But there is still much of interest. Hovering in the background of The Final Count is the threat of warfare, especially aero-chemical warfare. George Simmers noted some time back that this novel seems to present an unusually early example of the feeling that the Great War had been futile. That's my impression too, from a slightly different angle. The events described in the novel take place in 1927 (i.e. the near future of the time of publication in 1926), and Europe seems to be on the brink of war again. That's at odds with my impression of the mid-1920s, certainly after the Locarno treaties of 1925; it's not that there were no tensions between nations, but there was little feeling that war was likely any time soon. Perhaps Sapper needed to exaggerate the possibility of conflict in order to find employment for Drummond and his band of merry vigilantes, preferably against the Bolshevik menace.

The poison mentioned above was originally developed near the end of the Great War by Robin Gaunt, a British chemist serving in the British army. It's actually a liquid (as was mustard 'gas') which causes instantaneous (and very painful) death if applied under the skin. This made it impractical as a battlefield weapon, because the intended victims would need to already have some minor cuts to allow the poison to get in. There is also the problem of how to spray a liquid over a large area. The plan put forward was to use tanks for this purpose (a la J. F. C. Fuller in The Reformation of War).

The Armistice fortunately made this unnecessary. But by 1924 the world is on the edge of ruin again:

Six years later found Europe an armed camp with every nation snarling at every other nation. Scientific soldiers gave lectures in which they stated their ideas of the next war: civilised human beings talked glibly of raining down myriads of germs on huge cities. It was horrible -- incredible: man had called in science to aid him in destroying his fellowmen, and science had obeyed him -- at a price. It was a price which had not been contemplated: it was a case of another Frankenstein's monster. Man had now to obey science, not science man: he had created a thing which he could not control.¹

Gaunt comes up with the idea of 'inventing a weapon so frightful that its mere existence would control the situation. The bare fact that it was there would act as the presence of a headmaster in a room full of small boys'.² The intention is that a world policeman would threaten its use against potential or actual aggressors. He meets an Australian (!) millionaire who also hates war, having lost two sons at Gallipoli, and who agrees to fund his researches. Gaunt manages to improve his gas by combining it with a blister agent which will rupture the skin and allow the poison to penetrate it. Only a few drops are needed to kill. The problem of deployment is also solved:

The tank scheme, however effective it might have been when a war was actually raging, was clearly an impossibility in such circumstances as I contemplated [wrote Gaunt]. Something far more sudden, far more mobile was essential.

Aeroplanes had great disadvantages. Their lifting power was limited: they were unable to hover: they were noisy.

And then there came to my mind the so-called silent raid on London during the war when a fleet of Zeppelins drifted down-wind over the capital with their engines shut off. Was that the solution?

There were disadvantages there too. First and foremost -- vulnerability. Silent raids by night were not my idea of the function of a world policeman. But by day an airship is a comparatively easy thing to hit; and once hit she comes down in flames.

The solution to that was obvious: helium. Instead of hydrogen she would be filled with the non-inflammable gas helium.³

Gaunt's benefactor buys an airship from Germany; the idea is to present the completed weapons system to the War Office (no mention of the Air Ministry!) and spring the whole scheme on the world as a fait accompli. But Bulldog Drummond's arch-nemesis Carl Peterson intervenes, and the airship is diverted from its noble purpose ...

The idea of a 'world policeman' here might relate to proposals for an international air force which were beginning to percolate at the time. But there's an important distinction: in Gaunt's vision, the death-dealing airships would not be at the service of the international community (the League of Nations is pointedly labelled useless) but instead would be wielded a great power which could be trusted to use them responsibly, i.e. Britain (possibly in concert with the United States and the other English-speaking nations). So this is more a revived pax Britannica, air-based rather than sea-based. The idea of scientists developing a terrible new weapon in order to end war is also suggestive of such novels as W. Holt-White's The Man Who Stole the Earth (1909).

The prospective use of airships as an offensive weapon (and the parallel denigration of aeroplanes for the same purpose) is unusual for a story written after the First World War. Sapper gives their combustibility as the main reason for their unsuitability, which is why he fills his with helium. (Also for important plot reasons.) This strikes me as both backwards and, er, forwards. The combustibility of hydrogen was certainly a problem, as the Hindenburg discovered in 1937. And helium was starting to be used in airships: the USS Shenandoah, built in 1923, was the first to use it. But inflammability was hardly the only reason why airships were no longer thought of as bombers. Being filled with helium didn't stop the Shenandoah from being ripped apart in a storm.

Similarly, Sapper misunderstands the nature of the so-called 'silent raid' of the night of 19 October 1917. This was a big Zeppelin raid which encountered heavy winds when the eleven airships crossed England's east coast. They were driven hard by the wind across the country and even into France; in all five were destroyed, four due to the weather, one by anti-aircraft fire. Accounts differ as to why the raid was 'silent': it may have been because the high wind dispersed the sound of the Zeppelin engines, or it might have been because London's AA defences held fire as L45 flew overhead, figuring that fog hid the city's location and that there was no need to let the Germans know where they were. According to Sapper, however, the silent raid was an intentional tactic in which the Zeppelins switched their engines off, effectively sneaking up on their target. Before radar, when sound location was one of the primary means of detecting enemy bombers, this was indeed a worrying possibility (which the Italians were later accused of making a reality over Barcelona). But Sapper seems not to have realised that the silent raid was an utter disaster for the airship raiders. He might at that have shared in a popular misconception, but accurate accounts of the silent raid were already available, for example in Joseph Morris' The German Air Raids on Britain, 1914-1918 (1925).

