freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of molten
soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously and
maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks
according to the size of the bomb employed and the chances of its
dispersal. Once launched, the bomb was absolutely unapproachable and
uncontrollable until its forces were nearly exhausted, and from the
crater that burst open above it, puffs of heavy incandescent vapour and
fragments of viciously punitive rock and mud, saturated with Carolinum,
and each a centre of scorching and blistering energy, were flung high
and far.

Such was the crowning triumph of military science, the ultimate
explosive that was to give the 'decisive touch' to war....

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