WEAPONS GRADE: Revealing the links between modern warfare and our high-tech world

R207.00

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.

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Description

Bookseller Inventory #: 12141
Title: WEAPONS GRADE
Author: HAMBLING, DAVID
Format/binding: Soft Card Cover.
Book condition: Used – Fine
Jacket condition: None
Quantity available: 1
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Paperback
ISBN 10: 1845290887
ISBN 13: 9781845290887
Publisher: Constable and Robinson
Place: London
Date published: 2005
Keywords: US Navy, UFO sightings, Wright Brothers, V-1 flying bomb, Edward Teller
Bookseller catalogs: War;
Size: 234x32p13mm
Location: A u6