Another bit from the Earl of Halsbury's 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), this time from p. 217. It's a couple of weeks after a massive Russo-German air strike on London, Paris, and in fact most of the bigger cities of western Europe. Two members of a group making its way to the southern coast of Cornwall wonder just how much further British society has to sink after the enormous dislocation caused by the knock-out blow:
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Monthly Archives: April 2006
Acquisitions
Flies and cockroaches
As everyone knows, cockroaches are supposedly the only creatures able to survive a nuclear explosion.
Poison gas in the open is one thing. Dropped on a densely populated town like London it's quite another. Suppose you dropped enough to make a lethal atmosphere all over London to a depth of forty feet, not a single living thing could survive, not one -- except flies. Curiously enough, they are immune.
Source: the Earl of Halsbury, 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), 25.
This is a new one on me, I wonder if this idea became as popular as the cockroach version later did?
It also has grave implications for the future of life on this planet, because chemical weapons are easier to develop than nuclear ones and so that will give the flies an advantage over the cockroaches in the eternal struggle for supremacy ...