Weapons Grade
Revealing the Links Between Modern Warfare and Our High Tech World
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Predicting how the business world might evolve is itself a multi-million-dollar business. Plenty of gurus, academics and snake-oil salesmen will tell you all about the future for a price. What the experts overlook is that the future is already here.
Chances are the products and services of tomorrow are available now to a very limited clientele at a top-secret research institute near you. Throughout history, war and its threat have driven innovation and the uptake of new technology from the ancient swordsmiths who pioneered the use of iron to the Pentagon bureaucrats who funded the early internet. And since 1945 the relationship between military needs and modern business has grown ever closer.
As well as telling the story of technology transfer in the past, Hambling explores the cutting edge of modern military research. Throughout he seeks to identify the technologies that will transform business and society in the decades to come. If history does repeat itself, Weapons Grade will be a book about the future of business with a difference: rather than learning more about the shape of current preoccupations, Hambling's readers will discover something about the future of business.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Exhaustingly extensive and well-researched, this study of developments in contemporary weapons technology evinces a gee-whiz love of military widgets. It also contains journalist Hambling's desire to explore the murkily overlapping scientific, military and corporate worlds. The result is a book that is for short stretches a breezy guide to everything from vortex cannons to tasers, and everyone from Tesla to Turing. Hambling describes complex procedures and devices in a lucid, uncondescending way, and a reader seeking a quick description of, say, how a rocket plane works or what an E-bomb is need look no further. But the scale and scope of the book indicate an ambition to be something other than a supplementary reference to the novels of Tom Clancy and the press briefings of Donald Rumsfeld. Hambling's underlying thesis is that advances in military technology eventually benefit civilian life (e.g., the Internet), and that the domestic technologies and business opportunities of the future, like nanotechnology, are already to be found in today's military hardware. While gently and inconclusively touched on, the moral implications of this are never really explored in any depth, and the military-industrial complex is seen mostly as an ethically neutral dispenser of fascinatingly nasty devices. The lack of broader context, along with a wearyingly episodic structure, create frustrating limits.
