh so dumb ritual of scientific genocide scientists must address. They should, and can, close it down. They cannot take the militarists’ dollar and abjectly do death and destruction, and redesign national budgets. There is no military technological breakthrough. We are trillions better off without fighting. World Multilateral Disarmament is easier than WMD. Scientists and technicians should revolt, en masse, against this prostitution of their purposes and do good.
It is time for the scientific rebellion. Military science and technology is destroying the planet through global warming, war, threats and mega military technology. It is time to stop and disown this direction simply because it kills people and offers a false hope. Some will have split loyalties, but those can be resolved. The detailed stance against this scientific/technical power needs some thought, and here is not the place to do it, but scientists can fight, without weapons, and develop strategies to win. The glorious truth is that winning this one harms no-one and benefits us all.