Universities and the Military
how does your university tie in?

The University-Industrial-
Academic Complex:
Institutional and Interpersonal Links

University Profiles

The first computers, Colussus (1943) in the UK, and ENIAC (1945) in the United States were both constructed by university professors in partnership with their governments.

ENIAC was built by scientists at the University of Pennslyvania under the supervision of the US Army who desired the machine for computing ballistics calculations. ENIAC's first assignment in 1946 was to calculate a particularly complicated equation for the atomic bomb program at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, administered by the University of California. "Just before pressing a button that set the ENIAC to work on the atomic bomb, Maj. Gen. Gladeon Barnes spoke of 'man's endless search for scientific truth."

What he really meant was some men's endless search for war. Computers have since found their way into every facet of life, but most funding for computer science still comes from the military. In 1999 the DoD spent $643 million to fund computer science within American universities, and this sum was projected to rise another $100 million by 2001. In addition, the most powerful computers remain in the service of the warfare-state.

The UC administered Lawrence Livermore Lab's ASCI White, the world's most powerful computer is used mostly to simulate nuclear explosions, both testing aging weapons in the US stockpile, and now new weapons with designs that cannot be tested in actual explosions since the US suspended underground explosions in 1992. ASCI stands for Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative White. Accordingly, "It's also just the beginning. The government says that to certify the nuclear arsenal with full confidence, it needs a supercomputer that is 10 times as powerful as ASCI White by 2004". Clearly warfare still guides the future present and future of computing.

The entire hyper-dominance of the US military has evolved through research conducted through American universities. Without access to the best and the brightest the stream of technological and strategic innovation would dry up. For example, around 55-60% of the DoD's basic electronics research is conducted in universities, computer science is higher, around 70%, not surprisingly the humanities and arts recieve nothing.

The DoD is extremely reliant on its access to academia. And science has been equally affected. The military-university relationship has symbiotically created an American science, or more accurately a militant form of knowledge. Science, most strikingly the disciplines of the physical sciences have been molded by this relationship, so much that physics, and engineering owe much of their theoretical basis, methodology, and purpose to assumptions about the world which include uses of force, that the earth is possessable, disposable, and winnable (assumptions that we find within and exemplified by the military). A 1953 DoD publication concerning R&D clearly explains this molding of basic physical science (and scientists) into knowledge of military application as intended,

"...to maintain effective contact between the Armed Services and the scientific fraternity [note the masculine identity of America's scientists] of the country, so that the scientists can be legitimately encouraged to be interested in fields which are of potential importance to national defense."

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