The Immaculate War

...In the distance, obscured by a range of coastal hills, some unidentified large target—could it be Leningrad or Tripoli?— disappeared beneath the burst of the submarine's intermediate-range Tomahawk missile...

...between stints as NATO commander and Secretary of State...

...The consequences of its destruction never came up in his discussions...

...In its brochure hyping three conferences on computer graphics sponsored by the Data Processing Management Association, State of the Art Seminars notes the guest speaker's association with three leading military contractors— McDonnell Douglas, General Electric, and Lockheed...

...Are There Some Really Effective Approaches to Picking Winners...

...Government personnel), one could find out about the emerging military technologies from insiders in industry and at the Pentagon...

...A flier touting Otto Freudenberger of the Northrop Corporation (high performance aircraft, missiles, rockets, electronic warfare systems) as guest speaker for a series of three conferences on technology marketing ends with this ringing testimonial for a previous seminar: "Excellent—impressed by speaker and his ability to do and organize what we have only been speculating could and should be done...

...But Sigman appeared before us in Boston in his capacity as former deputy director of DARPA, the Pentagon's corporate laboratory...

...You're going to see something in the early '90s...

...Towson, U.S...

...The featured speaker was Robert J. Rader, a computer expert whose experience includes six years on the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile System (Bell Telephone Laboratories) and five years on the Aegis electronics system for the Navy (Missile and Surface Radar Division of RCA...

...Before the two-day conference was over, I had learned that the military's "technical thrusts" under President Reagan are not likely to differ substantially from what they were under President Carter...

...I glanced at the man on my left, a member of a small consulting firm of half a dozen professionals based in nearby Cambridge, who had come to the conference in hopes of finding a way to pick up the slack in the firm's slumping computer software business...

...Gordon Sigman is the vice president for technology for Norden Systems, a division of United Technologies, the aerospace conglomerate whose products have included an interim job (as company president) for Alexander M. Haig Jr...

...Will It Be Strategic or Tactical...

...One of those who joined in these expressions was Bernard T. Feld, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor-in-chief of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists...

...Outlined in white were mushroom cloud silhouettes and human bodies sprawling on the ground...

...Even in the most noncombative subjects, a connection with the military seems obligatory...

...Not all of those who turned out to bear witness against the AIAA's Fourth Annual Military R&D Conference were "street people" offering free food or painting corpses on the sidewalk...

...There was never a drop of blood...

...I looked again at my neighbor, the man from the small Cambridge think tank, as Millburn inserted a slide identifying the six companies already at work on Phase One of the five-year, $300-million VHSIC program...

...Tsipis, like Feld, is a leading light in the "arms-control community...

...For DARPA it need take no more than ten to fifty people to put a proposal together, he said...

...Unconsciously, the conferees walked around the bodies in getting in and out of the building...

...Have Laser Battle Stations Been Oversold...

...The picture that seemed to tell it all was one flashed on the screen by the Navy's representative in the George Sherman Union ballroom, Robert L. Moore, assistant to the technical director of the Naval Underwater Systems Center...

...Nagasaki...

...Leonard Weisberg, the keynote speaker, was asked whether recent breakthroughs in microbiology—recombinant DNA research, gene-splicing, and creation of new life forms—might augur a revolution in chemical and biological warfare as profound as the military revolution wrought by the atomic bomb...

...I thought of it ruefully that night when, dining at one of Boston's plush tourist restaurants with Lockheed's Harry Plumblee and another conference companion, Roy M. Tidwell, executive director of national security programs for SRI International, a think tank, I paid my share of a dinner bill that came to $90...

...The object was to achieve a hundred-fold improvement in the capabilities of such "electronic defense" weapons as fire-and-forget missile targeting systems...

...The voice of Keith McHenry brought me back from my musings...

...Beneath a drawing of a mushroom cloud was this message: "Planning for war does not make peace, it is a cause of war...

...firearms are very complicated things which get out of order in many ways...

...Samuel H. Day Jr., a contributing editor of The Progressive, is an author, lecturer, and political organizer based in Madison, Wisconsin...

...I also learned that, down here on Earth, despite the promises of profits to be made from cashing in on preparations for the automated war, there are few big bucks in it for the little guys in the military-industrial complex...

...U "Chemical warfare/defense"—almost $2 billion over the next five years to give the United States armed forces an "improved chemical deterrent posture...

