Commercial Weapons Research and Peacetime Weapons Research

Abstract

We have dated the beginnings of WR to the fourth century BCE; and at that time there was also an armaments industry, the organised systematic production of weapons as an element of economic activity. In fact, once we know when WR emerged we can infer that the arms industry must also have been in existence at that time, because there could be no point in there being research into the design of weapons technology without there being workshops, factories, merchants, customers, etc., for realising the output of the design process. In the fourth century BCE there were many sieges involving catapults and others engines of war, cities accumulated arsenals of weapons, and there were centres, such as the island of Rhodes, where it was possible to buy catapults and learn how to make them. All this is clear from Rihill (2007) and from other sources. The production of weapons as a commercial activity has thus been in existence for nearly two and half millennia, and ranks with agriculture and building as one of the oldest industries in continuous existence. Arms production became ‘industrialised’ in the nineteenth century, when modern methods of production informed by scientific understanding of the composition of metals and explosives were introduced. The production of weapons has been one of the most profitable enterprises of all time, and WR has been integral to this process. There is no doubt that the main reason the vast majority of people involved in weapons research and weapons production undertook these activities was economic: as a source of work, as a means to make money, etc. In the modern era, at least, it is states who have been the biggest customers for CWR, notwithstanding the large domestic market for small arms in some countries – I shall in any case only consider WR done at the behest of national interests.