As head of the Office of Scientific Research (precursor to the current NSF/National Science Foundation), Bush also spearheaded the effort to develop atomic weapons despite the warnings of even Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer about the possible world reprecussions.
Being first and foremost a military scientist, Bush seemed to speak from a position of ambivalence about the fallout (if you'll pardon the pun) of global technological disparity. Rather, he was solely interested in securing and maintaining a wide gulf of technical skill between the USA and the rest of the world; to the point where even close war-time allies like Britian and France were left out in the cold.
In fact, the first applications of the Memex grl mentioned above were developed at the behest of the CIA, which in 1946 had inherited oceans of data collected by the Office of Strategic Services during the both world wars.
"By the end of the 1950s it (the memex) had millions, if not billions of records and its manual and electromagnetic indexing and retrieval systems were overwhelmed."1
In other words, the ur-invention of hypertext, Bush's Memex, had its roots in the State intelligence problems of domestic and international covert surveillance.
Source: Colin Burke,
Information & Secrecy : Vannevar Bush, Ultra and the Memex (Scarecrow : Metuchen, 1994) p. 366