Scientists and War At the end of his interesting presidential
address to the British Association's meeting at Cambridge, Lord Rayleigh devoted a special section to the relation between science and war. During war itself men of science are expected, as a duty, to apply their specialised knowledge to its purposes. But at other times they are told, said Lord Rayleigh, that their work is " the source of all the trouble." It is undeniable that science has transformed warfare, and, while changing it to a process of slaughter by machinery and chemistry, has degraded it to acts of destruction more wholesale than any- thing since the exterminatory campaigns of primitive savages. Yet are scientists specially to blame for that ? Lord Rayleigh gave the right answer—No—but for wrong reasons. He stressed the disinterested and unforeseeing nature of original discovery—the chemists who found out high explosives or thermite little knew or cared what uses they would be put to. That may be so, yet the other scientists who perfected bombs and bomb-aiming knew very well. Their real defence is that they have merely played their part in a social purpose. They are not criminals, for the same reason that soldiers are not murderers. The only solution is to render war obsolete.
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