entire book - Chris Hables Gray

Future Peace [ 229 ]
On the other hand, most Marxists still argue that Marxism is
scientific, although there are exceptions (see Fee, 1986). Marxism-asscience
is a claim that has even convinced some scientists. Between the
World Wars many prominent British scientists were Marxists, such as
J. B. Haldane and J. D. Bernal, and they even went so far as to argue that
future science could only be communist. Stalinist science policy, as
exemplified by the Lysenko affair, eventually dissuaded them of this
particular delusion. But, in general, it seems illusions about science's
total applicability led these ex-Stalinist scientists to continue their
arguments for the scientific management of society and for the expansion
of science into politics in all its forms, especially warmaking.
Ironically, the well-organized antimilitarist groups of scientists, such as
the Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group and the Association of Scientific
Workers (ASW) in Britain, were led by Bernal and others into the heart of
the British war effort in the late 1930s. The leadership of the ASW even
collected a list of scientists willing to do war work, despite numerous protests
from scientists with more consistent antiwar politics. Finally, the ASW came
to the contradictory conclusion that while "war [is] the supreme perversion
of science" the danger of "anti-democratic movements" which were a threat
to "the very existence of science" meant that "we are prepared to organize
for defence" (McGucken, 1984, p. 159). For them, a perverted science is
better than no science at all.
Many U.S. scientists also campaigned for a greater role in government
decision making, especially on military issues. Along with access to policy
making, the scientists usually proposed scientist-controlled institutions to
hand out government money. They wanted money without accountability,
which didn't happen except in limited cases such as the National Science
Foundation. Usually scientists did get lots of money, but at the price of
becoming accountable to the military.
Is it any wonder that science has survived, indeed triumphed, in today's
perverse form? Well-meaning radical scientists played a major role in the
creation of the postmodern war system through the application of scientific
methods to social and military processes (Hales, 1974). It was under the
mistaken impression that the Nazis were close to developing atomic bombs
that a number of antimilitarist, even pacifist, scientists conceived and created
the first atomic bombs, unleashing the possibility of annihilation upon the
world. That the advances of science and the developments of war may have
led to our present situation anyway does not lesson the guilt of the physicists,
as many freely admitted. Even J. Robert Oppenheimer said, "Physicists have
now known sin."
Still, he didn't feel that guilty. Witness his postwar advocacy of tactical
nuclear weapons as a counterweight to development of the hydrogen bomb
being pushed by Edward Teller and John von Neumann. Oppenheimer's