Jay Caplan <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Right, between the military interst and NRC regulators, it will be
10-15 years before any of this tech is available for commercial use.
Why do you say that military use of technology slows down civilian
access to it? In my experience going back to the 1970s it is just the
opposite. NASA and the military spurred progress in computers and other
high-technology by spending huge sums of money on it. This brought it to
civilian markets much sooner than it would have reached them otherwise.
For example, the microscopic motion sensors used to deploy airbags in
automobile collisions were first developed by the military and some
fantastic cost. I believe they may even have been developed for use in
Star Wars. Star Wars has been a $90 billion blackhole of money and
waste, but it has produced several useful spinoffs.
Military technology that has alternative useful civilian uses has never
been embargoed by the military, except in the middle of WWI and WWII.
Immediately after World War II radar, cavity magnetron microwave
generators, computers and many other technologies were made fully public
by the U.S. and the UK governments, which had developed them. A few
things were kept secret, such as some details about how to make nuclear
weapons, and the existence of Bombes used to break the German enigma
machines. The British kept the Bombes secret for a long time because
they assured other governments around the world that German enigma
machines (and the more modern variants) were unbreakable. They wanted
other governments to continue using the machines so that MI5 could read
their mail, which they did.
Surprisingly detailed information on the nuclear bomb was released in
the Smyth report, "Atomic Energy for Military Purposes," 1945. See:
http://www.archive.org/details/atomicenergyform00smytrich
- Jed
