Small, but perfectly formed

The US Department of Defense is throwing around a whole mess o' cash in the hopes that someone, hell, anyone, can come up with some useful nanotechnology breakthroughs. Beginning next year the DoD will be spending up to $15 million a year, up on $8

The US Department of Defense is throwing around a whole mess o' cash in the hopes that someone, hell, anyone, can come up with some useful nanotechnology breakthroughs. Beginning next year the DoD will be spending up to $15 million a year, up on $8 million this year, which was handed out in 16 research grants to universities and military research programs.

Areas of particular interest 'nanoscale electronics and architects', which is being looked at by Princeton University, and 'polymeric nanophotonics and nanoelectronics' at the University of New York. The aim of all this research is to hopefully end up with viable quantum computing devices, which, apart from being powerful computers in their own right, would also be small. Size is the main restriction in many modern computing applications in the armed forces - there's only so much power you can pack into an F-16.

Military spokespersons were very open with their motives for the increased spending and need to miniaturise. 'Well, we just wanna kill people with smaller and smaller things. Little missiles, and tiny smart bullets. We've been killing people the old fashioned way for years and years, and we think it's about time we splashed out and gave ourselves a lethal little present,' said one Navy officer from the conn of his nuclear submarine. 'If we had smaller electronics we could definitely sink a lot more fishing trawlers.'
US Department of Defense