Swords To Ploughshares - List of Notable Cases

List of Notable Cases

Not all of the following examples actually express the idea of the phrase, which stresses the destruction of weapons of war and recycling the materials for peaceful purposes. Although interesting and somewhat related to the concept, these show the dual-use nature of technology, which does not always clearly convey the intention of the phrase nor how it is used today.

• Radar was initially developed for detection of incoming bombers, now used in commercial airliners. The microwave oven is also a consequence of this technology
• Jet engines were developed for fighter craft by Britain and Germany during the Second World War
• The Space Race was based on technology, in particular rockets, designed for nuclear warfare
• The first computers, Bombe, Colossus and ENIAC were developed for codebreaking or the calculation of ballistic trajectories; many of their predecessors were designed to assist in military codebreaking
• Roman roads were designed for the rapid transport of troops, but were used by civilians for millennia afterwards
• The Global Positioning System (GPS) was developed under the United States Department of Defense for military navigational purposes. The system has been released for free civilian use, e.g. in land, sea and air navigation, cartography and land surveying.
• Cyanoacrylate was developed in an attempt to produce synthetic gunsights for airplanes during World War II, but was too sticky to be useful. It is now commonly sold as 'super glue'.
• Active sonar was developed during World War I to facilitate the discovery of enemy submarines, which led to medical ultrasonography.
• WD-40 was originally designed to prevent corrosion in intercontinental ballistic missiles.
• Facial tissues such as Kleenex were originally created while attempting to develop better gas mask filter membranes.
• In several former Soviet republics, large stocks of a rocket fuel component, mélange, (a mixture of nitric acid and nitrogen oxides that would have otherwise posed significant a environmental hazard) were recycled into fertilizer by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. .
• Old M20 recoilless rifles are being used as part of an avalanche control system used by the U.S. National Park Service.
• The Megatons to Megawatts Program is a joint program between the United States and Russia to convert fissile materials in nuclear weapons into nuclear fuel.
• The National Reconnaissance Office presented the NASA Space Telescope Science Institute with two obsolete space telescopes from the Future Imagery Architecture project in 2012. The donation of these telescopes is judged to have reduced mission costs by $250 million