World Wars of the Twentieth Century 357
weapons design rivaled transnational organization in importance at the
time; and since atomic bombs did not dissolve with the peace as inter
national economic structures mostly did, one can argue that this aspect
of the war effort was more fateful in the long run.
Scientific advice had been sought in critical questions about arms
design long before World War II. Archimedes is reputed to have
helped the tyrant of Syracuse in devising new machines of war for use
against the Romans in 212 B.C. and Gribeauval was in touch with the
top levels of French science in the eighteenth century on questions of
ballistics. The renowned physicist Lord Kelvin had advised the British
Admiralty about technical questions of ship design as early as 1904;
and during World War I the Admiralty established a special board of
scientists to help with antisubmarine warfare. Its important result, an
echo-ranging device nicknamed ASDIC, did not mature until 1920,
too late for use in World War I.^91 On the German side, however,
Professor Fritz Haber provided the chemical expertise necessary for
the fixation of nitrogen and also invented the first poison gases.^92
Nevertheless, scientific collaboration remained sporadic and marginal
during World War I except, perhaps, in the field of airplane design.^93
World War II was different. The accelerated pace of weapons im
provement that set in from the late 1930s, and the proliferating vari
ety of new possibilities that deliberate invention spawned, meant that
all the belligerents realized by the time fighting began that some new
secret weapon might tip the balance decisively. Accordingly, scien
tists, technologists, design engineers, and efficiency experts were
summoned to the task of improving existing weapons and inventing
new ones on a scale far greater than ever before.^94
- R. F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone (Oxford, 1973), pp. 506–9; Richard Hough,
First Sea Lord (London, 1969), p. 238.
- Cf. L. F. Haber, Gas Warfare, 1916–1945: The Legend and the Facts (London,
1976), p. 8. Why poison gas was not used in World War II, despite the common
expectation beforehand of murderous attack from the air in the first hours of combat, is
an interesting and important question. Psychological distaste among military men for a
weapon that seemed somehow stealthy and unheroic in use must have played an im
portant part in diverting attention from gas to tanks and airplanes. Barton C. Hacker,
“The Military and the Machine: An Analysis of the Controversy over Mechanization in
the British Army, 1919–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1968) offers a
persuasive psychological interpretation of this choice. For German deliberations, see
Rolf-Dieter Muller, “Die deutschen Gaskriegsvorbereitungen, 1919–1945: Mit Giftgas
zur Weltmacht?” Militargeschichtliche Mitteiliungen 1 (1980): 25–54.
- For the British side see John M. Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry,
1850–1975 (London, 1972), pp. 228–30; for the United States, Daniel Kevles, The
Ploys ids ts ( N e w Yo rk, 1978), pp. 117–38.
- M. M. Postan et al., Design and Development of Weapons: Studies in Government and
Industrial Organization (London, 1964) is limited to Great Britain but makes clear the
