There is a fascination in fear. There is a vortex that surrounds the concept of doom . . . No terror is greater than the unknown except the terror of the half-seen.
So Vannevar Bush, boss of all U.S. scientists who worked for the Government in World War II, summarizes the feelings of the layman toward the newest weapons in the world's arsenals. In a book to be published next week—Modern Arms and Free Men (Simon & Schuster; $3.50)— he devotes himself to the job of illuminating some of the dim corners of science's weapon shop.
Like a man thinking out loud, Scientist Bush tries to answer certain questions: What would a third world war be like? Would the U.S. be ready for it? Could the U.S. win it? Could civilization survive the holocaust made possible by the new techniques of war? No one is better qualified to answer such questions than Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and of the project which produced the atom bomb; but in answering them he only half succeeds in removing from them the terror of the half-seen.
The Dominant Element. The science of destruction, growing by leaps & bounds since World War I, has changed, and continues to change the whole face of warfare. During World War I, precision manufacture, mass production and the internal combustion engine upset all the old techniques. Barbed wire and the machine gun, recalls Author Bush, "ended forever the hot rush of masses of men." In modern times, says he in a typical scientist's estimate, not man but the factory became "a dominant element in the whole paraphernalia of war."
By 1918, with submarines, airplanes, and the new pursuit of electronic miracles, the science of destruction was in full career, equipped with virtually every basic modern technique "except atomic energy."
By 1945 it had reached the climax of Hiroshima. Dr. Bush thumbs through the catalogue of miraculous instruments of World War II: radar, the eye which helped save Britain during the Nazis' all-out bombing campaign; sonar, the underwater ear which helped break the Nazis' almost-decisive U-boat campaign; missiles, such as the V-i which "might well have stopped the [Normandy] invasion"; rocket-firing bazookas which can stop tanks; recoilless guns which can be carried by two men and have the power of 75-mm. howitzers.
As much to be feared as any weapon in the arsenal, says Dr. Bush, is the submarine, now able to stay submerged for long periods "with only a small end of a pipe [the schnorkel] sticking out like a swimmer breathing through a straw," able to outrun pursuers and overtake fast convoys, and carrying long-range homing torpedoes which could be fired from a point beyond the earshot of sonar. The Nazis had been a few months too late with their undersea engine of destruction. But there it is now, says Bush, a heritage of German ingenuity: "one of our greatest potential enemies."
These weapons and many more—in awesome priority, the atom bomb—are in the arsenal. So, ruminatively, Dr. Bush looks into the near and distant future.