This dense, thoughtful, and provocative book advances several important arguments about the relationship between science and technology on the one hand and war and the state on the other. Three seem especially important. First, Britain was militarized in the middle decades of the twentieth century far more than it was socialized. It was less a welfare state than a warfare state. Second, this militarization infected science and technology. These activities were not primarily civilian realms enlisted by the state in wartime. They were rather permanently mobilized instruments of state policy. What David Edgerton calls the military-industrial-scientific complex in Britain was an arm of what others have called the national security state. Finally, the growth of the warfare state was masked by a national myth of welfarism and declinism that represented science and technology as civilian.
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