THE FUSE

It used to be that the unpleasant business of conceiving, building, testing and manufacturing weapons of war was the exclusive remit of large companies with deep and broad access to state capital. Their names are well known. They are multibillion-dollar behemoths; all part of the “military industrial complex”, a phrase coined by Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 as a cautionary description of an ill-advised future, which came to pass anyway.