2.1 KiB
CHAPTER THE SECOND. THE LAST WAR
Section 5
A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one that 'believed in established words and wasinvincibly blind to the obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been more obvious tothe people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And ascertainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands. Yet thebroad facts must have glared upon any intelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries theamount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant thatthe power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever inthe ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered bythis tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body ofmalcontents could use it; it was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war beganit was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energysufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knewthem. And yet the world still, as the Americans used to phrase it, 'fooled around' with the paraphernalia andpretensions of war. It is only by realising this profound, this fantastic divorce between the scientific and intellectual movement on theone hand, and the world of the lawyer−politician on the other, that the men of a later time can hope to understandthis preposterous state of affairs. Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage. There were already greatnumbers of actively intelligent men and much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a whole,
The World Set Free
The World Set Free
33
was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of imbecility. Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' wasstill in the womb of the future....