entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 230 ] The Future
general evasion of responsibility, famous public quotations such as the one
above notwithstanding, can be seen in this letter in 1946 to Vannevar Bush
defending the general amnesty given to German scientists and their recruitment
into the U.S. military-research apparatus (while a similar integration
was taking place on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain with the scientists
they had captured):
You and I both know that it is not primarily men of science who are
dangerous, but the policies of Governments which lead to aggression and
to war. You and I both know that if the German scientists are treated as
enemies of society, the scientists of this country will soon be so regarded,
(quoted in Kevles, 1987, p. 338)
This begs the question: sure, atomic bombs don't kill people, people kill
people, but do you give atomic bombs to killers?
By the end of World War II many scientists congratulated themselves
on science's integration into government. Some, such as the technocrat
physicist Arthur Holly Compton, a Nobel laureate, thought that all of culture
should be subordinated to science. He argued that "Only those features of
society can survive which adapt men to life under the conditions of growing
science and technology" (quoted in Sherry, 1977, p. 128)
Scientists also began pushing for a more worldwide policy role for
scientists through the World Federation of Scientific Workers, founded in
1946, and UNESCO, whose first director was Julian Huxley, a leading British
liberal. Most capitalist and communist scientists were equally enthusiastic
about this alliance. Since 1946 there has been an unprecedented number of
scientists in public policy positions. What's seldom discussed about these
scientist-politicians is that one of the main reasons they have a voice in
public affairs is because of their ability to make weapons. But this is not
surprising. In many ways war is the dirty secret of science.
Consider how brief the treatment of this relationship is in philosophy.
Such famous philosophers of science as Thomas Kuhn, Hilary Putnum, and
even the dada-anarchist Paul Feyerabend hardly ever confronted it. In
computer science, a discipline mothered and fathered by war and the military,
philosophical works like Margaret Boden's ignore this genealogy altogether;
which is all the more startling when one considers how open and debated it
is among computer scientists themselves. But there are exceptions. David
Dickson's The New Politics of Science (1984) is an excellent overview of U.S.
Cold War science. Not only does he always keep the militarized context of
late-twentieth-century U.S. science clear, but he also situates it within an
intense capitalistic discourse that turns individual scientists, government
agencies, and nonprofit universities into profit-seeking organizations for all
intents and purposes.