...He was billed as a speaker on "high-energy lasers: status, outlook, and issues...

...As individuals, they were no more sinister than a gathering of church accountants, no more bloodthirsty than a convention of model-airplane builders...

...THE RIGHT SPEAKERS FROM THE RIGHT PLACES...

...The atomic bomb brought lethality...

...Tsipis's name and credentials were displayed prominently in a red-white-and-blue brochure handed out in the George Sherman Union ballroom to advertise the AIAA's third annual convention on "electro-optical systems and technology": Can E-0 Cope With the Increasingly Hostile Battlefield Conditions—Weather, Smoke/Haze and the New Chemical Warfare Threat...

...But when you stop to think about it, you realize that there are never any corpses in the slide shows upstairs in the ballroom, nor is there even a suggestion that the activities depicted, can be dangerous to human health...

...If you can disrupt the other guy's C-3 you've won...

...the brochure had asked...

...Micro-electronics," said Sigman...

...The breakthroughs in high-speed integrated circuitry that are revolutionizing the computer industry are changing the face of the battlefield as well...

...The AIAA brochure spelled it all right out: "The Reagan era means new R&D opportunities—and new challenges for industrial R&D management...

...world of military research and development, the words seemed to say, and that's how it always will be: For every breakthrough, from the crossbow and the cannon to nuclear fission, there is always some learned fool ready to swear the thing will never work...

...Of course, it helps if you can create some interest in your idea on the part of one of the military services, and you'd better be prepared to spend some research money of your own, Sigman cautioned...

...There's certainly a lot of material here to absorb," he said...

...Keith was from the Cambridge "Food for Free Committee," which shows up at political rallies, demonstrations, and other events in the Boston area to affirm its belief that nourishing food is a necessity for survival and should be accessible to all...

...Current research funding: $1.3 billion through fiscal 1986...

...The reams of reports, charts, and diagrams instructing me on how to get in there and compete for the "defense research dollar" with Rockwell, Sperry, Raytheon, Litton, and other giants...

...The jet engine, scoffed at in a 1940 National Academy of Sciences report, brought superior power density and efficiency to modern aircraft...

...Splat...

...What's the Best Way to Identify the Nuggets and Pursue Them...

...Sir John Smyth, consultant to British Privy Council, 1591 That's how it has always been in the...

...While we were out to lunch on the second day of the conference, a young man slipped into the ballroom and left at each place a one-page tract denouncing military research and development as a "travesty of human values...

...For a registration fee of $425 ($360 each for teams of three or more, $250 for U.S...

...A Boston-area organization calling itself "High Technology Professionals for Peace" sent a representative—corporate systems engineer Alexander Brown—to monitor the meeting, and called a press conference to express its indignation...

...The food smelled delicious...

...The closest we came to confronting physical destruction Was the sight of a pockmarked airfield, shown by Colonel Robert C. Barlow, director of the Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, in a discusison of "runway denial...

...The spray-painted bodies seemed a crude, indecent caricature of the business that had been going on inside...

...We've got an electromagnetic gun we're working on with the Aussies," said David Petter, the DARPA assistant, cryptically...

...There was a curious paradox in Feld's appearance at the "High Technology Professionals for Peace" press conference...

...Nevertheless, it seemed quite fitting that others had come, at long last, to call the attention of the wider world to these proceedings, to point out that the business in the George Sherman Union ballroom was the business of war, and to remind us all, with their crudely painted mushroom clouds and corpses, that no war can be immaculate...

...These bodies are here to remind us of the raped, of the dead, of the hundreds of thousands of incinerated corpses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the nuclear war we can prevent, of the tortured, of the suffering," we were told in a leaflet prepared by Brushfire Graphics, a Cambridge organization...

...All of us—and some others we were to encounter later on the sidewalk outside the student union building—had been attracted by the promises of a brochure distributed nationally for the AIAA by State of the Art Seminars, a Los Angeles agency which conducts hundreds of meetings of this kind...

...He told me he had decided to "enter the lions' den" to press that view...

...While he was calling on his fellow professionals to challenge the Pentagon collaboration symbolized by the AIAA's Fourth Annual R&D Conference, the AIAA was touting his friend and colleague, Kosta Tsi-pis, also an MIT physicist, as a speaker at one of its next military technology conferences...

...The Pentagon's "high tech" people are still looking for the immaculate war—one fought from computer consoles...

...What Is E-O's Future in Fire Control and Missile/Smart Projectile Seekers...

