Press, 1996); Kenneth Macksey, Technology in War (New York: Prentice Hall, 1986); William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D.1000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). On the continuing danger of nuclear war, see William E. Burrows and Robert Windrem, Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994).
Eric Prokosch, The Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of Antipersonnel Weapons (London: Zed Books, 1995).
Arne Naess, “Why not science for anarchists too? A reply to Feyerabend,” Inquiry, Vol. 18, 1975, pp. 183-194, at p. 192.
Saul Mendlovitz and Rajni Kothari, “The perversion of science and technology: an indictment,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 35, No. 1, January 1979, pp. 57-59, at p. 57.
Even if armed liberation is possible, it may not be a promising road to a better society, since it involves killing, secrecy, centralisation of power and male domination. The armed liberators often become the new oppressors.
Johan Galtung, “Why do disarmament negotiations fail?” Gandhi Marg, nos. 38-39, May-June 1982, pp. 298-307; Johan Galtung, There Are Alternatives! Four Roads to Peace and Security (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1984), pp. 131-138; Alva Myrdal, The Game of Disarmament: How the United States and Russia Run the Arms Race (New York: Pantheon, 1976). Among other factors, disarmament negotiations keep control over the agenda in the hands of the dominant governments and dampen public concern by giving the illusion that something is being done about the problem.
See, for example, Bonn International Center for Conversion, Conversion Survey 1996: Global Disarmament, Demilitarization and Demobilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Seymour Melman, The Demilitarized Society: Disarmament and Conversion (Montreal: Harvest House, 1988); Judith Reppy (ed.), Conversion of Military R&D (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Peter Southwood, Disarming Military Industries: Turning an Outbreak of Peace into an Enduring Legacy (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); and the journal Positive Alternatives, published by the Center for Economic Conversion, 222 View Street, Mountain View CA 94041-1344, USA.
On the topics of policing, prisons and economics from the perspective of social defence, see Brian Martin, Social Defence, Social Change (London: Freedom Press, 1993).
I thank Andreas Speck for emphasising this point. A theoretical foundation for this approach is given by Nicholas Maxwell, who argues that most scientific and scholarly work is based on the “philosophy of knowledge,” which assumes that knowledge is of value in itself. Maxwell argues that the philosophy of knowledge should be replaced by a “philosophy of wisdom,” in which science is directly geared to solve major problems facing humanity, such as poverty, repression and war: Nicholas Maxwell, From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution in the Aims and Methods of Science (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); Nicholas Maxwell, “What kind of inquiry can best help us create a good world?,” Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 17, 1992, pp. 205-227.
Theories of technology are discussed in the appendix. The general model adopted here is that military and other social factors influence but do not determine technology, and that any specific technology is easier to use for some purposes than others.
General treatments of the influence of the military on science and technology include J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1939), chapter
