I guess I’m really asking about the organization itself although it’s the website that sparked my curiousity. The amount of information on that site is just staggering and it begs the question, “Why?” Perhaps I’m jaded and think that there has to be a reason beyond information sharing that an organization would maintain a database of that scope/detail (i.e. the names/details of every US military operation since before the Cold War)? What does this organization do? Does it have an axe to grind in Washington?
This question was asked before in this thread.
I don’t think so. First, much of the information seems to be shared with globalsecurity.org. The organizations responsible have different addresses and so on, so I think they’re separate.
From the membership page at fas.org:
The Federation of American Scientists is a nonprofit, tax-exempt, 501c3 organization founded in 1945 as the Federation of Atomic Scientists. Our founders were members of the Manhattan Project, creators of the atom bomb and deeply concerned about the implications of its use for the future of humankind.
The website seems to have no hidden agenda beyond nuclear disarmament – but in a very strange way that’s more Washington-realistic than pacifistic. There’s articles on there, for example, about why nuclear weapons aren’t tactically useful at any scale.
Staggeringly detailed information about military issues is nothing new. Any bookstore will have shelves of glossy books with glamorous pictures of military hardware and the explosions it causes. There’s whole series showing the uniforms of specific units in extraordinary detail, and hundreds of books about single battles (even minor ones). Most of these have no political bias besides militarism.
I’m not saying for sure that fas.org or any of the other large military sites aren’t biased – just that there are people that have an interest in detailed information like that, and it’s not surprising that it’s out there.
Well hopefully books make a profit for the publisher/author. I guess I can’t figure out what reason FAS would have for hosting all that information. What do they gain financially/politically/etc.?
The FAS is part of the broader tradition of groups of “concerned scientists” that have their roots in the arguments culminating in the Franck Report of 11 June 1945. A strong component of this tradition - though there have been exceptions - has been that the best way of influencing policy is by producing informed politicians and an informed public. Getting this sort of information out there is thus seen as desirable. A necessary foundation for rational debate about the issues.
I had thought of mentioning Alice Kimball Smith’s classic history of the beginnings of that tradition, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945-47 (1965; MIT, 1970), in my last post, but it seemed a little specialised. However, I’ve since remembered that she does discuss the origins and formation of the FAS in some detail. Clearly organisations can evolve over half a century, but, as I say, we’re dealing with a specific tradition here.
The first aim in the original constitution was that they were seeking a system of global control of atomic energy (a common formulation at the time). However, the relevant clauses here are: