Weapons of mass destruction

“ Weapons of mass destruction pose a direct and serious threat to the United States and the entire international community. The probability of a terrorist organization using a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon, or high-yield explosives, has increased significantly during the past decade. ”

“ Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction." ”

“ To invent yet more dreadful means of destruction—balloons with bombs filled with suffocating gases, shells, which men will shower upon each other from above? Whatever may be invented, all States will furnish themselves with similar weapons of destruction. And cannon's flesh, as after cold weapons it submitted to bullets, and meekly exposed itself to shells, bombs, far-reaching guns, mitrailleuses, mines, so it will also submit to bombs charged with suffocating gases scattered down upon it from balloons. ”

“ At times eight or ten of the destructive missiles were to be seen rushing away on their errands of death and destruction at the same moment, sometimes exploding and scattering the fragments in wide circles over the water, throwing it up in vast silver columns, or on the shore plowing up the earth and sending soil and foliage in thick masses high in the air. ”

“ And yet what a small and miserable thing this was, after all, in the way of a battle compared with the titanic combats which have been taking place in Europe ever since the greatest war in history commenced last August. I can well understand how the nerves of any man, however strong, may be shaken to pieces, by the awful clamour of the giant shells and the concentrated fire of many machine-guns, and countless numbers of rifles, and the terrible havoc wrought by these fearful weapons of destruction. ”

“ They were subjected to rifle fire, machine-gun fire and bombs of a peculiar sort, big iron balls of the size of a football filled with explosive that were just flung down the steep. They dodged flares and star shells. At one place they went up a chimney that would be far beyond the climbing powers of any but a very active man. It must have been like storming the skies. The dead and wounded rolled away often into inaccessible ravines. Stray skeletons, rags of uniform, fragments of weapons, will add to the climbing interest of these gaunt masses for many years to come. ”

“ Each time it breathed it belched out flame and smoke with the most unearthly crash that could possibly be produced, and with each breath there flew with it a mass of metal and high explosive weighing fourteen hundred pounds, scattering death and destruction for hundreds of yards round the point of impact in the German defences, so that our boys might find it easier to force their way through. ”

“ The bombs used are as diversified as the crafts on which they are carried. The French aviators at one time dropped long steel billets or arrows which had swedged heads and sharpened points. These missiles, dropped from the height of a thousand feet or more, attained a velocity and force which made them dangerous weapons of the minor sort. ”

“ The continuous deep booming of the heavy guns, as they belched forth their three-hundred-pound projectiles, mingled with the sharp ringing reports of the thirty and forty pound quick-firers, and the horrible grinding rattle of the machine guns in the tops that sounded clearly above all, and every few seconds came the scream and the bang of bursting shells, and the dull, crashing sound of rending and breaking steel, as the terrible missiles of death and destruction found their destined mark. ”

“ New weapons of destruction are being devised; the chemists and scientific thinkers of European countries are devoting their knowledge and skill to the task of inventing new weapons of torture and destruction for use not only against the soldier but also against the civilian. ”

“ They read with interest, if not with avidity, of their new guns, of their immense and still more immense ironclads, of their incredible and still more incredible explosives, but just what these tremendous engines of destruction might mean for their personal lives never entered their heads. ”

“ Not only has their knowledge been turned to the creation of tremendously destructive explosives, the like of which have never before been known in warfare, but the same brains which have been utilized to assist man in his death-dealing crusades have been called upon to thwart the efforts of the warring humans and save the lives of those compelled to face the withering fire of cannon, the flaming grenade and the asphyxiating gas bomb. ”

“ On the earth, torn up by a recent explosion, were lying, here and there, broken beams, crushed bodies of Russians and French, heavy cast-iron cannon overturned into the ditch by a terrible force, half buried in the ground and forever dumb, bomb-shells, balls, splinters of beams, ditches, bomb-proofs, and more corpses, in blue or in gray overcoats, which seemed to have been shaken by supreme convulsions, and which were lighted up now every instant by the red fire of the explosions which resounded in the air. ”

