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The Canceled Carrier. Some of what he has to say bears on the great debate in the National Military Establishment—a debate, incidentally, which he deplored as a "sorry spectacle . . . undignified, immature, disruptive and damaging to morale and to the country's safety." An all-out war in the near future, he believes, is not likely. If it comes it will be chiefly fought with the last war's weapons, "and we would win it. The whole world knows that. If it comes it will be by miscalculation, not by design."
War in a more distant future is hardly likely to see either a repetition of World War II's Pacific naval battles or such mass bombing raids as the air assaults on Germany. Great fleets on the sea or in the air will be canceled out by the guided bomb, the guided missile, the proximity fuze, he thinks.
True, high altitude bombers sent against warships "have their limitations. They can seldom see a target on the ground clearly, except by radar." And with "ordinary bombs which fly many miles horizontally as they drop they cannot hit the side of a barn—they cannot even hit a small city with any assurance . . . [But] the guided bomb alters this whole situation ... A great ship alone on the sea is a clear target to radar and a clear target for a guided bomb." Therefore, unless some effective seagoing defense against airborne attack comes along, "the days of the large fighting ships—carriers as well as battleships—are over."
The Canceled Bomber. On the other hand, the bomber in mass formations over land targets had become very vulnerable. One lesson of World War II, says Bush, is that "bombardment of enemy cities in the face of determined defense, as the sole means of bringing victory over a foe of equal or comparable strength, was a delusion, and not worth the extreme cost and effort it entailed . . . [In the future] no fleets of bombers will proceed unmolested against any enemy that can bring properly equipped jet pursuit ships against them in numbers, aided by effective ground radar, and equipped with rockets or guided air-to-air missiles armed with proximity fuzes . . . The days of mass bombing may be approaching their end."
Bush visualizes nests of robot weapons guarding strategic centers. Ramjet missiles would be loosed against the highest-flying, swiftest planes, which "could neither see them nor dodge them; they come too fast." The missiles carry proximity fuzes which, during the war, "multiplied the effectiveness of large antiaircraft batteries by five or ten." The fuze, which commands the scientist's awe as "a devilish device," may yet, he thinks, "bring a feeling of relative security to the world."
The Fantastic Cost. What would War III be like? Bush finds no ready answer. It would not be as easy as some optimists like to think, nor as dire as others predict. "For a long time to come," at least, there would not be fleets of fast and high-flying intercontinental bombers. The atom bomb would be dropped, but it is not the abso lute weapon it has been said to be. It is not even as devastating as popularly supposed, says Bush. The costs of manufacturing and of delivering it would be so vast that they might well exhaust a nation before it had struck a winning blow.