Word: bushing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Military security has terribly hampered Vannevar Bush's discussion of the prospect of future war and its effect on what he calls "our society of free men." Bush, who as wartime head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development probably knows as much about the impact of science on modern warfare as anyone, sets down a double thesis: that a forthcoming war will not be very different from World War II, and that a democracy should be capable of preparing itself to prevent such...
...case is weakened by the restriction on facts he can print to back it up. Bush details the changes in warfare since World War II, and those we can reasonably expect in the future. He describes how light, mobile, powerful weapons such as recoilless guns have swung the advantage in land warfare back to the defense; how the co-ordination of radar net, jet-aircraft, and guided missile should make things very tough for the high-altitude bomber; bow rockets and fast submarines will be advanced enough to chop up conventional naval vessels at long range. Bush tends to describe...
...second half of Bush's thesis is more acceptable. His belief that science in a democracy is necessarily more creative than that in a totalitarian state is pretty suspect--at the end of the war Nazi scientist were well ahead of the Allies in the development of aircraft, guided missiles, tanks, and submarines, among other things. But his does not mean that we must be unprepared...
...Bush visualizes nests of robot weapons guarding strategic centers. Ramjet missiles would be loosed against the highest-flying, swiftest planes, which "could neither see them nor dodge them; they come too fast." The missiles carry proximity fuzes which, during the war, "multiplied the effectiveness of large antiaircraft batteries by five or ten." The fuze, which commands the scientist's awe as "a devilish device," may yet, he thinks, "bring a feeling of relative security to the world...
...Fantastic Cost. What would War III be like? Bush finds no ready answer. It would not be as easy as some optimists like to think, nor as dire as others predict. "For a long time to come," at least, there would not be fleets of fast and high-flying intercontinental bombers. The atom bomb would be dropped, but it is not the abso lute weapon it has been said to be. It is not even as devastating as popularly supposed, says Bush. The costs of manufacturing and of delivering it would be so vast that they might well exhaust...