Throughout history of warfare has spurred scientific and technological innovations. Conversely, science and technology have always made substantial impacts on the field of war. WWII is no exception. Indeed, WWII saw some of the most substantial advances in technology for good and bad – brought about by advances in science and math that history has ever seen.
Scientists, mathematicians, and engineers theorize and create. Politicians, military commanders, bureaucrats, and business leaders then use those creations for a multitude of reasons.
Physicists in Wartime Japan
Between 1935 and 1955 a handful of Japanese men turned their minds to the unsolved problems of theoretical physics. Much of the time their lives were in turmoil, their homes demolished and their bellies empty. But the worst of times for the scientists was the best of times for the science.
Their achievements were all the more remarkable in a society that had encountered the methods of science only decades earlier. Japan realized that without modern technology it was militarily weak. The new regime sent young men to Germany, France, England and America to study languages, science, engineering and medicine.
"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes," Albert Einstein.
Indeed, the development of nuclear weapons utterly transformed human warfare, as the mass destruction wreaked by bombs dropped on Japan a year earlier made chillingly clear. Yet devastating though the outcomes often were, this was a time of extraordinary discoveries in the field of physics.
In this issue, leading authorities discuss the science--and the scientists--that delivered us into the nuclear age, from Lise Meitner's long-overlooked contributions to the discovery of nuclear fission to Manhattan Project member Philip Morrison's reflections on the first nuclear war and how a second must be avoided.
In this issue, leading authorities discuss the science--and the scientists--that delivered us into the nuclear age, from Lise Meitner's long-overlooked contributions to the discovery of nuclear fission to Manhattan Project member Philip Morrison's reflections on the first nuclear war and how a second must be avoided.
Science and Technology - World War II and the early cold war
By the late 1940s, Secrecy concerns influenced the practice of science and international communications, and new career opportunities arose as science and technology became significant.
Through bilateral efforts, World War II thus nurtured two critical developments that would shape science and technology in the post war world: the imposition of secrecy systems to protect national security concerns, and the creation of scientific intelligence programs to discover foreign progress in science and technology (particularly but not limited to advances in weaponry).
A principal challenge was to secure reliable information on the scientific and technological capacity of other nations, since such intelligence was necessary to match enemy advances in weaponry. A major point of intersection between physicists and U.S. policymakers came in developing methods to detect and analyze.
Antiaircraft fire control was the key to “cybernetics”, a science that would embrace intentionality, learning, (and much else within the human mind) providing firmer foundation for regulating larger systems, such as nations, and even the whole world. Wiener brought to bear his own established interest in feedback (cybernetic principle of feedback) mechanisms, communication technology, and nonlinear processes.
The man-airplane-radar-predictor-artillery system is
a closed one in which it appeared possible to replace men by machines and machines by men.
a closed one in which it appeared possible to replace men by machines and machines by men.
Weiner: “I think that I can claim credit for transferring the whole theory of the servomechanism bodily to communication engineering.”
World War I1 elevated the stakes of understanding the enemy's intention to survival itself; it stripped human behaviour to moves of pursuit, escape, and deception; and it introduced a new class of self-regulating weapons.
The increasing role of technology in warfare in the modern era has brought science and war into an increasingly intimate relationship with the development of the computer and the information sciences, particularly cybernetics. One contemporary example of this:
Cyber Terrorism- The Dark Side of the Web World
A phrase used to describe the use of Internet based attacks in terrorist activities, including acts of deliberate, large-scale disruption of computer networks, especially of personal computers attached to the Internet, by the means of tools such as computer viruses. This use of information technology by terrorist groups furthered their agenda. This can include use of information technology to organize and execute attacks against networks, computer systems and telecommunications infrastructures, or for exchanging information or making threats electronically. Examples are hacking into computer systems, introducing viruses to vulnerable networks, web site defacing, Denial-of-service attacks, or terroristic threats made via electronic communication.
The emergence of the notion of command-and-control epitomised a centralising approach which sees military organisation purely as a top-down process, a vast techno-social machine to be integrated and directed through a strict hierarchy on the basis of the predictions of mathematical models. Born of Second World War research, “science of control and communications” articulated a new worldview of self-regulated systems sustained through the flow of information and corrective feedback loops.MANEKA
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