So Sapper -- real name H. C. McNeile, a decorated ex-Royal Engineer -- was not particularly well-informed about aerial warfare. He probably picked up his ideas about airships from incomplete reports of the Great War air raids and reading about the Burney and Imperial Airship Schemes in the mid-1920s. Well, not everyone could be an aviation expert. But equally, few readers would have noticed or cared -- his books certainly sold well enough, and The Final Count perhaps helped to sustain the image of the airship as a bomber. But if so, it left few traces that I can find.

1. Sapper, The Final Count (London and Melbourne: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1985 [1926]), 148.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 149.

'To-day and To-morrow' was a series of over a hundred essays on 'the future' of a diverse range of subjects, which were published in pamphlet form by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. between 1924 and 1931. The authors are equally varied: some were acknowledged experts in their fields, others seem to have been chosen for their ability to provoke. Some of the 'To-day and To-morrow' essays have since attained classic status; most have been forgotten. But as a whole they are an impressive testimony to a vibrant, wideranging (and idiosyncratic) kind of British futurism, and I think they deserve more attention. Some of them have been reprinted from time to time, and if you're rich you can both nearly all of them in collected volumes through Routledge, but otherwise there are so many they are are hard to track down. So I've tried to compile a definitive list of the series' titles (which are mostly classical allusions) with links to online sources for the texts and some sort of author biography, where available. Google Books has many of them, but only snippets or previews, so I've linked to other sources where possible. Additions and corrections are welcome.

Physically, they were very small books (pott octavo, to be precise), easy to slip into a pocket, and numbered only a hundred pages or so, in large type and generous margins. Their price was 2/6, about the same price as a cheap novel, but five times the price of the later, hugely successful Penguins. So they did not attract a mass readership, but do seem to have been much read by the chattering classes. (See Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009), 139.) Many of the titles went through multiple impressions. And at least one was discussed in the House of Commons.

As I said, some of the essays are still well-known, at least to historians of science: for example the first two in the series, Daedalus, or Science and the Future (1924) by chemist J. B. S. Haldane, and Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924) by Bertrand Russell, the philosopher. Daedalus was Haldane's first book. His prediction in it of universal ectogenesis (i.e. the artificial creation of life, true test-tube babies) was its most startling feature, but he also discussed eugenics, the problems of peak oil and peak coal (Haldane's answer is, in part, wind power: he foresaw a Britain 'covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains'), the creation of food from coal and atmospheric nitrogen, and so on. Russell was already famous (hence another book by him in the series, What I Believe, published 1925). Icarus was a bit more glum than Daedalus, as the titles perhaps suggest; he spoke of race suicide (of the white races, that is, due to birth control), the end of liberal ideas such as a free press, a despotic world state (though he thinks it would become more benevolent as time passed), the control of personality through hormones (possibly to create a compliant underclass). The apparent dominance of biological themes in many of the books is interesting. The 1920s were the great days of physics -- Einstein was a worldwide celebrity because of his theory of general relativity; the cornerstones of quantum mechanics were being laid in Germany; in the United States, Hubble was showing that the Universe was far bigger than anyone had imagined. But judging from 'To-day and To-morrow', it was evolution and its implications which gripped the imagination of the reading public. It's true that there are books on physics (Archimedes), chemistry (Hermes) and cosmology (Eos). But there are a number on aspects of biology (e.g., evolutionary psychology, Down's syndrome, the body of the future, Darwinism itself), and evolution seems to feature in many of the books, even when they ostensibly have nothing to with it. For example, Gerald Heard's Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes (1924) apparently makes the argument that fashion is evolution at work, that 'evolution is going on no longer in but around the man, and the faster because working in a less resistant medium'.

Another example of futurology from the series which is remembered today is J. D. Bernal's The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929), particularly for its discussion of space travel. Rockets, solar sails, hollowing out asteroids to make space colonies -- Bernal spheres -- and ultimately interstellar colonisation. That's pretty heady stuff, and its not the sort of discourse we would usually associate with early twentieth-century Britain. But how unusual was it? Not that unusual, it can be argued. Olaf Stapledon published the wonderful Last and First Men the following year, which makes The World, the Flesh, and the Devil look stodgy and unimaginative by comparison. The British Interplanetary Society was founded in 1933. H. G. Wells had his Space Gun on screen in 1936; and much earlier, his First Men in the Moon. The British Empire even expanded into interstellar space in 1900. There was also (at least one) earlier example of spacemindedness in 'To-day and to-morrow', Hanno, or the Future of Exploration (1928), by J. Leslie Mitchell. I'm not sure what Mitchell's qualifications to discuss exploration were: later he was a key novelist in the Scottish Renaissance (again, as with Bernal, Haldane and Heard, this was his first book -- which says something for the judgment of Kegan Paul's editors). He served in various bits of the Empire in the Army and the RAF so perhaps that's it. I haven't read Hanno, and it's only available online in Google Books's snippet view, but judging from the word cloud it doesn't just talk about darkest Africa and Antarctica. Some of the most common phrases are 'extraterrestrial', 'Martian', 'lunar', and the names of several lunar craters and mares. So why haven't I heard of Mitchell before? (Not to mention André Maurois's 1927 parody of what sounds like a 'lunar panic' and subsequent war against the Moon, The Next Chapter.)

