The 1980s defense buildup largely benefited the preexisting centers of defense procurement in the ''Gunbelt'': the Pacific, South Atlantic, New England, and Mountain regions. I examine whether the interregional distribution and movement of scientists and engineers paralleled this concentration of defense contracts, using the 1982-89 National Science Foundation Survey of Scientists and Engineers. The Gunbelt modestly increased its share of the nation's scientists and engineers during the 1980s, with employees leaving the Midwest and Middle Atlantic for defense jobs faster than those employed in civilian businesses. However, most Gunbelt migration predated the Reagan buildup, due in part to Gunbelt military spending between the 1940s and the 1970s. Defense-funded professionals were also less interregionally mobile in the 1980s than those without defense funding. There is also a dramatic difference in the regional distribution of defense vs. nondefense professionals. Though all four Gunbelt regions have high concentrations of defense-funded scientists and engineers, only New England also has a high concentration of nondefense scientists and engineers. Finally, the timing of this migration suggests a ''brain drain'': Midwestern universities, in particular, essentially subsidize bicoastal high-tech regional development by exporting technical and scientific graduates to faster-growing regions of the nation. These results offer an insight into how American defense contracting during the cold war acts as a huge, implicit regional-industrial development program, with one of its central instruments being the support and relocation of scientists and engineers.
