Good-bye to all these!

Our armies, navies and air forces are finished

ON March 9, 1862, metaphorically speaking, all the navies of that day were sunk in the American Civil War battle of Hampton Roads.

What happened? The first duel between ironclad ships — the Merrimac and the Monitor — was fought, and proof positive gained that no wooden fleet in the world could stand up to them.

So astonishing was this event that, in the quietude of his London office, Admiral Sir John Hay exclaimed:

‘The man who goes into action in a wooden ship is a fool, and the man who sends him there is a villain.’ Now comes the atomic bomb, something infinitely more worldshaking, and so enormous are its possibilities that it may well be asked:

‘From now on will not the man who goes to war at all be an idiot, and he who sends him there a madman?’

IS NOT war killing itself through its own perfection? Though I hope it I doubt it, because the things which emerge from man’s brains seldom change the evil in his heart.

Therefore, I think that wars will continue for many years yet.

one thing, however, is certain, our whole conception of war and its waging will have to be changed.

From August 6, 1945, onwards, armies, navies, and air forces as we know them, have metaphorically been sunk in the rubble and dust of Hiroshima, as surely and certainly as were the wooden fleets at Hampton Roads. Faced by bombs which even in their earliest infancy can release energy equal to 20,000,000 tons — ten times the total tonnage rained upon Germany, and not in four years but in a few minutes — what place is there for conscript hordes, for battle fleets, and for armoured divisions, or even for generalship, because the technician is now in supreme command?

If war is to continue, what is the answer? I think it is this:

The object of war is not to destroy. It is to change your enemy’s opinion; what he is fighting for – his aim.

A war of pure destruction is madness, and today we are beginning to realise this as regards Germany.

Merely to multiply bomb-power in order to devastate is not war, for war is a political instrument, not an exercise in pure butchery.

Carried to its logical conclusion, destruction as the sole aim in war is the end of the world.

This end is in sight if we persist in looking upon atomic energy purely as an explosive, such as gunpowder or TNT.

But when we look upon it as a propellant, as we look upon steam in locomotive or petrol in a car, a completely new vista of warfare is opened up — something terrible, wonderful and extraordinary.

A year ago we were threatened by the then greatest inventions of the war — the flying bomb and rocket. Both were destructive instruments; yet, as we know, the second has been used as a propulsion engine.

If an aeroplane can be motored by a rocket, why not then a ship, an immense ship, a ship as great as the Queen Mary, and not to sail the sea but to fly through the air and into pure space?

This was the dream of those earliest rocketeers, men like the American Dr. Robert H. Goddard a nd t he German professor Hermann oberth, who shortly after the last war set out to experiment with rocket propulsion in order to solve the problem of interplanetary flight.

Though it may seem fantastic, those concerned had such faith in their project that they went so far as to draw up plans for a Transatlantic passenger-carrying rocket ship, which by travelling through the stratosphere would cover the distance between Berlin and New York in well under one hour.

THEORETICALLY their project was sound, but to render it practical an initial difficulty had to be overcome — the problem of fuel.

Most of these men favoured a mixture of liquid oxygen and petrol, which gives a maximum velocity of 9,000 miles per hour. But they realised that this fuel was too bulky and unreliable, and that the problem was unlikely to be satisfactorily solved unless atomic energy could be tapped.

That energy i s now ours: the rocket ship, no longer a dream, is a potential fact, and soon may become an actual one. What does this mean from the point of view of war?

Right through history it has been the prime innovators and not the prime destroyers which have changed the face of war and of the world.

It was the horse which in the second Millennium AD enabled the Steppelanders of Central Asia to conquer what today we call europe and lay the foundation of our civilisation.

It was the improvement of the sailing ship in Tudor days that began to give us power to found our empire.

Again, it was the railway which gave might to the German theory of the nation in arms, and in the present war i t was the f l ying machine which, above all innovations, brought her to ruin.

Is it likely, now that a new innovation is about to appear — namely, the atom-propelled rocket ship — that history will reverse her course and that wars will disappear?

I doubt it. Instead, I believe that wars in the future may actually transcend this globe of ours — and be fought in space by warriors flying atom-powered rockets.

one of those old rocketeers wrote: ‘ The r ocket denotes a unique method of propulsion which bids fair not only to change the face of the world but the face of other worlds.’

We live in days of strange and violent possibilities.