ABSTRACT
Vast areas of technology have been developed for industry, essentially so that either the same end product can be produced more cheaply or the same needs satisfied at less resource cost. When the purchasers of the products of a new technology are to be individual human consumers, it is much harder to put a quantitative value on the total benefit or to determine its distribution. The entire problem of harnessing modern technology to the needs of defence is an optimisation problem, getting the best defence for a given sum of money. Defence in the nuclear age is primarily about deterrence. The avoidance of war is our chief objective, by making it clear to the other side that it would be most unwise for them to attack. But in any modern major system one of the several overall performance limitations is due to our lack of knowledge of ourselves, inhibiting the optimisation of the man-machine interface.
