Can Civilization Survive?

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.

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.

There is also a defense against it: "The same sort of defense used against any other type of bomb [radar, jet fighters, the proximity fuze] . . . We need not be terrified."

Intercontinental guided missiles, Bush contends, need not be feared at all--at least for the present. "It can be done . . . [but] its cost would be astronomical. As a means of carrying high explosive or any toxic substitute, therefore, it is a fantastic proposal. It would never stand the test of cost analysis."

Mistakes & Abortions. The upshot of Dr. Bush's thumbing through the catalogue: modern war comes high, and the sheer expense puts a definite limit on weapons. But the armament race is on, and it behooves the U.S. to win it. "We have not gone far in it yet and we already feel the pinch . . . We had better settle into the harness for the long pull." So long as the U.S. stays out in front, war is not likely, but the nation cannot lag.

Can a free democracy win such an armaments contest against totalitarian Russia? Bush is sure that it can--just as the U.S. beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb. "At the end of the war," he says, "it was found that [Nazi scientists] . . . had not accomplished five percent of the task." Somewhat underestimating Russian science, Bush writes: "It is a far cry indeed from the time when the enemy has a bomb." Even as Bush's book was going to press, President Truman announced that the Russians had it.

But Russia's bomb does not substantially alter Bush's thesis: that a regimented science which does not admit criticism "is likely to produce great mistakes and great abortions . . . [that] it cannot possibly alter its pattern and become fully effective without at the same time becoming free; and if it becomes free, the contest is ended."

The immediate danger to the U.S., as Dr. Bush sees it, is the danger of strangling U.S. enterprise by good intentions. The central problem "is summarized in the idea of the welfare state."

A horde of bureaucrats "takes two dollars from Jones to furnish one to Smith and makes Smith stand in line to get it." The next thing the U.S. knows, he says, it will "have taken care of everyone at the expense of everyone else, and failed to take care of the primary national interest. We cannot afford today to interfere unduly, even in the name of humanitarianism, with the diversified vigorous private initiative that made us great."

Impartial Science. "There need be no more great wars; yet there may be ... If democracy loses its touch, then no great war will be needed to overwhelm it. If it keeps and enhances its strength, then no great war need come again. Yet there is a chance . . . and free men must be ready . . .

"Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic, and it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation. A new great war would not end the progress of civilization, even in the days of the riven atom, even with the threat of disease marshaled for conquest. It is even possible that defenses may become tightened, not made absolute, but competent to halt the full flood of death from the air. As science goes forward, it distributes its uses both to those who destroy and to those who preserve."

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