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Section 5
A recent historical writer has described the world of that time as one
that 'believed in established words and was invincibly blind to the
obvious in things.' Certainly it seems now that nothing could have been
more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the
rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they
did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in
their fumbling hands. Yet the broad facts must have glared upon any
intelligent mind. All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually
increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a
blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was
no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive
defence, armour, fortifications, and so forth, was being outmastered
by this tremendous increase on the destructive side. Destruction was
becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it
was revolutionising the problems of police and internal rule. Before
the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could
carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to
wreck half a city.
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