Military-industrial complex

Notwithstanding her economic difficulties, Britain continued to maintain a considerable scientific-military-industrial complex after the war. The Attlee government committed Britain to a major nuclear research and development programme, which limited the supply of scientific and technical labour available for other projects, including guided missiles. 

Haber was the patron saint of guns and butter. He was a founder of the military-industrial complex and the inventor of the chemistry through which the world now feeds itself. 

Werke concentration camp on the outskirts of Auschwitz, comparable to the rocket-building labor camp at Peenemunde that hosts one of Pyn-chon s set-pieces in Gravity s Rainbow. Seed says that Pynchon concentrates on IG as a process, a steady relentless agglomeration of power through mergers, takeovers and contracts [...] IG becomes the model of the totalitarian state . It is, indeed, the prototype of the modem military-industrial complex but one in which the tentacles of power are entwined with elements of the occult and chthonic. 

But again this seems simplistic. It is tme that P mchon expresses a profound distaste for the military-industrial complex he has said that. 

We can ask what did interest people who went to hear Faraday or his contemporaries, and it was clearly not only ideas but also facts. Lectures at the Royal Institution included much on explosives and weapons - the military-industrial complex of Eisenhower s famous speech went back a hundred years or so. Poisons, like explosions, have also always drawn audiences, who might not have gone to hear August Hofinann talk about molecular structures, even though he had croquet balls and rods as his visual aids. In the mid twentieth century, young Oliver Sacks delighted in chemistry, practical and factual, which helped him focus his life in wartime London (Sacks 2001). He, and people like me a little later, learned chemistry not so very different from that of the late nineteenth century, and often in laboratories of that date definitely hands-on. 

Triplett WC. A look at Asia past and present Inside China s scary new military-industrial complex. Washington Post. 8 May 1994 C3. 

This section identifies some of the other military munitions sites likely to be excluded from official lists but which are problematic nevertheless. As explained previously, the modem relationships in the military-industrial complex prevent World War II and later manufacturing sites from being included as military FUDS. For the reasons listed, this was not true in World War I, and these sites will be missed in the military survey. 

However, it is less well known why men of science abandoned their commitments to intemationality and communality - values which, while often honoured more in the breach than the observance, had served usefully in the conduct of European science for over a century. Indisputably, scientists became crusaders, overtaking political and military leaders in their zeal to apply science to the war effort. Nowhere was this feature so pronounced as in chemistry. In the United States, a new willingness on the part of scientists nourished a scientific-military-industrial complex, linked to special relationships among the Allies, that has continued to the present day. For Arthur Noyes and other chemists, the war was the first taste of work that was deemed of demonstrable and immediate importance to the general community, and their first experience in spending money freely. As a consequence, chemistry, interwoven with... 

For an American viewpoint, see D.J. Kevles, George Ellery Hale, the First World War and the advancement of science in America, Isis, 59 (1968), 427-437 H. Wright, Explorer of the Universe, A Biography of George E. Hale (New York Dutton, 1966) for a German perspective, see H. Kessler, Walther Rathenau His Life and Work (London, 1929). For a later history of the concept, see Carroll Pursell, The Military-Industrial Complex (New York Holt and Reinhart, 1972). 

Pursell, Carroll. The Military-Industrial Complex (New York Holt and Reinhart, 1972). 

Paul A.C. Koistinen, The military-industrial complex A historical perspective (New York, 1980), chapt. 2. 

A main source of inspiration for this story-line was the American writer Lewis Mnmford, especially his classic work, Technics and Civilization, from 1934. Mumford was one of the first to discuss the cultural preconditions for modem science and technology, and to explore the long process of cultural preparation prior to the scientific and industrial revolutions. He was also one of the first to discuss the cultural consequences, and, not least, the forms of cultural resistance and opposition to science and technology. Later in his life, he became one of the main critics of the so-called military-industrial complex in the United States which he saw as a new kind of authoritarian engineering, what he termed the megamachine (Mumford 1970). 

The map of Nagasaki (right) shows the location of the hypocenter, equidistant from the two principal military-industrial complexes and disastrously close to the medical center. 

The hypocenter was just east of the Urakami River, precisely halfway between the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance and Torpedo Works, a mile to the north, and the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, a mile to the south. It could not have been better targeted to destroy the heart of that important military-industrial complex. 

DU ammunition was developed in the late 1970s by NATO as antiarmor ammunition for improved T-72 Warsaw Treaty army tanks. As the trash from nuclear power industries DU is a liability to the US DOE that made the decision to pass it on to the military-industrial complex for the production of weapons, hi January 2001 DOE reported that the DU stock for manufacturing munitions might contain traces of U and transuranic elements including Pu [83]. Beside USA, DU-containing weapon systems are owned or under development in different countries such as Saudi Arabia, France, United Kingdom, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey [38]. 

Military-Industrial Complex Network of relationships between government and various industries... 

America has fashions in dirty words (or phrases) and good words (or phrases). Examples from the not very distant past are motherhood (good) and red or commie (dirty). It would seem that recently ecology has been substituted for motherhood. . . . Peace is, of course, a good word—as it has always been— but it is mouthed with as much understanding and purpose as were the words Liberty, equality and fraternity by the mobs of the French Revolution, the very mobs which were engaged in the destruction of all three. Military industrial complex is, I would estimate, our favorite dirty phrase of the present time. 

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