entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 234 ] The Future
every sort, such strength that the appalling costs of preparation can be
paid without wrecking the system that produces them, such mounting
strength that armed prosperity can proceed to more arms and more
prosperity, (p. 120)
Bush became a central proponent of preparedness and of militarized science,
although with many reservations. His was probably the mainstream response,
but not all computer scientists agreed with him. Two of the most important
"fathers" of computation, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, both of
Hungarian-Jewish descent, took substantially different positions from Bush
toward science and war, Wiener was almost a pacifist while von Neumann
was particularly prowar. Comparing their postwar careers we can see how
antiwar scientists have been marginalized politically even as their discoveries
were being applied militarily whereas prowar scientists have been integrated
into the highest levels of political power while claiming to be nothing more
than objective experts without politics. 2
When von Neumann was invited to join the FAS board he declined,
claiming to have avoided "all participation in public activities, which are not
of a purely technical nature." When invited again he wrote, "I do not want
to appear in public in a not primarily technical context" (quoted in Heims,
1980, p. 235). This is the man who in arguing for the hydrogen bomb the
year before had said, "I don't think any weapon can be too large" (p. 236).
Even as early as 1946 he went out of his way to view the first postwar atomic
tests, Operation Crossroad, which FAS objected strenuously to. He was
hardly adverse to shaping military-political policy either: he met with Teller
"immediately after they learned the news of the Soviet [atomic] bomb and
discussed not whether but how to get political backing for an accelerated
superbomb program" (pp. 240-247).
Norbert Wiener, the founder of the field of cybernetics, did substantial
war work at MIT, but by the end of World War II he had decided that he
would refrain from any further research with military applications. At the
end of 1946 he said, "I do not expect to publish any future work of mine
which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists" (p. 208).
By 1950 von Neumann was advocating preventive war. "If you say why
not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock,
I say why not one o'clock?" (p. 247) In the early 1950s he chaired the
committee that justified the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles
(ICBMs), starting with the Atlas.
Steven Heims, whose fascinating double biography of Wiener and von
Neumann is subtitled From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death,
concludes that this was a "deep failure":
On their own terms, the Atlas missile and its successors were greatly
successful, like the hydrogen bomb before them. But when one recognizes,