Science and Technology Studies and the Question of the Military

Abstract

In the first half of the 1980s the United States has spent a trillion dollars on defence. Astrophysicists may have an intuitive sense of the meaning of 1012. I can grasp the figure only by translating it into human terms. It works out at $1,000 (around ?700 at current exchange rates) for each of the poorest billion people on earth surely enough, if wisely spent, to banish famine and endemic disease. Since 1980, the US defence budget has risen by 51 percent in real terms (taking inflation into account), the research and development budget by 56 percent and the procurement budget by 91 percent. One single defence project, President Reagan's 'Star Wars' Strategic Defense Initiative, will, if pursued, cost of the order of a trillion dollars on its own. While it is questionable whether Soviet defence spending exceeds that of the United States, it certainly forms a larger part of a considerably smaller economy. And, lest the reader feel these words are written with smug West European superiority, it is worth noting that over half British government research and development funding is devoted to defence, a proportion which certainly far exceeds those in other Western European nations. It is indeed probable that the proportion of research and development devoted to defence in the UK is the highest of any major nation apart from the Soviet Union. 1 What does all this money buy? Patently not security. The flexing of military muscle against much weaker foes has, it is true, recently reinvigorated some atavistic feelings in television audiences in Britain and the United States. One commentator writes of the age of the Falklands/Malvinas war and the invasion of Grenada as 'spectator-sport militarism' :2 great lengths are now gone to in order to avoid disturbing the warm patriotic glow by allowing gory human consequences to be seen as they were in Vietnam days. But this aside, it is hardly necessary to