Abstract
In the issue of 19 April 1985, the “News and Comment” section of Science devoted a full page to the administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the so-called Star Wars program. In that article the following passage appeared: As many as 100 million lines of error-free software code must be written for a network of computers capable of up to 1 trillion operations per second. “We don’t want to have a few lines of bad code mistakenly set off a nuclear weapon or cause something to miss a target,” says Edward Wegman, chief of the mathematical sciences divisions at the Office of Naval Research and one of the program’s primary research reviewers, only partly in jest.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1988 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ralston, A. (1988). Star Wars: What Is the Professional Responsibility of Computer Scientists?. In: Weiss, E.A. (eds) A Computer Science Reader. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8726-6_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8726-6_2
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-6458-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-4419-8726-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive