American Science: Addicted to Pentagon Cash?

An anonymous submitter writes: "In totalitarian states the military can compel scientists to perform research for weapons systems. That's not true in the United States, yet American scientists who refuse military work are exceedingly rare today. This may be in part because scientists, like most other citizens, agree that the U.S. is facing dangerous foes. But some dissidents argue the cause is more likely that Pentagon cash has become an addiction that scientists rationalize by working on 'dual use' technologies -- radar that maps planets and guides missiles; robots that peer through smoke in apartment fires to rescue victims, and through battlefield smoke to find human targets."

Comments

KILL them all

[xiopher]

And let the government/God sort them out.

Re:I don't understand the problem?

[Archie Steel]

This would be true if "defending" was the main occupation of the "defense" department. Instead, it seems the Pentagon's main job now (along with being a very interventionist economic tool) is to realize the megalomaniac ambitions of ExxonMobil and its puppet-in-chief in Washington - and that hardly entails "defending" the country you love.

Re:What's the big deal?

[gantzm]

Yeah I agree 100%! Those 2,800 people in the WTC didn't have to die.

Re:I don't understand the problem?

[Archie Steel]

I don't remember the US bombing for oil anywhere in the world in the last 2 years.

Well, it's never quite presented that way by the White House, now, is it? That doesn't make it any less true.

Either you or I are being delusional.

That would be you.

I see 2 towers that no longer exist and thousands dead.

A great crime, yes. But unrelated to the present discussion. Don't mix up things. Likewise, I won't bring in the 70,000 killed by the U.S.-backed military and paramilitary forces in El Salvador. Or the million killed in Vietnam. One should not use dead civilians for political gain.

I see mass graves of people in Iraq killed by the hand of a dictator no longer in power.

Mass graves dug when the dictator was an ally, mind you.

Now, what do you not see? Iraqis greeting americans as altruistic liberators. When U.S. soldiers liberated France in WWII, did they keep getting attacked and killed afterwards? No, they didn't.

Now, if the U.S. was truly altruistic, it wouldn't seek to privatize Iraq's oil, but instead would leave it as a property of the Iraqi people themselves, so that the profit would benefit them instead of mutlinational oil companies. But of course, that was the whole point - as honestly told by the Polish foreign minister, who candidly said that his country expected to have its share of oil exploitation rights, since they sent soldiers to help...

I don't see oil pouring in from anywhere or cheap gas prices, which would be the result of having access to lots of oil.

Are you really that naive? Do you really think that once ExxonMobil gets its hands on Iraqi oils it's going to sell it cheaper, even though it's the cheapest oil to produce in the world (and the world's second largest reserve)? You see, it's all about one thing: profit margins. Having access to Iraqi oil won't make prices cheaper at the pump: what it will do is let the oil barons make more money than before.

Re:It does matter...

[b-baggins]

Unfortunately, as long as countries like Iraq have useful idiots like you to help them out, the adults in America will have to go to war to clean up your messes.