Paul Johnson‘s latest Forbes column turns to history for an example about the interesting link between freedom and military might.
When Hitler took power in January 1933, Germany was home to some of the best military scientists in the world. Fortunately, Hitler’s prejudices led him to rule out a major military and industrial effort to develop an atomic bomb on the grounds that he wanted nothing to do with Einstein and his “Jewish science.” Instead Hitler concentrated his resources on developing long-range rockets, an old idea developed by Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. His “flying bombs,” or V-1s, and his enormous V-2 rockets were formidable weapons, inspiring fear in Britain and causing a great deal of trouble. But they were not war-winning weapons, as they carried only conventional warheads. Had Hitler been able to use his V-2s to deliver A-bombs, he’d have won the war–or at least been able to force us into a peace that left him and his war machine intact, a frightening thought. …
… The initial concept for atomic weapons could have been developed only by a free society, one where people are at liberty to receive and process ideas of every kind. And I suspect this principle still holds. Breaking the speed-of-light barrier will lead to fundamental revisions in scientific theory. These in turn will produce new processes, some of which will inevitably have military applications. We don’t yet know what these will be, but one possibility is the creation of explosive forces equivalent to the Big Bang that produced the universe, i.e., a genuine doomsday weapon. The fear created by such a weapon would enable its possessor to keep the peace and prevent any other powers from duplicating it. It’s essential that such a weapon be in the hands of the U.S. and that this time the U.S. keep its monopoly.
