XII
Preface
catastrophic consequences, the connections between science, technology and
armaments concern all who go into science or technology or who practice
them. They have been governed for half a century by the existence of public
organisations and private enterprises whose function is the systematic transformation of scientific and technological progress into military progress within
the limits, often elastic, of the economic capacities of the various countries
which take part in it:
With the attention which is paid in these days to weapons of war, there is
probably no known scientific principle that has not already been carefully
scrutinized to see whether it is of any significance for defence l3 .
In countries - France is a prime example - where discussions on the
relations between Science and Defence have been dominated for decades first
by silence, then by a thick consensus 14 , and have been totally absent from
university teaching 15 , the thing to say to young people is that one of the forms
of intellectual liberty is not to let oneself be dominated by the dominant ideas.
But this requires access to other information sources. It would be impossible to thoroughly discuss this subject and its history within the framework of
a mathematical treatise. I nevertheless decided to write a few dozen pages -
the Post face to Volume II - in order to give the interested reader an idea of it
and, in particular, to show that the question and the subject do exist. I have
not balked at citing a good number of important bibliographical references
13 Sir Solly Zuckerman, Scientists and War (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1962,
p. 80); the author was at the time the British Government chief scientist and
had formerly been the head of British military research. There is no reason to
believe that Zuckerman's statement is no longer valid, particularly in America.
14 "Science et Defense" is the title of a French association founded in 1983 by
Charles Hernu, then the (socialist) Secretary of Defence and future hero of the
Greenpeace affair - the clumsy sinking in Auckland harbour by French agents of
a ship that would have interfered with a French nuclear test in the Pacific. Supported by the Armament branch of Defence, the association organises a yearly
congress, where, over two days, engineers and scientists lecture on the technical problems of armaments and the closely related sciences. Several hundreds
of people attend: military, engineers, industrialists, scientists, and, inevitably,
political scientists and metaphysicians of strategy. France is, to my knowledge,
the only country where what a number of American historians now call the
scientific-military-industrial complex dares to exhibit itself so publicly and without provoking the least reaction. This would not have been possible before the
conversion of the Socialist and Communist parties to nuclear weapons when, at
the end of the 1970s, they saw a good prospect of winning the 1981 presidential
election.
15 America was, in the 1970s, a notable exception to this general statement: student protests against the Vietnam war and the cooperation of many university
departments or laboratories with the DoD led some universities to add to their
curriculum lectures on various aspects of "Science and Society" that attracted a
sizeable number of science students, while some teachers in the history of science
saw their audience suddenly grow. Although the traditional back to normal process did not take very long, many of the present generation of specialists found
their calling during this period.
Preface
catastrophic consequences, the connections between science, technology and
armaments concern all who go into science or technology or who practice
them. They have been governed for half a century by the existence of public
organisations and private enterprises whose function is the systematic transformation of scientific and technological progress into military progress within
the limits, often elastic, of the economic capacities of the various countries
which take part in it:
With the attention which is paid in these days to weapons of war, there is
probably no known scientific principle that has not already been carefully
scrutinized to see whether it is of any significance for defence l3 .
In countries - France is a prime example - where discussions on the
relations between Science and Defence have been dominated for decades first
by silence, then by a thick consensus 14 , and have been totally absent from
university teaching 15 , the thing to say to young people is that one of the forms
of intellectual liberty is not to let oneself be dominated by the dominant ideas.
But this requires access to other information sources. It would be impossible to thoroughly discuss this subject and its history within the framework of
a mathematical treatise. I nevertheless decided to write a few dozen pages -
the Post face to Volume II - in order to give the interested reader an idea of it
and, in particular, to show that the question and the subject do exist. I have
not balked at citing a good number of important bibliographical references
13 Sir Solly Zuckerman, Scientists and War (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1962,
p. 80); the author was at the time the British Government chief scientist and
had formerly been the head of British military research. There is no reason to
believe that Zuckerman's statement is no longer valid, particularly in America.
14 "Science et Defense" is the title of a French association founded in 1983 by
Charles Hernu, then the (socialist) Secretary of Defence and future hero of the
Greenpeace affair - the clumsy sinking in Auckland harbour by French agents of
a ship that would have interfered with a French nuclear test in the Pacific. Supported by the Armament branch of Defence, the association organises a yearly
congress, where, over two days, engineers and scientists lecture on the technical problems of armaments and the closely related sciences. Several hundreds
of people attend: military, engineers, industrialists, scientists, and, inevitably,
political scientists and metaphysicians of strategy. France is, to my knowledge,
the only country where what a number of American historians now call the
scientific-military-industrial complex dares to exhibit itself so publicly and without provoking the least reaction. This would not have been possible before the
conversion of the Socialist and Communist parties to nuclear weapons when, at
the end of the 1970s, they saw a good prospect of winning the 1981 presidential
election.
15 America was, in the 1970s, a notable exception to this general statement: student protests against the Vietnam war and the cooperation of many university
departments or laboratories with the DoD led some universities to add to their
curriculum lectures on various aspects of "Science and Society" that attracted a
sizeable number of science students, while some teachers in the history of science
saw their audience suddenly grow. Although the traditional back to normal process did not take very long, many of the present generation of specialists found
their calling during this period.