p. 576 | Preparing War

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 16, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 36.

Preparing War.

IT would seem as though modern invention could not go much farther in the production of weapons of destruction. A young French naval officer has made experiments which show that in warfare forts and vessels may be blown up by means of torpedoes dropped from balloons. Against weapons from such a source no walls nor armor can guard. A torpedo falling on the deck of the strongest iron-clad would blow it to pieces as quickly as one exploded under her keel; and a few of them dropped within a fort would annihilate it. On this subject the S. F. Chronicle says:—

“These discoveries are useful. The more deadly war is made, the less likely it is to occur. If every army that went into battle ran a risk of total annihilation, nobody would go to battle. And if every fort and every ship of war was reasonably certain of total destruction with all its contents, whenever it was attacked, there would be no more forts and no more ships of war.”

But that is a mistake. So long as the war spirit exists, so long will there be war, and these death-dealing inventions show an increase in the war spirit. A nation will refuse to fight only when it knows that its armament is inferior to that of its enemy; but all nations have an equal chance to secure the latest improved artillery, and, standing on an equal footing, they would be relatively in the same position as they are now. Instead of there being no more forts and no more ships of war, as the Chronicle imagines, all the difference would be that each army would try to bring its weapons to bear on its adversaries’ forts and ships before its own were attacked.