Science & War

Science and War

Many a scientist, contemplating with heavy heart last week the outbreak of war in Europe, recalled with bitterness the layman's charge that "Science has made war horrible." Scientists do not feel that science is responsible for the frightfulness of modern war. They have pursued the conquest of nature in their laboratories and it is not their guilt if men of bad will have snatched up their discoveries and misapplied them to the conquest and murder of man. The first man who discovered that fire could be made by twirling sticks or striking flints was, in a sense, a scientist. It was not his fault that fire was later used to burn people at the stake.

By definition, the aim of science is not to produce but to know. Thus many "pure" scientists, who pursue knowledge for its own sake, do not consider the industrial and military technologists who apply other people's knowledge as scientists at all. The application may be far removed from the original discovery. For example, phosgene, which was first used as a military weapon in World War I, was first made by British Chemist John Davy in 1812.

Thirty-six gases were used in World War I--every one of which was a known chemical compound or element and many (like chlorine and phosgene) were useful in peace before the War. Their use in battle was not a scientific but a manufacturing problem. With their powerfully developed chemical industry, the Germans had a considerable edge on the Allies, and Allied gas warfare was largely a series of belated retaliations.

Of the 36 World War I gases, about half-a-dozen (including mustard, phosgene, diphosgene, chlorpicrin, diphenylchlorarsine) proved highly efficient.* Two gases which showed deadly promise--Lewisite, an arsenical blister-producer, and Adamsite, a respiratory irritant--were developed by the Allies during the War, but the peace was signed before they got into action. Adolf Hitler promised last week not to use poison gas, but if gas rolls into the European arena notwithstanding, Lewisite and Adamsite are almost certain to get a thorough trial. Otherwise, military experts believe, the armies will rely on the half-dozen gases which proved efficient in World War I. Though nobody can deny it with certainty, it does not seem that a terrible "supergas" has been produced in secret because the realm of possible chemical compounds has been too well explored.

Straightforward military technological improvement has proceeded apace in some fields, especially the speed and versatility of tanks, the accuracy of aerial bombing, the range and speed of airplanes. Yet the most effective innovation of the Spanish civil war was a crude anti-tank weapon-- bottles of gasoline wrapped in burning rags which were hurled at Insurgent tanks by Loyalist infantry. And the record for long-distance artillery fire is still held by the monster guns with which, during World War I, the Germans shelled Paris from a wood 70-odd miles away.

For incendiary bombs, military men favor thermite, a mixture of iron oxide and aluminum powder which burns at a temperature of 3,000DEG C. (about 5,400DEG F.). Thermite was known before, and used as an incendiary during World War I.

Last year horrified reports cropped up that liquid oxygen was being used to fill bombs of dreadful killing power. An article in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Review pooh-poohed this bogey, on the ground that liquid oxygen explosives are so sensitive that they cannot safely be transported from place to place, and that they deteriorate rapidly, losing their explosive power in an hour or two.

From the Spanish war came rumors of a new air bomb expressly designed not for demolition but to kill personnel. These German-made bombs were said to be light (6 to 60 Ib.) and relatively cheap; even a small bomber could carry and release a great many. The casing was criss-crossed with grooves like a bar of chocolate so that a 10-pound bomb would fly into 800 small, jagged fragments of uniform shape. Many of the fragments fly out horizontally, giving the burst an effect like the circular sweep of a machine gun.

In military metallurgy, beryllium is rated a new wonder metal. The element beryllium was discovered by a Frenchman in 1797, but during World War I and for years afterward there was no known use for it; in 1923 its price was $5,000 per pound. But beryllium ores are scattered widely over the world and last week the price of the metal was down to about $11. Not quite twice as heavy as water, beryllium is one of the lightest of all metals. It is a third lighter than aluminum. Chemically wedded to copper or nickel, it makes an extremely hard, tough alloy. Nickel with only 2% of beryllium in it has a tensile strength of 260,000 pounds per square inch, as against 90,000 for stainless steel. Moreover, this nickel-beryllium alloy maintains high tensile strength and resistance to "fatigue" up to temperatures around 1,000DEG C. For some time Germany has used beryllium for bushings, valve springs and other airplane and automotive engine parts which must combine strength with heat-resistance. In the U. S., Beryllium Corp. of Reading, Pa. is licensed to manufacture the metal under German patents. Used in airplane structural parts for lightness and in engine parts for durability at high temperature, beryllium, according to this company's predictions, will make possible airplanes capable of flying 500 to 600 m.p.h.

For resource-poor nations like Germany and Italy, a large part of war science is concerned with the invention and manufacture of Ersatz or substitute foods and synthetic materials. Germany's brilliant chemist, Friedrich Bergius, 54, who a quarter-century ago conceived the hydrogenation process for making gasoline from coal, is likely to be one of the most useful men in warring Germany, and one of the most hated by those who have to eat his Ersatz foods. From sawdust Bergius has extracted a digestible sugar, equal in food value to barley. Of the sawdust 60% to 65% becomes sugar, 5% acetic acid, 30% lignin which can again be used to make charcoal or wallboard. The sugar can be converted into protein by treatment with yeast; into fat by feeding it to pigs. Apparently, up to the outbreak of World War II, food-from-sawdust in Germany was fed only to animals.

When the first World War broke over Europe in 1914, the physicists at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, famed citadel of pure science, scattered to Government Service, as they will doubtless do in 1939. But during the first World War the late revered Lord Rutherford, great formulator of the atom's internal structure, stuck to his post. He was on the verge of splitting the atom. When a committee of scientists sought his help on a method for submarine detection, he put them off by saying that if he could prove atomic disintegration it would be more important than the war itself. As it turned out, it was not.

The scientific achievement most important to the Germany of World War I was only indirectly a military weapon, and has since been used far more in peace than in war. This was Fritz Haber's nitrogen-fixation process which enabled Germany to manufacture nitrates (for explosives) and other nitrogen compounds from thin air. Haber's name has been smirched in Nazi Germany. He was a Jew.

** According to Chemicals in War (TIME, March 8, 1937), by Lieut. Colonel Augustin M. Prentiss -- generally considered the most thorough treatise on gas warfare, past and future, in English.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.