The war brought together the power of science and industry and the
power of government as never before. The personification of this union was
Fritz Haber, the German chemist. i By synthesizing nitrogen before the war,
Haber made it possible for Germany to produce munitions even when the
Allied blockade cut it off from the outside world. His seminal act, however,
was to convince the German government and military of the uses of poison
gas, then to supervise its application on the western front.
In all, between 1914 and 1918, governments called on their scientists and
inventors for new discoveries and on their industrialists for new feats of
production. The war was the seed ground for the weapons of the future.
Great Britain, for example, put the world's first aircraft carrier into the
water in time for the Battle of Jutland in 1916. In several countries, including
Germany and the United States, the airplane went from the primitive, barely
armed models of 1914 to sophisticated, long-range types available in time
for the final years of combat. The growing use of tanks by the Americans,
British, and French in the final offensive of 1918 likewise began to open a
new era in armed conflict. Soon after the war's end, devices first invented
or first widely used in wartime found vast application in the civilian world.
Radio became first a basic tool for warring armies, then, after 1918, a
common conveyor of news and entertainment in middle-class homes. In
June 1919, Captain John Brown of Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) and a
fellow officer made the first successful flight across the Atlantic. Their trip
from Newfoundland to Ireland opened the way for long-range commercial
aviation. The scientist in government employ or under government contract,
active in the development of weaponry, remains a living legacy of the war.
At the close of the century, the immense destructive capacity of modem
weapons, which first became fully evident in World War I, remains a factor
in intemafional life. Nonetheless, the ulfimate destructive tool of war,
nuclear weapons (which came out of the World War II experience), has not
been employed for the past five decades, though Iraq's use of chemical
weapons in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and the threat of biological and
chemical weapons use during the Persian Gulf War in 1990 and after recalls
the extremes, and horrors, of World War I. The World War I era's readiness
to resort to whatever weaponry existed or could be conjured up has not
continued to its logical conclusion. The horror and the irrationality of
launching nuclear salvos has so far restrained the international powers that
have such weapons at hand. As in other areas, the trajectory of events set in
motion by the war has gone forward in a twisted and unpredictable fashion.