Some entries are important in the history of military strategy, or at least the airpower parts of it: Basil Liddell Hart's Paris, or the Future of War (1925), and Haldane's Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare (1925). Paris falls pretty squarely into knock-out blow territory, a position Liddell Hart had mostly retreated from by 1939. Callinicus was infamous for its argument that poison gas was actually a humane weapon, since during the last war it had a low mortality and high recovery rate, compared with explosive and bullets. Haldane also the favoured knock-out blow line of thinking, though it wasn't his main concern. (He did downplay the risk of gas attacks on cities.) But again, there are other relevant titles which are less well-known. For example, Aeolus, or the Future of the Flying Machine (1927), by Oliver Stewart. While he didn't discount the possibility of a knock-out blow, Stewart did believe that air defence was possible (and he was a Great War fighter ace as well as an aviation correspondent). Or what about Janus: the Conquest of War (1927), by William McDougall? As a psychologist, maybe McDougall doesn't seem likely to have had a lot to say about aerial warfare. But as I've argued, he was perhaps the first person to propose a fully-fledged international air force. So there are interesting things here, when you look beyond the well-known titles. (Sadly for me, one title was advertised but seems not to have been published: Mercurius, or the World on Wings by C. Thompson Walker, billed as 'A picture of the air-vehicle and the air-port of to-morrow, and the influence aircraft will have on our lives'. Sigh.)

But I don't want to leave the impression that 'To-day and to-morrow' is just about science and technology. The future is presented as being much more than that. There are books on the future of Canada, of music, of Shakespeare, marriage, crime (and miscreant youth), Oxford and Cambridge (and another just on Oxford), humour, swearing (both by Robert Graves), psychical research. There's one on the future of Futurism (the kind with the manifesto) and another on the future of prophecy. There's C. E. M. Joad on the future of morals (Thrasymachus) and Sylvia Pankhurst on the future of international language (Delphos). Vera Brittain wrote on the future of monogamy (Halycon), J. F. C. Fuller on transport and on America (Pegasus, Atlantis). Arthur Keith on 'the problem of race' (Ethnos). An expatriate Scot who left for New Zealand some sixty years before was recruited to write about his former homeland, but another key member of the Scottish Renaissance was given the chance to respond in another volume. Anthony Ludovici wrote Lysistrata (1924), which one reviewer described as an anti-feminist but pro-feminine tract; Dora Russell provided a counterblast in Hypatia (1925), though her feminist credentials may have been undermined by being listed in the publisher's catalogue as 'Mrs Bertrand Russell'. So broad was the range of subjects that some don't seem to fit at all with the rest at all: dragons? aid for the best-seller? Then there's what isn't discussed. A decade later, you might expect such a series to be dominated by international affairs: the future of the League, the future of Germany, the future of dictatorships (which is the sort of thing the Penguin Specials were about, pretty much). There's not much of this here. It was a more peaceful time. There was plenty of anxiety but it was caused by problems seen on the horizon. And as for authors, the most famous British futurist of them all is missing -- no H. G. Wells! (Though an early biographer of his, Geoffrey West, is there, writing on the future of literary criticism.)

After more than a hundred volumes (I have 103 listed, though I may have missed some), 'To-day and to-morrow' came to an end. Interestingly, despite the very British flavour of many of the books, they were simultaneously published in New York by E. P. Dutton (which seems to have added a couple of its own), which perhaps suggests an even greater appetite for speculation about the future in America than in Britain. Certainly, the writing, publication and reading of these books tells us something about the way the future was constructed in those countries in the early 20th century. Max Saunders, who is in the English department at King's College London, has a research project going on 'To-day and to-morrow'; a conference was held a couple of years ago. Even in putting this post together, I can see there's a lot potential there, and I'll be looking out for any resultant publications!

I recently rewatched one of my favourite science fiction films, The Day the Earth Stood Still -- the 1951 original, of course, not the currently-screening remake (which I have yet to see, but tend to doubt that it will improve over the original in any area other than special effects). I can't remember when I last saw it, but it must have been before I started the PhD because otherwise the climactic scene would have leapt out out me and smacked me in the face, as it did the other day ... (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

The whole scene is shown above, but I'll quote the speech made by the alien Klaatu to the leading scientists of Earth (emphasis added):

The Universe grows smaller every day and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all -- or no one is secure. This does not mean giving up any freedom except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves, and hired policemen to enforce them. We of the other planets have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets, and for the complete elimination of aggression.

The test of any such higher authority, of course, is the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets, in space ships like this one, and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression we have given them absolute power over us. At the first sign of violence they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk.

The result is that we live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war -- free to pursue more profitable enterprises. We do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works.

So the robot Gort is an interplanetary policeman, whose function is to deter and punish any breaches of the peace with the use of force. The reason why this made me sit up straight is that it's yet another post-Hiroshima, space-based rehash of the international air force idea. (See, for example, Robert A. Heinlein's Space Cadets, published in 1948.) The international air force was a popular topic of discussion in the interwar years; the basic idea being that national air forces would be disbanded, and instead all countries would contribute towards a multinational force which would use airpower for collective security. (Exactly how was a matter for debate; some writers contended that it would need to use the full power of the knock-out blow, while others thought that it could get by with just fighters, since any aggressors would only have converted airliners to use as fighters, relatively easy to shoot down.)

The language and ideas of the international air force proponents are very much like Klaatu's: they too used the police analogy extensively, and I can easily imagine somebody in the 1930s saying 'There must be security for all -- or no one is secure'. Here's William McDougall, a British psychologist, writing in 1927:

The institution of such an international air-force might, then, well lead to general abandonment of national armaments, and might initiate an era of universal peace. For, given the condition that the International air-force were the only one in existence, resistance to it would be hopeless, and no nation would attempt it.¹

Klaatu would have understood where McDougall was coming from; it's the same hope for an end to war, now motivated by the fear of nuclear weapons instead of bombers and expanded to an interplanetary scale rather than an international one. Obviously the point was not so much that Earthlings needed to worry about aliens interfering in our affairs, more that we needed to set up an international police force of our own.²

But I do wonder just how credible a threat is a fleet of flying saucers flown by robots who can be pacified simply by speaking the words 'Klaatu barada nikto'?