“ The air-ships, flying hither and thither a few hundred feet above the house-tops, like spirits of destruction, sent their shells into their crowded masses and wrought the most awful havoc of all with their frightful explosives, blowing hundreds of men to indistinguishable fragments at every shot, while from the windows of every house that was not in ruins came a ceaseless hail of missiles from every kind of firearm, from a magazine rifle to a shot-gun. ”

“ Neither blasting gelatine, dynamite nor gun-cotton fulfills all these conditions; but they satisfy many of them and are more powerful than other substances. For the destruction of walls, trees, rails, bridges, etc., it is simply necessary to attach to them small bags of explosive, which are ignited by means of blasters' fuse and a cap of fulminate of mercury, or by an electric fuse.
We now come to the application of high explosives to warfare in the shape of bursting charges for shells. ”

“ The casemates are designed to be absolutely bomb-proof, the walls being of such thickness as to resist the impact of shot weighing hundreds of pounds, while the enormous arches overhead are made to withstand the weight and the explosion of the heaviest shells. Such at least was the design of the military engineers who constructed them: though, with the new inventions in war, the monster guns and the new explosives, it is hard to put any limit to man's power of destruction. ”

“ All over Earth, people were digging up the guns that had laid buried for a hundred years, and when those were lacking, seizing scythes and axes, sticks and stones, and going out to meet the fleeing Germans. The German military retaliated by unloading its whole arsenal of atomic and other weapons against the rebelling peoples. ”

“ In every case the right kind of weapon is the one which performs the job of stopping the enemy’s armed forces without inflicting unnecessary loss on the innocent bystander. For this purpose we need a great number of weapons which are adaptable to specific purposes, which are easy to transport and easy to deliver, and give rise to the kind of effect which the situation requires. ”

“ The guns used by the enemy for the destruction of men produced horrible wounds, certainly more severe on the whole than those we had tended during the first twenty months of a war that has been pitiless from its inception. ”

“ Like all inventors of war material of increased efficiency, he believed that the more destructive the weapons and explosives the more improbable would war become, until it should be rendered impossible.
“Were it not that the increased destructiveness of war must tend to shorten its duration and diminish its frequency—thus saving human life—the invention of my projectiles could hardly be justified; but believing in the really pacific influence of the most powerful means of defence, these long projectiles I call the anti-war shell.” ”

“ The instruments of modern material [Pg 18] warfare are almost incredible in the refinement of their destructiveness, and I have no doubt in my own mind that even these ingenuities are also diabolic, and that if we could pierce the veil we should see the invisible enemies at their fiendish work. But these unseen antagonists out-do all the subtleties of the material instruments of destruction in the devices in which they lure and snare and entrap and overthrow the soul. ”

“ When we read of guns that will carry a shell weighing a ton for over twenty-five miles which will, when it explodes, destroy everything within an eighth of a mile, and of guns less destructive that will carry over seventy-five miles, almost wholly destroying a church and killing sixty-five men, women, and children; when we read of bombs dropped from the sky, killing innocent women and children, hundreds of miles from the field of battle ”

“ And still dropping their horrid explosives
Below to the shattered plain,
They seek by quick aerial manœuvres
Advantageous positions to gain.
And thus rising, poising, and advancing,
Pausing in close column and line,
The strange scene was awesome and wonderful,
And immeasurably sublime.
Fiercely on each other with quick-fire guns
Destruction they now madly pour,
And infernal machines and magazines
Add their terrible, deadly roar. ”

“ From there and for miles back the car crept slowly past gun positions and batteries beyond count or reckoning, jolted across the metals of a railway line that was already running into the captured ground, past “dump” after “dump” of ammunition, big shells and little piled in stacks and house-high pyramids, patches of ground floored acre-wide with trench mortar bombs like big footballs, familiar gray boxes of grenades and rifle cartridges, shells again, and yet more shells. ”

