Donald G. Brennan
Hudson Institute

The hardware that we have to deal with in the National Security busi-
ness is certainly hard enough, but the issues are sometimes a good deal
softer, and I am really going to talk about the issues related to the hard-
ware.

Some people in the past have questioned, on ostensibly ethical
grounds, the conduct by the American National Security establishment
of research and development directed toward improving various kinds
of weapon capabilities. I should like to claim that the research and de-
velopment of weapons and weapon systems is on the whole entirely
compatible with recognized ethical principles. I won't spend very much
time on this because, I think, in some sense the National Security estab-
lishment, and in particular the military research and development com-
munity, is in fact not currently substantially threatened by the kind of
fashion that is coming up in the biomedical sciences, for example. We
have had a few tentative forays against the National Security establish-
ment on allegedly ethical grounds but nothing like the kind of sus-
tained attack that Dr. Davis was speaking of.

As to the ethical principles involved that would justify the usual
kinds of weapon research and development, I should say first of all that
it's not even questioned, even by the critics of some of this research,
that sovereign states will defend themselves, can defend themselves,
and should and ought to defend themselves against encroachments
from the outside world. For example, it is stated very clearly in the

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