Following up on this post, this paragraph also caught my eye:

The computer, one might well conclude, was conceived in sin. Its birth helped ratchet up, by several orders of magnitude, the destructive force available to the superpowers during the cold war. And the man most responsible for the creation of that first computer, John von Neumann, was himself among the most ardent of the cold warriors, an advocate of a preemptive military attack on the Soviet Union, and one of the models for the film character Dr. Strangelove. As George Dyson writes in his superb new history, Turing’s Cathedral, “The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time.” Von Neumann had seemingly made a deal with the devil: “The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get the bombs.