“ High-explosives, shrapnel, grenades, bombs, bullets were rending, piercing, and shattering the living flesh and muscle and bone. Towns and villages were being turned into heaps of brick and wreckage. Hordes of old men, women, and children were thronging the roads, and fleeing from approaching disaster. ”

“ It was he who first persuaded people to make guns, pistols, and cannon mortars, bombshells, and congreve rockets, so that widows and orphans have been multiplied by him, and [27] millions of men, by his means, have been destroyed. ”

“ Zero time is 9 p.m., and exactly on the second hell breaks out. Guns in the rear roar out in fury. Trench mortars close at hand vomit forth their missiles of death, and even machine-guns and rifle batteries help to swell the crescendo of battle. The ranges are well known, and the guns do their work without harming our men, who are now crawling forward. ”

“ Even an eye untrained in photographic interpretation can clearly see the buildings in which the missiles are checked out and maintained ready to fire, a missile trailer, trucks to move missiles out to the launching pad, erectors to raise the missiles to launching position, tank trucks to provide fuel, vans from which the missile firing is controlled, in short, all of the requirements to maintain, load, and fire these terrible weapons. ”

“ From observations previously established, he will locate at the earliest possible moment the batteries, etc., of the attack, and will prevent their completion and arming by the use of shells and case-shot charged with high explosives, fired from howitzers and mortars. He will use his long guns for counter-battering those of the besieger, and generally for direct fire upon exposed targets.
By taking the initiative he may frequently obtain the upper hand in the artillery duel, and possibly be able to prepare the way for strong sorties, and the destruction of the besieger’s works. ”

“ A week ago they were ready, with railways, guns, Tanks, every kind of explosive, every kind of weapon which modern science has devised for the killing of men in great masses. A week ago all the guns that had been massing let loose their fire. Night and day for seven days it has continued with growing violence, working up to the supreme heights of fury as dawn broke to-day. ”

“ After a rest the enemy opened again, the hills in front spouting flame, and the battery at the foot of our position vomiting death. Between the explosions, however, and they came thick and fast, we saw the figures of men as numerous as ants swarming up the base of the hill. Our machine guns were soon angled upon them, and our rifles sent rattling volleys among them, but the explosions in our position now come so frequently that we are soon choked in clouds of dust, and battered by splinters of gun carriages and even falling sand bags. ”

“ Shells are fired, shrapnel in some cases, explosive shells in others, which are timed to the second, so that when fired from guns many miles from the objective point, they explode at a measured distance from the earth. They are exploded within a gauged distance of the target, and the execution is done over a measured area. On the shells are indicators. Within the shrapnel shells are hundreds of small shot. As the shell explodes the shots are scattered over the enemy, and death and destruction are unavoidable. ”

“ Deluged by high explosives, shrapnel and gas shells, seeing their comrades mowed down by machine gun fire, bombed from the sky, alternately in pouring rain and burning sun, hungry half the time, their eyes burning from want of sleep, half suffocated from long intervals in gas masks, undergoing all the hardships of a bitter campaign against a determined, vigorous and unscrupulous enemy, yet their only thought was to push on—and on—and on. ”

“ Even the emplacements of the big guns would offer excellent targets—and who will say that five hundred pounds of high explosive, placed on or near a disappearing gun carriage, would not do serious harm? But why continue? We may rest assured that the enemy would make the destruction as complete as possible, under the circumstances. If it should take a whole day to batter down a single lock and if all the machines should be lost in the fight, would not the results justify the price paid? ”

“ The surging masses of human beings intent on each others destruction with the death dealing artillery with its terrific roar and the more destructive missiles of small armies with their hateful hissing sounds, together with the deafening cheers of the moving armies, and the heartrending screams and moans of the wounded and dying make the scene agonizing to the extreme. ”