Will Europe ramp up defence research? War prompts major rethink

"There is a lot of pressure at the moment on research institutions and universities to change their long tradition in peaceful and civilian research, towards a more politically oriented policy," says Hannes Jung, a particle physicist at the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg and member of the Science4Peace Forum, which campaigns to use science to promote peace. "I find that extremely worrying."

The push for dual-use research is part of the European Union's response to a "more threatening geopolitical context", commission president Ursula von der Leyen has said. This includes integrating such studies into its flagship multibillion-euro research programme.

Unlike after the Second World War, when government-backed military laboratories were major research hubs that often spun-out civilian applications, today the military must "spin in" innovation from universities and industry, says James Black, who studies defence policy at RAND Europe.

The EU is in a different situation from the United States and China, which spend vastly more on military research and where academia and defence typically have closer ties. In China, researchers are often incentivized to engage with the military."

Read at Nature