RADIO AND WAR OF THE FUTURE.

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 42, 2 May 1930, Page 4

RADIO AND WAR OF THE FUTURE.

"ANZAC DAY, the day of memories, has passed and the swirl and eddy of modern life has again engaged the attention of those who stopped for a brief respite to reflect on a decade that was blackened by war. Radio took the messages and the .prayers of those participating in public ceremonies and flung them to the four winds. Everywhere, the gospel of peace was carried by radio. But that very agent of peace can become a sinister force, unequalled in its powers of destruction and atrocity. The Great War and the disorder that followed were sufficient to horrify the whole world, but half its terror has not and cannot be revealed. In it radio was only in its infancy; it was threatening to be a menace but was not. In the eleven years that have followed the declaration of peace, this science has made remarkable strides till now it is one of the premier sciences of the age. As a means of spreading entertainment and culture it has neither equal nor predecessor. Its use in the world of commerce has hardly been exploited, and its use in war undreamed of. It would be well nigh impossible to imagine just what it would grow into were hostilities to break out afresh. In the hands of the scientists concentrating on destruction it would be a weapon such as could annihilate armies and cities. It would change the whole aspect of war, and turn battlefields into shambles eclipsing in their horror those of the last Great War. Consider for a moment the possibilities of remote control. Already aeroplanes and cruisers have been directed by stations, many miles away. Imagine the destruction these could cause without injury to the controlling hands. Aeroplanes filled with poisonous: gases’ many times more deadly than those used before, when brought down could spread their fumes before a defenceless opponent.. The submarine, that dread agent which nations are trying to outlaw, could be made doubly and trebly effective, through remote control. Then there is the photographic cell, which emits electrical impulses when it is acted upon by light. Mines that explode when touched would be totally eclipsed in their death-dealing properties by an explosive that was

directed to the doomed ship, by the combination of a photo cell and -a small amplifier. Armies could be destroyed when the enemy was jar away, gases and other fiendish ageftts of destruction might be liberated when their victims came within range--surely the power of | "the ‘retreating force would be greater than that of the advancing ¥ one. ~ Then there is television, though now. not practicable, yet the time is coming whén it will be. Its use in war wowld be horrible in the extreme. Battles could be waged by officers removed considerable: distances by controlling "planes or other agents of destruction and seeing everything; they might even use the mechanical man somé have been devised already and used to amuse, but their place in war can be imagined. The observation planes of the last war must _ be strapped when television becomes practicable. The possibilities of power amplification in detecting minute sounds, beam transmission to replace, or at least substantially supplement, the signal-methods of our existing units are in themselves dangerous weapons while transmitted power suggests the perfection of the death ray which threatened to terrorise the last war. Throughout history the tendency is for each war to be mo terrible than the one that preceded it, but the utilisation of radic’ « and television in the war of the future must make it an unparallellec horror. Gone is the glory of war.