![]() ![]() Nobel was the first “merchant of death” to operate on a world scale-and an enemy of war. Within a decade his gigantic trusts linked ammunition firms all over the globe. He kept developing new, more powerful explosives and selling them to anyone who would buy, without distinction. ![]() He advertised it for use in mining and railroad construction but almost as fast as his plants were built, his principal customers came to be the ministries of war. His first laboratory blew up, killing his brother hundreds of lives were lost in other blasts before he finally found his “safety powder,” dynamite. He set about bringing the oil under control. When a vial exploded and destroyed a wing of Turin University, the horrified scientist abandonned all work on his “nitroglycerin.” Young Nobel was not horrified. As a youth, he became interested in an oily liquid discovered by an Italian chemistry professor. Should there be peace now, an atomic peace, it would be the crowning success of a deliberate even though devious pacifist experiment launched by one man just half a century ago.Īlfred Nobel was the inventor of high explosives and, while he lived, their virtually exclusive manufacturer. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system-” For the first time, the end of a war has found the generals seriously inclined to give a chance to lasting peace. On V-J Day, General Douglas MacArthur dismissed the use of force as a method of settling international disputes, stating, “The utter destructiveness of war now blots out this alternative. He finally pursued the great aim with both factories and congresses and in an even more indirect third way-through his science prizes-which may yet prove to be the most effective. With a half-wistful, half-cynical smile at the Baroness von Suttner, whose speech to the Fourth World Peace Congress had just been applauded by delegates from twenty nations, Alfred Nobel added, “Perhaps my factories will end war sooner than your Congresses.” It was conceived before the British novelist was born, by a Swedish multi-millionaire who once told a young lady, “I wish I could produce a substance or a machine of such frightful efficacy for wholesale devastation that it would make wars altogether impossible.”Ĭruising on a Swiss lake twenty years later, he told the same lady, meanwhile matured into a prominent pacifist: “On the day when two army corps will be able to annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations will recoil from war in horror and disband their forces.” On that day and no sooner. Wells who got the credit for it in the recent editorials. Peace by the threat of scientific destruction is a fairly new idea, but older than H. ![]()
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