Space exploration offers potentially the most profound and revolutionary new possibilities for the future of humanity. This was understood over 50 years ago by a handful of scientists, including John Desmond Bernal, the noted British crystallographer and Marxist philosopher of science. Bernal clearly realized that...
Category - No 4
Advocates of any new military technology must sell their idea to a reluctant public which must bear its cost and consequence, an accountable Congress which must authorize its expense, and the scientists and technicians whose lives will be involved in its development. Laser fusion is such a technology. Before...
It is in Washington, rather than in Moscow, that scenarios are dreamed up for theatre wars; and it is in America that the alchemists of superkill, the clever technologists of "advantage" and of ultimate weapons, press forward the "politics of tomorrow" E.P. Thompson, "A Letter to America"
All of this country's nuclear weapons are developed at two huge laboratories—located at Livermore, California, and Los Alamos, New Mexico—which are operated by the University of California (UC) under contract from the Federal Department of Energy (DOE). For nearly five years these labs, along with the issues and...
On April 4, 1980, Elie McGee, a black security guard at the Naval Biosciences Laboratory in Oakland, California, was fired for refusing a direct order to enter the lab. His reason was that an organism being researched there was a hazard to his health. Seven months earlier he had almost died from an infection with the...
Preying on the fears of the military intentions of the USSR, carefully nurtured for the past 30 years, the U.S. government has made increased military spending a national priority. This call to "Rearm America" needs to be critically evaluated. It is time to ask: —Is the Soviet Threat all we have been led to believe...
The new Administration's budget, formerly submitted to Congress on March 10th, is the most flagrant, systematic assault by government on the economic well-being of America's middle class, working poor and unemployed in this century.
Thus wrote Galileo Galilei on the opening page of his work which marks the beginning of modern science, the Two New Sciences (1638). It is not surprising that Galileo's new science was motivated by military interest, for western science and military interests have always been entwined; what changes is the degree of...
Outraged by the U.S. war in Vietnam, in a period of heightened political and social awareness, progressive scientists and technologists joined together 13 years ago to establish the organization and the magazine, Science for the People. Thus was launched an organized radical critique of science and technology under U...