It used to be that in the simpler days of overstuffed chairs and musty men's clubs, thoughts of war turned to battlefield strategies, martial grandeur, unified purposes, and now-curious words like valor. Battle was bloody all right, and the suffering horrid beyond description. But civilians and the military usually were dying for a high cause. So it all seemed to be worth the gore. Today war is different. It is in many ways the handiwork of research and development fantasies transmuted to high-tech hardware. It is annihilation by pushbutton, or if nonnuclear, the screeches and blasts of armor-piercing rocketry. It is the deployment of doomsday machines, MX's, and SS-20 missiles. It is Trident missiles, Backfire bombers, and laser weaponry. It is above all, hypersonic chaos. And it is increasingly a new call to conscience among the scientific and technological community—the subculture which has so much a hand in developing the new weaponry. Many military strategists ...