THE relationship between science and the military goes back a long way. Even Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci had their ideas pilfered by military strategists – Galileo’s telescopes, da Vinci’s submarines, catapults and parachutes. But the relationship really took off with the second world war, when weapons research became a primary scientific aim in industrialised countries.
At the height of the cold war, as much as 40 per cent of R&D effort worldwide was devoted to military technology. Today’s “war on terror” has given the field an added boost: in 2003, global military spending rose for the first time since the…