1. William McDougall, Janus: The Conquest of War (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., n.d. [1927]), 126-7.
2. The idea doesn't appear in the 1940 short story by Harry Bates, 'Farewell to the master', so it was presumably introduced by the scriptwriter, Edmund North. Bates and North were both Americans.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I'm going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I'll give you a little background on that.

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.

This is the British Army's first aeroplane, which wasn't very successful but did at least make the first ever flight in Britain. In 1914, the First World War broke out and this pushed aviation along very quickly. At first, aeroplanes were mostly used to find and report on the movements of enemy troops, but soon they were used to drop bombs on them too.

And when aircraft became powerful enough, they started to bomb targets far behind enemy lines. This is the German Gotha G.IV, which was used to bomb London in 1917 and 1918. Of course, each country also developed fast fighter aircraft to try to shoot down their opponents' slow bomber and reconnaissance aircraft.

Here's one of the most famous fighters of the First World War, the British Sopwith Camel, as flown by both Biggles and Snoopy. It was fast, agile, and armed with twin machine guns.

After the war ended in 1918, aviation technology continued to progress, though not quite as quickly. By the 1930s, air forces were starting to be equipped with sleek biplanes such as this Hawker Hart, which was the fastest aeroplane in the Royal Air Force -- which is a bit startling since it was actually a bomber and not a fighter!

The late 1930s witnessed the birth of a new generation of aircraft, powerful monoplanes with maximum speeds well in excess of 200 or even 300 miles per hour. They were also better armed than earlier aircraft: these Hawker Hurricane fighters had 8 machine guns.

This is one of the bombers that the Hurricane would be defending Britain against, the Ju 88, Germany's most effective bomber. It could carry up to 2.5 tons of bombs. Germany built over 14000 of these bombers by the end of 1945.

Finally, this is one of the most powerful bombers of the war, the British Avro Lancaster. It was capable of carrying up to 10 tons worth of high explosive or incendiary bombs to Berlin and beyond.

But that's all just by way of introduction. My research isn't actually about aeroplanes as such or how they were used. What I'm looking at is the fear of bombing in Britain in the early twentieth century, from the early days of flight before the First World War, up until the end of the Blitz on British cities in 1941. More specifically, I'm interested in how the threat of aerial bombardment of cities was debated in the public sphere, as distinct from what was being discussed behind closed doors by the government and the armed forces. A number of historians have written excellent studies of British air strategy and air policy. Many of them mention the pervasive fear of bombing on the part of the British public, especially in the 1930s, but nearly always, they just take this fear as a given, and don't spend much time trying to understand it or its origins. This annoyed me, because the little that they did tell me about the popular fear of bombing was fascinating, and I wanted to know more: why was the public scared of bombing, and what were they afraid would happen? Hence the thesis!

However, it's very difficult to measure public opinion itself, especially before the introduction of opinion polls (which means virtually all of the period I'm studying). You can get the occasional odd glimpse into what the average person really thought about the dangers of bombers coming over and blowing them up, but perhaps not enough to do a whole thesis on. So instead I'm focusing on some of the most important influences on public opinion: primarily books, journals and newspapers which discussed the air menace and what should be done about it. And to a lesser extent, I also use things like cinema newsreels, films and radio broadcasts. Concerned citizens -- often professionals such as military experts, doctors, or scientists -- used all of these forums to present predictions of what would happen to cities and civilians under air attack, along with their proposals about how to solve the problem. Novelists took the serious speculations of the experts and turned them into nightmarish visions of what future wars held in store for the inhabitants of great cities. These fictional scenarios in turn coloured much of the debate about bombing. In fact, fictional and non-fictional discussions about bombing were often remarkably similar to each other.

So, what was the threat? Most people today have probably heard of, for example, Guernica, the Blitz or Dresden, which are all still potent symbols of the horrors of total war. This is Guernica, a small town of about 5000 people in the Basque country in northern Spain. In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War it was devastated by a German air raid.

London was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 57 consecutive nights from 7 September 1940, forcing more than 200,000 people to take shelter in the underground railway stations every night. Here are just some of them in Elephant and Castle.

And this photo was taken from a British aeroplane during the Allied air raids on the German city of Dresden in the middle of February 1945. The little points of light are incendiary bombs, which started a massive firestorm. About 30,000 people -- men, women and children -- were killed in these raids.

But as terrible as these events were -- and there are many more I could have mentioned -- they were nothing compared with the predictions made before the war. Essentially, the widespread belief in the 1920s and 1930s was that at the beginning of the next war, a huge fleet of enemy bombers would suddenly strike at London and other cities and destroy them with high explosive bombs, incendiaries, and poison gas, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties within a matter of hours or days, shattering essential infrastructure and leading to mass panic. Under such circumstances, it was widely assumed that Britain's government would be forced to surrender within days or weeks of the outbreak of war. This is what was sometimes called the 'knock-out blow', that is, the sudden blow which would knock Britain out of the war.

This graph shows the effects of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War. 'Casualties' means the number of people killed or seriously wounded, in this case in each month. Green shows the casualties caused by airships, and red the casualties caused by aeroplanes. Note that it peaks at about 600 casualties in any one month.

And this is the equivalent graph for the Second World War. The peak casualties per month has shot up to more than 16000. That's September 1940, when the Blitz began. In all, there were more than 146000 civilian casualties in Britain during the war, around a third of whom were killed.

