ABSTRACT
Military scientists frequently claim that nanotechnology will transform the warfare, integrating soldiers and machines into the ‘digital battlefield’ at a molecular level and making combat programmable at every scale: war becomes a video game. At the same time, consumer video games increasingly feature simulations of ‘nanowar’ based on the research agendas of real scientific institutions. This chapter examines the convergence of military nanotechnology with video game culture. The digital battlefield: an immense network of computers, sensors, and communications systems linking soldiers and machines into common channels of data, where every vehicle, weapon, and combat trooper is rendered a component in the fully integrated circuits of command and control. The notion that nanotechnology will empower military science to transform the field of combat, the constitution of weaponry, and even soldiers’ bodies with the ease of toying with pixels on a screen, appears frequently in the research agendas and media artifacts of nanoculture.