...He pressed on: The "R&D" breakthroughs of yesteryear succeeded because they accomplished a single job better...

...The merchants of death make the rich richer while each one of us is a potential target for their weapon...

...With all that's going on now in genetics, it's inevitable that something big will happen there...

...He looked discouraged...

...It showed a submarine, hovering off some alien shore, conducting a "mining mission" while simultaneously destroying, with its nuclear-tipped torpedoes and missiles, an incoming airplane, a helicopter, two other submarines, and two surface vessels...

...In Boston and Washington the subject of another conference was "new directions in trainers and simulators: eighteen experts from . . . Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Industry Identify Policy Issues, User Problems, Requirements, Budgets & Technology Opportunities...

...The gun brought greater accuracy than the bow and arrow...

...f "Precision-guided munitions"— missiles that can fly themselves to any target, defying fog, rain, and other natural and artificial impediments...

...The thirty-five men in the room leaned forward, sensing that what was coming was the thing that had brought them to the ballroom: a glimpse of the big money to be made in pursuit of the Reagan Administration's plans to beef up the military budget...

...Beyond the great leaps forward in electronic warfare, the speakers identified other areas of technological thrust where the pay-off promises to be highest: 41 Manufacturing technology—better and cheaper ways to build ships that now cost the Navy as much as $2 billion each, computer-aided manufacturing of weapons and weapons parts, a new method for the precision-casting of turbine engine housings...

...E.R...

...Yes," he replied, without hesitation...

...The high-tech delegates shook their heads and looked away, as if refusing even to attempt to fathom such incongruous notions...

...And so it is, the speaker continued, with the technological "mini-revolutions" of today: radar, laser-designated missiles, submarine detection, night/fog vision, early warning of attack, "fire-and-forget" missiles...

...The military research budget—one-tenth of the Pentagon's total outlay—is scheduled to increase a whopping 28 per cent in fiscal 1982 (to $21.5 billion...

...Tsipis explained that he's against the Pentagon's high-energy laser weapon research because such weapons will never work...

...Transport planes are what Harry Plumblee's division builds down in Marietta, Georgia, and so far the conference had done nothing for him...

...But at DARPA they dispense with red tape, and little documentation is required...

...The bow is a simple weapon...

...Naval Weapons Center...

...But by and large the target of the exercise—of the $21.5 billion annual expenditure—seemed to be a nameless, faceless, bloodless, bodiless force no more capable of hurting or being harmed than the "enemy" in a video pinball game...

...Just 125 guys looking for innovative ways to spend $600 million a year...

...From the very beginning, we had been made aware of an outside presence...

...Harry E. Plumblee Jr., chief scientist for the Lockheed Georgia Company and the man seated on my right at the conference, looked quizzically at the orange leaflet someone had handed him on the sidewalk during the first lunch break...

...If I were a scientist, an engineer, or a scholar looking for work or a modest research contract, I asked myself, which of the messages would I find more helpful...

...It's fought, ever so neatly, on video display terminals Aripple of approving laughter arose from the audience of neatly suited businessmen, seated at linen-covered tables in the ballroom of Boston University's George Sherman Union, as the speaker projected a new slide and let the words on the screen sink in...

...The fact is that neither message seemed right for Harry Plumblee, Roy Tidwell, and the other small "merchants of death" I encountered in the Boston University student union ballroom those two days in August...

...To him, talk of "merchants of death" and "the war machine" from the demonstrators who had gathered outside seemed as remote as what he had been hearing inside from the experts on very-high-speed integrated circuits, precision-guided munitions, and directed-energy weapons...

...Do you think they mean usl" he asked...

...What Progress Is Being Made in All-Weather, Day and Night Systems for Target Acquisition and Missile Terminal Guidance...

...The Lockheed scientist looked at the pamphlet denouncing the merchants of death.' 'Do you think they mean usr he asked There were frequent references to the enemy, to the threat, to unfriendly forces, sometimes even to the Soviets...

...Overnight, spray-painted messages had appeared on the sidewalk in front of the George Sherman Union: War Is Murder for Profit, and The Whole World Is Watching...

...A brochure bristling with missiles, airplanes, tanks, and submarines invites dealers to Los Angeles and Washington for two days of inside information on "systems acquisition reform—the first conference that covers all ramifications of pending changes" in the Pentagon's spending plans...