Now, here's a comparison between what actually happened in 1939-1945 and what British government officials in 1938 predicted might happen if a war started in 1939 -- that's the knock-out blow: over a million casualties per month, half of them fatalities, over only two months. Nearly two orders of magnitude more destructive than what actually happened. These estimates were not plucked out of thin air, but they weren't much more than naive extrapolations from the First World War experience: divde the number of casualties between 1914 and 1918 by the tonnage of bombs dropped, and then multiply by the number of bombers the enemy had and the amount of bombs they could carry. This turned out to be a huge exaggeration, but you can see why everyone was so worried!

In extreme versions of the knock-out blow, civilisation itself would collapse, as the complex webs of commerce, transport and social control which bind society together break apart, leaving people to fend for themselves as best they could. From the perspective of a later generation, this sounds a lot like the effects of nuclear war.

And in fact in 1966 Harold Macmillan, a former Conservative Prime Minister who had been a backbench MP in the 1930s, wrote that 'We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today'. It could in fact mean the end of life as we know it.

I'll now give you some typical examples of how this fear of the bomber was manifested in literature and the arts. The following quotes are from a knock-out blow novel published in 1934 called Invasion from the Air. Firstly, the enemy air force attacks suddenly, with little or no warning, just after or even before the declaration of war:

At five minutes to twelve on that fateful night Germany struck from the clouds. The blow was totally unexpected, for the declaration of war by Britain against Germany and Italy had no more than been conveyed to the departing Ambassadors [...] London's bewildered eight millions were precipitated into actual war conditions before the majority of them knew there was a war.

Secondly, the attack is massive in scale:

Squadron after squadron assailed the cities and towns in waves, each wave having its separate duty and aims. Upwards of two hundred enemy aircraft -- fighters, bombers and [poison gas] sprayers -- were brought down that morning as against only fifty British machines, but eight hundred broke though all attempts to stop them.

And thirdly, it is devastatingly destructive:

Thousands of people were killed or burnt to death or died subsequently insane at the memory of that battle, while, as always after the raids, vast numbers developed later the agonies of poisoned
lungs and throats, eyes and nasal passages [...] When the battle had passed Regent's Park was scarred with great pits where explosive bombs had fallen [...] the bodies of old and young, broken and mutilated, lay everywhere.

So the knock-out blow would bring the horrors of the trenches of the Great War into everyone's homes.

The Fall of London: Waterloo, by James Boswell (1933)

Next, here are some drawings which were actually commissioned for the novel I've just quoted from, but in the end weren't actually used. They show the aftermath of the attacks, as the terrified mob revolts and rampages through London. Wrecked trains at Waterloo Station.

The Fall of London: Corner House, by James Boswell (1933)

A patrolling soldier in gas gear tramping past the body of a woman.

The Fall of London: The Colosseum, by James Boswell (1933)

The rioting crowds, clashing with troops. An upper and middle-class fear of the unruly mob goes back at least to the time of the French revolution; more recently, since 1918 there had been an increase in working-class assertiveness and the example of the Russian Revolution to worry about. So the fear of the knock-out blow was not only about the possibility of war but also reflected other anxieties about British society.

Now, I'll show you a clip from the 1936 film Things To Come, which was adapted from a novel by HG Wells. This was a history of the future in three parts, and was a big-budget spectacular for its day. The first part of Things To Come features a graphic depiction of a gas attack on a city called Everytown, which bears a suspicious similarity to London. It was Wells' argument that the destruction of modern society by total warfare was a necessary prelude to its recreation into a technocratic, utopian world state.

So much for the threat of the knock-out blow. What could be done about it? Surprisingly, the obvious answer, the one that actually did work in the Battle of Britain -- air defence by fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns, harnessed to a sophisticated command and control system -- was given little credit. It was widely believed that bombers were too fast and too well-armed to be shot down, at least in sufficient numbers to stop an attack.

I'll show you a graph which helps explain this pessimism. First here's a map showing Britain in relation to Europe, and some of the directions from which enemy bombers might attack. Ideally, the defending fighters would intercept the bombers before they reached London, the biggest and most important city. But there weren't nearly enough fighters to keep up a standing patrol, so they'd have to wait until an air raid was detected, and then take off to intercept it. However incoming aircraft could usually only be detected once they'd crossed the coast. And it's only about 50 miles, give or take, from the coast to London. The problem was that as technology improved and bombers got faster, there was less and less time for the fighters to react.

This graph shows in blue the time in minutes it would take for a bomber to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. In the First World War, this could take around half an hour. By the Second World War, this time was down to only 10 minutes or so. The points in red show the time taken for the defending fighters to take off and climb to the height of the attacking bombers. As you can see this time is generally less than the crossing time, so in theory the fighters would have time to find the bombers and hopefully shoot them down. But lots of things could go wrong -- the bombers might be detected late, the detection might not be reported soon enough, the bombers might have changed course or be hiding in cloud and so on. So the greater the margin of safety the better. In the 1930s, this margin was only 5 to 10 minutes which was not reassuring at all. Air defence exercises in the early 1930s seemed to confirm the difficulty of intercepting bombers before they could reach their target.

As the former and future prime minister Stanley Baldwin pessimistically told Parliament in 1932,

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through

A widely-quoted remark at the time and for years afterwards. He went on to offer the standard alternative: essentially to bomb the enemy harder than they bombed Britain.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I mention that so that people may realise what is waiting for them when the next war comes.

One solution, then, was a bigger air force so that Britain could kill more women and children more quickly than any enemy.

This was a solution generally favoured by those on the political right, such as the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League. This is a leaflet they distributed in 1933 or 1934. As you can see, they ask 'Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at 4 o'clock and wipe out London at 8?'

