entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 232 ] The Future
There have always been objections to linking what many described as
a quest for knowledge with improving the killing of fellow humans. Although
he served Cesare Borgia and later King Louis XII of France as a military
engineer, Leonardo da Vinci explained that he wouldn't even describe his
ideas for submarines in his secret notebooks because "of the evil nature of
men, who would practice assassinations at the bottom of the seas by breaking
the ships in their lowest parts and sinking them together with the crews who
are in them" (quoted in Brodie, 1973, p. 239). Niccolo Tartaglia, the author
of the first scientific study of gunnery, called simply enough Nuova Sdenzia
(1537), claimed that he was going to keep his work secret because "it was a
thing blameworthy, shameful and barbarous, worthy of severe punishment
before God and man, to wish to bring to perfection an art damageable to
one's neighbor and destructive of the human race" (quoted in Brodie, 1973,
p. 240). But later he changed his mind. He asserted that was because Italy
was being menaced by Turkey, but why did he do the study in the first place?
John Napier, the Scottish inventor of logarithms in the early seventeenth
century, feared a Catholic invasion of Britain, so he designed a tank
and a gigantic cannon. However, he never revealed the details of his
inventions because there were already too many "devices" for "the ruin and
overthrow of man" (p. 243).
Even in 1945 such reservations were still heard, but to little effect.
Social Responsibility and Computer Scientists
Within weeks of the obliteration of Hiroshima, scientists from the Manhattan
Project were organizing "to promote the attainment and use of scientific
and technological advances in the best interest of humanity." They formed
the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS) with other newly established
scientists' groups and began publishing the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
(Heims, 1980, p. 233). They also initiated the Pugwash Conferences, named
after the town in Nova Scotia where they first met. In 1995 the Pugwash
group was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But over the years scientists have
been far from united.
The political divisions among physicists in the post-World War II period
are well known: they ranged from Albert Einstein's pacifism to Edward
Teller's militarism, and included the uproar over Oppenheimer's losing battle
with McCarthyism. However, physics wasn't the only discipline where this
drama took place. Computer science had its own martyr in Alan Turing,
probably hounded to suicide by the British authorities because of his homosexuality.
1 And computer science has had its warlords as well, such as the
analog expert Vannevar Bush, who directed the Office of Scientific Research
and Development.
Bush is particularly interesting because he was directly and philosophi-