enormously strong influence on what technologies are actually developed. Military budgets for research and development (R&D) around the world are huge. They have resulted in an amazing array of powerful and sophisticated weapons, from land mines to aircraft carriers.
Occasionally military funding leads to ideas, methods or products that are useful for civilian purposes. For example, the computer network called Internet grew out of a network set up by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). However, examples like this are quite compatible with the idea that military funding is a powerful way of shaping technologies. The influence of funding simply makes it more likely — not inevitable — that the resulting technologies will be mainly useful for military purposes.
“Funding” is a shorthand for a more complex process which can be called “military technological innovation.”[3] There are studies of how military and political elites steer the process of deciding upon, developing and deploying military technologies. This research provides insight into the specific features of military technological innovation in different countries and situations; it is fully compatible with the basic idea that military funding promotes and shapes technology to serve military purposes.
The military is always on the lookout for anything that can be used for its advantage. There is money to develop techniques and products. The possibility of applications has an influence on R&D, by encouraging at least some researchers to pursue areas where applications are more likely. For example, some researchers in pure mathematics are more likely to work in areas where there are possible applications. These applications might be computational methods, theoretical chemistry, energy conservation or ballistics.
Sometimes entire fields are shaped by military priorities. An obvious example is nuclear physics, which has received heavy military funding and provided jobs for many researchers. Furthermore, in several countries governments pursued nuclear power programmes as a means of keeping open the option of acquiring nuclear weapons or (in the US “Atoms for Peace” programme) to reposition nuclear technology as “peaceful.” The priority on nuclear weapons and nuclear power has meant that non-military nuclear physics, carried out in universities, has had a higher priority than otherwise would have been the case. Military researchers have been ready to take advantage of any advance from university research. Without the military and commercial interest in nuclear technology, it is likely that other branches of physics such as solar physics would have received greater attention.
Microelectronics and computing are other fields that were, for many years, driven by military applications.[4] For example, the development of sophisticated nuclear weapons makes heavy demands on computer power. In the early decades of nuclear weapons, the US nuclear weapons design laboratories — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory — worked closely with computer manufacturers to develop machines serving their particular requirements for high-speed numerical computation, and in some cases purchased a large proportion of the resulting production runs. Some of the choices in the architecture of supercomputers consequently reflect military influences. [5]
Since the development of computers, the field of numerical analysis — which, in part, deals with ways to solve problems using computers — has dramatically expanded, and there are areas of pure mathematics that take up esoteric questions related to numerical analysis. Thus, the development of computers has influenced the research priorities of some mathematicians; in turn, pure mathematics research relating to numerical analysis occasionally leads to results that have practical value.
In this way, possible applications influence the direction of research. Military applications are one such application. Thus, although most pure mathematicians do not have military applications directly in mind, their work may be oriented in directions making it more likely to serve military purposes.
The large amount of US military funding for electronics in the years after World War II actually led to few transfers for civilian uses.[6] In recent years, commercial uses have played a larger role in microelectronics research. Commercialisation is even a goal for some military-funded research.[7]
In the case of the insecticide DDT during World War II, military applications served to accelerate research in one particular direction. As a result of the emphasis on short-term control of insect pests by chemicals to support the war effort, research into biological control of pests declined rapidly, institutionalising a pattern that has persisted long after commercial interests became the primary influence on pesticide research.[8]
The social science field of communication studies in the United States was shaped by massive military funding and military agendas, especially in the early years 1945-1960. The military’s interest in the field derived from interest in psychological warfare which — in military terms — included not just propaganda but also techniques such as deception, “dirty tricks,” assassination, and terrorism. This context was omitted from the academic face of communication studies. Leading researchers and research centres received massive military grants. Major military studies were often later published in academic forums, usually without acknowledgement of their link to the military. Communication research was oriented to the goals of domination and manipulation of mass audiences. The development and use of now-standard survey techniques also reflected military priorities.[9]
Similarly, research in educational technology in the US has been heavily funded by the military, with military priorities of developing man-machine systems. Douglas Noble argues that computers in classrooms and computer- related procedures are not neutral tools, but rather reflect military goals. For example, when educational institutions operate in terms of “instructional delivery systems,” this can be said to reflect a military interest in command and control.[10]
It is worth emphasising that military shaping of science and technology can occur even when researchers themselves do not realise that military funding or applications are influencing their work. It is always possible to debate the true purpose of any research. For example, in military research on biological agents, military scientists and administrators may perceive or portray the research as “defensive” — designed to counter biological weapons of opponents — whereas outsiders may believe the research is a prelude to (offensive) biological warfare.[11] This “ambiguity of research” is always present to some degree, since any technology can be used for a variety of purposes, though more easily for some purposes than others.
In the following example, “pure” research is taken up by the military.
I did my PhD on the theory of dense plasma — the hot, ionised gas found at the centre of the sun and red giant stars. The work involved the calculation of the spatial correlations between the electrons and atomic nuclei making up this plasma. The calculations could be done mathematically rather than on a computer, but the work was esoteric, painstaking and even a little tedious.
En route to take up a postdoctoral position in London, I stopped over at the University of California in Berkeley to visit one of my thesis examiners. He congratulated me on the thesis, and then remarked, ‘My colleagues at Livermore are finding it very useful for their calculations of what happens at the centre of a hydrogen bomb explosion.’
Aware that Livermore is a design laboratory for nuclear weapons, I replied: ‘Surely not! I thought of that possibility, but discarded it. My calculations are only valid for equilibrium systems. A hydrogen bomb explosion is not in equilibrium.’
‘Aha!’ he said. ‘Of course the Livermore group use enormous computer programs to do their non-equilibrium calculations. But they need to check these highly complex programs by means of mathematical solutions in special cases. Your calculations are playing that role.’
A feature of this example from my youthful innocence was that the nuclear weapons scientists were already using my calculations before they had been published. But the main scientific application of my thesis which I wished to see utilised, the correction of an error in existing models of the solar interior, was only adopted three or four years later.[12]
Such personal concern to avoid military uses for one’s research is not that common. Much more typical is a concern to do good science and not worry about applications. Seldom, though, is it expressed as bluntly as by a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “What I’m designing may one day be used to kill millions of people ... I don’t care. That’s not my responsibility. I’m given an interesting technological problem and I get enjoyment out of solving it.”[13]
Militaries need to ensure that weapons systems work as desired. Therefore, they set up systems to ensure compliance to military specifications, or simply order certain products or services that fit such specifications. These
