H. G. Wells Quotes
Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.
Wells, H. G. The World Set Free. Macmillan, 1914.
The moral imperative of submission rather than allowing a war started by the aggressor, logical for Pizarro and Church leaders of the time, is the same logic of aggressors from Adolf Hitler to Saddam Hussein.
As in modern times the Navy encouraged the media and leading writers to promote their latest weaponry. Hawthorne however shortly after the Monitor and the Merrimac battle saw the future in terms even more dramatic than most of the military.
Ever since the invention and manufacturing of firearms, Bedouin Arabs have prized gun ownership highly. Gun ownership percentage is much higher than even the United States. Over time one or more guns appeared in every tent. With children about, the loaded gun has ever been a danger. Further, anger leads to gunplay in a society where guns are ubiquitous. Even for the gun owner, the additional time it takes to load a gun before using it is a safety valve that allows time for cooling off.
Einstein saw the war as madness but what distressed him most was that his friend and colleague, Fritz Haber, to help the war effort developed poison chlorine gas as a weapon which killed and maimed hundreds of thousands. He was a devoted pacifist thereafter. It took an even greater madman like Adolf Hitler and his Nazis to reach the mental point where he recommended to President Roosevelt that scientists develop an atomic bomb.
This declaration, drafted by Russell and Einstein two days before Einstein’s death was signed by a number of other prominent scientists.
While the inventor of the American M16, a weapon not as good, became a millionaire, the General got a medal but by the beginning of the 21st century was penniless. See {635786}.
The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb. After the development of the atomic bomb there were great pressures on the involved scientists to downplay the dangers of nuclear weapons development. The weapons developer arm of the government was anxious not to frighten the public which might call for more oversight or even limitation of development and testing. Equally important was the scientists themselves who understood the forces that they had unleashed and were worried that if the public realized the worst of the possibilities, science and scientific research itself might be in jeopardy from a new Luddite reaction. Oppenheimer urged candor with the public. Most scientists took his advice but the Atomic Energy Commission had become politicized and when Oppenheimer went public with his and others scientific concerns they punished him by calling him a security risk and withdrawing his clearance thus cutting him off from new developments and discrediting him and his views at the same time.
Herbert George Wells —known as H. G. Wells—was a prolific English writer in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is called a "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.[a] His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