Their demand is for the creation of 'a new winged army of long-range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests'. This was in fact the official Royal Air Force strategy at the time, pretty much, though due to years of disarmament and budget cuts, it did not have nearly enough aircraft to carry it out. The British governments of the 1930s did begin to rearm, but were reluctant to do so too quickly for fear of harming the economic recovery or offending the Germans.

There were also those, generally on the political left, who rejected the logic of two nations trading massive blows with each other, for it seemed likely that even the victor in such a war would be devastated. What alternatives were there? One was to mitigate the effects of bombing, by preparing Air Raid Precautions, or ARP as it was known. This could mean everything from training civilians in how to survive poison gas attacks, to the construction of deep shelters able to accommodate thousands of people during air raids. Although this sounds unobjectionable, some pacifists could and did argue that ARP was a mere palliative, and might actually invite war by making Britain feel over-confident about its ability to withstand a knock-out blow. So they favoured more radical solutions such as complete disarmament, or at least the abolition of military aircraft. But this in turn encountered problems. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the idea developed among aviation specialists that large civilian aircraft such as airliners could be easily turned into bombers, more or less by strapping bombs under the wings. This possibility undermined disarmament efforts because it was feared that once all nations had disbanded their air forces, an aggressor could arm its airliners and hold the rest of the civilised world to ransom. So, one proposed solution to this dilemma was to place the civil aviation industries of all countries under international control.

From there it was a logical step for many supporters of collective security to propose the formation of an international air force, a very popular position in the early 1930s for parts of the left and one which was under serious consideration at the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932. An international air force would harness the devastating power of the bomber to uphold collective security, because if one country attacked another it would immediately be bombed itself by the combined air forces of the world. It was also attractive to some people as a possible foundation of a world state, which would end war forever by ending nations themselves.

So, I've explained what people thought bombing would do, and what they thought could be done about it. I would lastly like to talk about the discourse itself, how these problems and solutions were propagated from specialists to the public. In the ordinary course of things, most people don't pay much attention to even existential threats such as terrorism, nuclear warfare, asteroid impacts, or indeed the knock-out blow. They may well be aware of them, and even anxious about them to some degree, but such information as they may pick up from the media, books or conversations with acquaintances will be random, fragmentary and possibly unpersuasive. It often takes some crisis, real or perceived, to concentrate people's minds on the supposed threat to society, and here the mass media plays a key role in creating the perception that there is a threat, and in suggesting solutions to the threat. So I suggest that this process is very much like the concept of a moral panic, as proposed by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972. Usually this is a media-driven panic about the danger posed to society by some group within it -- like criminals, drug users, religious cults. But it seems to me that something closely analogous can happen in relation to external threats to society. To distinguish these incidents from moral panics, though, I call them defence panics. Defence panics seem almost endemic in Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Initially these expressed fears about the loss of British naval supremacy and the possibility of invasion by a foreign power such as France or later Germany. The most famous expression of this was the great dreadnought panic of 1909, when an intense press campaign called for the laying down of 8 new battleships to pre-empt a supposed acceleration in the German naval construction programme. But only a couple of months later, there was a similar panic, this time time over German airships, and this panic was itself repeated on a larger scale in 1913. From then until the Second World War, the threat of air attack was unparalleled in its ability to create defence panics. Examples include scares over the size of European air forces in 1922 and 1935, claims about German preparations for biological warfare in 1934, the bombing of Spanish and Chinese cities in 1938 which were part of the background to the Munich crisis, itself a major defence panic, and finally the shocks of the Gotha air raids on London in 1917 and the Blitz in 1940.

In the end, the knock-out blow never took place, because the power of the bomber was greatly exaggerated. But the belief that it could happen itself shaped how the British prepared to fight the war that did come. The internationalist solutions such as disarmament or the international air force never worked, because few nations could even contemplate giving up their sovereignty like this. Britain did invest in trying to avoid the worst effects of a knock-out blow, with air raid shelters and plans to evacuate the cities. But their ARP schemes were never very comprehensive, and individuals did little to prepare for bombing on their own behalf until war came. Far more was spent on the armed forces, and most important here was air defence. Even though in the early 1930s nearly everyone was pessimistic about the fighter's chances against the bomber, effort was still put into improving them, resulting in fighters like the Hurricane which I showed earlier. These played a essential part in blunting the bomber offensive in 1940, at least in daylight. But another crucial technological component of the solution to the the problem of the bomber came, bizarrely, from almost pseudoscientific attempts to find an electromagnetic death ray. Death rays didn't help shoot down bombers, but radar did help find them.

A top-secret chain of radar stations around the coast was set up in 1939, just in time for the Second World War. This had an effective range of 120 miles. So instead of only being seen when they crossed the coast, bombers could now be detected far out to sea.

Returning to our graph showing how long it took for bombers to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. With radar, this distance effectively increased to 170 miles.

I've factored that into this graph, and as you can see, from 1939 the defenders had a much greater warning time, 30 to 40 minutes. Radar tilted the balance greatly towards the defenders. No longer was it a certainty that the bomber would always get through.

So part of the answer to the problem of the bomber came from an unexpected quarter. But it didn't just arrive by accident, it only came because people were worried about the problem and were looking hard for a solution. Sometimes, muddling through and hoping for the best just isn't good enough, not when the survival of civilisation is at stake.

Image sources: Wikimedia Commons (Wright Flyer, Avro Lancaster); RAF (here and here); Gotha GIV; RAFA Costa Blanca; World-War-2-Planes.com; Guernica, specchio del Novecento; Caring on the Home Front; Wikipedia; Airminded (here, here and here); YouTube; Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21; eBay; David Davies, Suicide or Sanity? An Examination of the Proposals before the Geneva Disarmament Conference (London: Williams and Norgate, 1932); An International Air Force: Its Functions and Organisation (London: The New Commonwealth, 1934). I can't find where the photo of the Hurricanes came from; but it's almost certainly under Crown Copyright.

