entire book - Chris Hables Gray

Scientists and War
Future Peace [ 231 ]
The relationship between scientific discovery, technological invention and
war has varied, as even a quicloand-dirty history shows. In ancient times
Archimedes refused to reveal the details of the engines of war he invented
to defend his mother city, Syracuse, from the Romans. Earlier, the wheel was
used on toys for hundreds of years before it was used on chariots. In China,
gunpowder was for fireworks, not killing (Mumford, 1934, p. 84). War was
only indirectly effected by discovery and innovation, except at those times
when a new weapon or technology would revolutionize warfare completely.
The Bronze Age became Iron as the stronger metal bested the earlier one.
Chariots swept the ancient Middle East; Sun Tzu's subtle and codified
insights into war allowed the State of Wu to dominate the Middle Kingdom;
and English long bows cut down French knights in the Middle Ages. But
after each innovation stability would quickly return. New methods often
took hundreds of years before they were even applied to war.
In large part this is because war is such a strong cultural force. It often
resisted the introduction of effective killing technologies for many years
because they didn't fit the war discourse of the time. Even as recently as the
seventeenth century in Japan, the warrior caste (samurai) succeeded in
banning guns from 1637 to 1867 (Perrin, 1979).
Some have even argued that war and progress (technological and
scientific) have been inexorably linked through the ages. There is much
evidence to contradict this as a historical analysis, as John Nef shows in his
book War and Human Progress, but the relationship of "progress" (technological
and scientific) and war today is almost symbiotic. Perhaps as many as
half of all engineers and scientists in the United States work for the military
and in accord with military priorities (Nef, 1963; D. Dickson, 1984). Worldwide
there are probably half a million scientists and engineers working on
military problems (D. Dickson, 1984, p. 108).
The recent militarization of science is quite a change from the earlier
relationship. Greek philosophy disdained war or anything practical. Roman
engineering certainly focused on the needs of empire, but what we now call
science (then still called philosophy) was hardly militarized. It was at the
beginning of the modern era that this began to change significantly. The
physics of cannonballs framed many of Galileo's questions, and the first major
commercial product of optics was military telescopes.
Still, science was not focused on war even as war began to focus on
science. Only 10 percent of the members of the early Royal Society did war
work. The number is at least four times higher now (Ziman, 1976, p. 11). And
todays technoscience is much more powerful than the earlier alliance of
engineering brotherhoods, mechanics, alchemists, natural philosophers, and
mathematicians who founded modern science.