...Together, the needs of C-3I account for the most rapidly burgeoning sector of military technology—EW, which stands for electronic warfare, often expressed as ED, for electronic defense...

...The electro-optical conference, scheduled for Washington and Los Angeles in October, like the R&D conference I attended in Boston, is just a small part of the mobilization gladdening the heart of the military-industrial complex...

...For people whose business is high technology, the AIAA conference was a chance to get in on the ground floor...

...Unlike the big, bureaucratic weapons research laboratories run by the Army, Navy, and Air Force, DARPA thrives on high-risk technology...

...Hiroshima...

...Step right up, it's free," he cried, pushing bowls in the direction of AIAA conferees, demonstrators, and passers-by...

...We demand an end to the war machine now...

...For two days we watched illustrations of attacks and heard talk of the threat/ but there was never a drop of blood Not to be outdone by the AIAA, an outfit called the Education Foundation of the Data Processing Management Association, also with the help of State of the Art Seminars, offered four conferences in August and September on "structured methodology for software design and development...

...You can come in with a solution looking for a home...

...I turned in my chair for a better look at what, for better or for worse, could be characterized as an inner sanctum of the Military-Industrial Complex (Aerospace Division...

...I saw several conference members pick it up, examine it briefly, and file it away with the rest of their conference "documentation"—the reports on new research and procurement policies and the notices of other conferences to come—as if determined to overlook nothing that might yield an eventual payoff...

...Rape, torture, and suffering...

...From George Millburn, acting deputy director of research and advanced technology for the Pentagon, we learned that the Reagan Administration would be doubling the average annual expenditure for "very high speed integrated circuits" (VHSIC) through fiscal 1986...

...It seemed strange company in which to find one who has written and spoken extensively against the arms race, so I called him and asked him about it...

...The electronic order of battle will determine the winner...

...One of Millburn's photographs showed a bomber launching a "precision guided munition" toward an "enemy target...

...Hard on the heels of those two came the "5th Annual Forecast Conference—1981 Update—a detailed analysis of all that's happened so far under the Reagan Administration and a series of enlightened predictions of what will happen in the future...

...Is the DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] about to Pioneer some New High Risk/High Payoff Technology Initiatives...

...The message was plain enough...

...His answer made genetic warfare sound like a promising new high-tech growth stock...

...My neighbor was no longer taking notes, having apparently concluded that none of that $300 million would trickle down to him or the other small fry who had crowded into the ballroom in hopes of finding something to help pay the rent...

...The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, again teaming up with the State of the Arts Seminars, alone sponsored three other conferences for military contractors in a six-week period this fall...

...C-J" is technical jargon for command, control, and communications, sometimes expanded to C-3I, the / standing for intelligence...

...For two days we watched illustrations of commanders ordering attacks (presumably nuclear) across unpeopled fields and mountain ranges into clusters of unpeopled military targets...

...The flier called on all scientists, engineers, and scholars to "reconsider the goals of their activity and re-dedicate their intelligence and talents to more humane ends...

...Sigman and Leonard Weisberg and another DARPA representative, David Pet-ter, an assistant to the agency's deputy director for research, tried to give us a feel for what is in the offing in military "high-tech...

...They are Hughes, Texas Instruments, Westinghouse, IBM, Honeywell, and TRW...

...DARPA is a small, lithe, flexible agency "completely open to new ideas," Sigman explained...

...247 million over the next two years...

...The laughter told Leonard R. Weisberg, vice president for technology for the Honeywell Corporation's Aerospace and Defense Group (and formerly director of the Pentagon's electronics and physical sciences research and engineering program), that he had made his point...

...But the target, whatever it may have been, was off-screen...

...Whereas a bowman can let off six aimed shots a minute, a musketeer can discharge but one in two minutes...

...11 "Directed energy" weapons—high energy lasers (up from $199 million to $279 million in the new fiscal year), particle-beam technology (up from $38.9 million to $51.4 million), and high-power microwaves...

...It seemed an opportunity too good to pass up...

...Warren Davis, speaking for High Technology Professionals for Peace, said the group had been formed because of "a spreading uneasiness among members of the high-technology community who are faced with working on military contracts...

...the proposal need run to no more than 2,000 pages...

...It was just the right keynote for the "keynote address" at the fourth annual Research and Development Conference of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AI A A...

...Or the urgings of Science for the People, Brushfire Graphics, the Food for Free Committee, and others that I shape up and be a human being...