These are grim, given the advent of atomic weapons. It may be the case that for every weapon, Clarke says, a defence is eventually evolved. But

During the interval between the adoption of a new weapon and its countering, the damage done to the material structure of civilization grows steadily greater, and there must come a time at last when breakdown occurs. The present state of Germany shows how nearly that point had been reached even with the weapons of the pre-atomic age.²

One particularly interesting possibility Clarke considers is that of 'radiation war'.³ He notes that the vast majority of the radiation emitted by an atomic bomb must fall outside the visible spectrum, concluding that 'the bomb acts as an X-ray generator of unimaginable power'.⁴ So a bomb could be detonated at high altitudes to blind large numbers of people, or to ruin huge areas of crops. Atomic bombs carried by long-range rockets would be the 'ultimate weapon'.⁵

Such attacks might in time assume even more vicious forms. The rockets might be detonated nearer to the ground to induce artificial radioactivity which would compel the evacuation of the areas affected. Neutron and gamma-ray warheads might be developed against which only great thicknesses of rock could provide protection. And most terrible of all would be the threat -- even if it were no more than that -- of X-ray mutation. This might well daunt a race which would fight to the death against ordinary weapons.⁶

Armies, navies and air forces would still have their uses -- atomic-tipped rockets wouldn't have been much use in Burma, for example; and at sea, the 'mobile rocket launcher, almost certainly a submersible' has great potential⁷ -- but they will ultimately deploy only once the first rocket strike (quite possibly a surprise, Pearl Harbor-style attack) has secured victory. In the air, piloted aircraft will give way to unmanned vehicles operated by 'controllers sitting in safety before television screens'.⁸ Fully-automatic aircraft may even be possible, since

All possible combat manœuvres can be analyzed and recorded by suitable coding in machines of the punched-card type. It is conceivable that "battle integrators" may be constructed along these lines, capable of making operational decisions in a matter of milliseconds according to changing combat conditions.⁹

In fact, such computers could be used to make strategic decisions as well as tactical ones, leading to a 'new type of warfare which would be too swift and complex for detailed human control [...] the apotheosis of mechanized war'.¹⁰

Clarke closes with a section on the problem of defence. Actually, the problem is bigger than that: he quotes the Smyth Report to the effect that

civilization may soon have the means to commit suicide at will. The problem that now confronts us is not one of defence but of survival.¹¹

He considers, but swiftly rejects, the idea that civilisation could move underground more or less permanently, to save itself from the bomb. Firstly, it would be practically impossible to arrange a food supply for a massive population of people for an indefinite period of time. Secondly, and more importantly, even deep underground there would be no guarantee of safety:

The penetrating power of a rocket falling from a hundred miles or more is enormous and would enable atomic warheads to be exploded at a considerable depth. Such "ground depth charges" could collapse or severely damage any cavity that could be built without an impossible amount of labour.¹²

The good news is that the British Empire, being so vast, is 'probably the least vulnerable target in the world'.¹³ The bad news is that Britain itself is indefensible, and so Clarke concludes that

the removal to Canada of the Central Government and the Service Departments must be carried out as a permanent measure. It would be impossible to do this after a war had started, and there would certainly be insufficient prior warning to enable such a vast transfer of administration to be made.¹⁴

But ultimately he doubts whether even a political unit as big as the Commonwealth could work effectively during an atomic war.¹⁵ The only winning move in this game is not to play:

In other words, the problem is political and not military at all. A country's armed forces can no longer defend it; the most they can promise is the destruction of the attacker.¹⁶

So, the United Nations is mankind's last, best hope for peace. How can rockets help it with this task? By backing up an international air force:

even if there is no intention of using them except as a last resort, the World Security Council should for psychological reasons possess long-range rockets. However, the weapons which it would use if force proved necessary would be the air contingents of its members, employing ordinary explosives and machines of the type that exist to-day. Behind these would be the threat, never materializing save in dire emergency, of the mightier forces against which there could be no defence.¹⁷

The international rocket force would need, according to Clarke, no more than 20 launch sites for world coverage. The personnel would come from every nation, and 'It would be the aim to inculcate in these men a supra-national outlook',¹⁸ much like the Red Cross. That most of them would be 'scientific' types would doubtless help this process along. And as support, they would need access to a research organisation that no nation could match:

This body might in time act as the nucleus around which the scientific service of the World State would form, perhaps many years in advance of its political realization.¹⁹

He sees this international force as only temporary, needed only until such time as 'a world economic system is functioning smoothly, when all standards of living are approaching the same level, when no national armaments are left'.²⁰

I'm sure the RAF implied no endorsement of Clarke's views by publishing them in RAF Quarterly!

So, there are a couple of points of interest here. Firstly, there's the very early prediction of 'radiation war'. I've suggested before that pre-1945, the radiation effects of atomic bombs were not well understood. Here's some evidence, then, that not very long after the first atomic explosions, there was enough publicly available information to put together a fairly accurate picture of the longer-term and larger-scale effects of a nuclear war. (The fact that Clarke had immersed himself in 1930s pulp science fiction may have helped enlarge his imagination on this point too!) For that matter, in contrast to the first part of the paper, Clarke made quite a few accurate predictions: not just intercontinental ballistic missiles, which one might think was obvious,²¹ but also submarine-launched ballistic missiles, nuclear bunker busters, and unmanned aerial vehicles.²²

Secondly, it's clear that Clarke was the very model of a liberal internationalist. His list of the causes of war -- economics and armaments, more or less -- speaks to the former, and his proposed solution to the latter. I don't know if Clarke was aware of groups like the New Commonwealth, who took pretty much the same line in the early 1930s (minus the rockets!) but it seems to me that the international air (rocket) force and the world state were temptations that many others of a technocratic persuasion had succumbed to before and since. And it's surely no coincidence that H. G. Wells was a huge influence upon Clarke, and Wells was practically obsessed with pretty much the same ideas in his later years (he died in 1945).

I'll close by quoting Clarke's two closing paragraphs in full, because they show just how strongly he felt about the need to reconstruct the world system, and also because the last paragraph, in particular, sounds very Clarke.

Only along these or similar lines of international collaboration can security be found: any attempt by great powers to seek safety in their own strength will ultimately end in a disaster which may be measureless.

Upon us, the heirs to all the past and the trustees of a future which our folly can slay before its birth, lies a responsibility no other age has ever known. If we fail in our in our generation those who come after us may be too few to rebuild the world when the dust of the cities has descended and the radiation of the rocks has died away.²³

We'll never know whether Clarke was correct in his belief that an international air and rocket force could have ensured world peace. But we do know that he was wrong to say that disaster awaited us without such a force: we've managed to survive for more than sixty years. (So far, anyway!) I'm sure Clarke would be quite happy to admit that he was wrong about this, since that's allowed him to reach his four score and ten.

Happy birthday, Sir Arthur!

1. Arthur C. Clarke, "The rocket and the future of warfare", RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.
2. Ibid., 76.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 77.
6. Ibid., 77.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 78.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 79.
15. It may seem odd to us now that anyone would even think that the Commonwealth would ever function like that, but of course it just had, in the war just past.
16. Ibid; emphasis in original.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. But wasn't: see Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London: Indigo, 2000), 16-7, where incidentally he discusses the May 1945 Lords debate I've talked about before.
22. OK, there were pre-atomic and pre-rocket precursors for most of these too.
23. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder, 79.

Nanotechnology is now starting to move out of science fiction and into the real world, though currently it's more advanced chemistry than the molecular-scale engineering foretold by K. Eric Drexler more than two decades ago. So no Strossian cornucopia machines yet, no swarms of nanobots swimming in our blood to clean out the cholesterol. But some people are already trying to think through the implications of what might lie over the technological horizon.

The November/December 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists contains a review, by Mike Tredar of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (blog here), of Jürgen Altmann's Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control (Routledge, 2006). The 'potential applications' of the book's title are both direct, for example 'specially designed warfare molecules'; and indirect, with the application of nanotech manufacturing techniques to the production of weapon systems of all types.

Thus, he [Altmann] warns, "MNT [molecular nanotechnology] production of nearly unlimited numbers of armaments at little cost would contradict the very idea of quantitative arms control," and would culminate in a technological arms race beyond control.

This is because anyone could -- with access to a nanofactory and the requisite blueprints -- construct vast quantities of very lethal weapons in very little time. Rogue states, terrorist groups, Rotary clubs. Anyone. There would be no way to police this. No hope for the future. Unless ...

The book’s most controversial thesis is not that MNT is plausible and should be taken seriously; it is that the only coherent response to this technology’s military implications is to develop global governance structures that supersede existing national powers. "The traditional way of guaranteeing national security -- namely the threat of armed force -- may no longer be compatible with the advance of technology,” he argues. And since security “can no longer be reliably ensured by national armed forces," he prescribes "strengthened international institutions and international law, in particular criminal law with prosecution of perpetrators, moving into a direction toward an international monopoly of legitimate force, strong enough to prevent or punish threats or use of illegal force."¹

This idea that technology has become so dangerous that the world needs a sort of international military organisation, with a 'monopoly of legitimate force' to guard it against destruction, is one that keeps coming up. Robert Heinlein suggested something similar in the age of the atom; Lord Allenby and (more hesitantly) Stanley Baldwin did likewise in the age of the aeroplane. They certainly weren't the only ones. (And see also Anthony Eden and Ronald Reagan on the extraterrestrial threat). And arguably, even before Kitty Hawk, there was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in "Locksley Hall" (1842):

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.²

Though Tennyson is actually speaking of a world government, this is clearly very closely associated with a world military: in practice it would be hard to have one without the other, in some form at least.

So, we keep getting told that we must unify in the face of some dire new threat: bombers, bombs, 'bots. And admittedly we've actually survived quite well (OK, maybe 'well' is not quite the right word here) so far, despite remaining approximately as fractious as ever. The doomsayers have all been wrong, thus far. Does that mean that they always will be? As I've suggested recently, in a different context, as a species we quite naturally tend to avoid taking the hard choices, at least until we are right up against it. So what happens if we ever do face a threat that really does require our unity -- maybe nanotech, maybe something else? It probably won't happen until it's too late.

Am I being too pessimistic? I sure as hell hope so.

1. Emphasis added.
2. Emphasis added.

It's 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started -- but never finished! -- was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can't have been older than 12 so it's not exactly sophisticated ...)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I'd even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn't quite worked out the way I'd envisaged it -- yet -- but of course, I'm in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There's a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun's proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.¹

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.²

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry -- including leading the V2's development team -- von Braun's obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders -- a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.³

Von Braun wasn't the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier's Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven't for a long time so I'll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. [...] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party's manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change ... sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a 'Race for Space' between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward -- if impressive -- technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn't have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it's hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it's good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I'll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, "Wernher von Braun's ultimate weapon", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53.
2. Quoted in ibid.
3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it's more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn't aware of the potential of ballistic missiles.