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Military Demonstration and Disclosure of New Weapons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Bernard Brodie
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Extract

Military demonstrations could conveniently be classified according to objective under two major headings: (a) those intended primarily to convey purpose or intention, and (b) those intended primarily to convey capability. The latter type is generally free of the political risks which often attend the former. Both types, but especially the former, may be effected without necessarily disclosing new advances in the use, design, or performance of weapons. In the latter type, however, there may be a strong temptation—or a strong justification even in the absence of temptation—to parade a new or improved weapon or weapons system which reflects both technological achievement and enhanced capability.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , April 1953 , pp. 281 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1953

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References

1 I am assuming here that an action which bears all the markings of a demonstration is not deprived of that identification simply because it occurs during wartime and is adjunct to the ordinary operations of war. Nor do we need to take account of some speculations that the Hiroshima-Nagasaki explosions were intended to impress the Russians. They were intended at least to impress the Japanese, and the fact that the objective in dropping those bombs was distinctly that of creating or powerfully implementing an impression, rather than of merely adding to material damage wrought by conventional means—as is borne out by the fact, among others, that the two bombs used were the only ones in existence at the time, with only one other at an advanced state of readiness—is what warrants identifying the act as a demonstration.

2 Although one can find certain partial exceptions in the literature, the extent to which these exceptions departed from the normal has been much exaggerated by some authors. Thus Mr. James R. Newman, who seems to be not at all aware of the difference between the nineteenth century and the present with respect to secrecy in weapons, describes the famous Mitrailleuse (a kind of machine gun) as having been invented and developed in utmost secrecy by a French officer named Reffye under the orders of III, Napoleon (The Tools of War, New York, 1942, p. 52).Google Scholar The facts are that the gun was designed by a Belgian, Montigny, who had based his work on that of another inventor of some twenty years before and who constructed several of the guns to supplement the permanent defenses of the Belgian fortresses. Staff officers from several European armies, including the Prussian, had inspected the gun at Brussels and were quite familiar with its design and performance. However, it is true that when the French adopted it, in 1869, they attempted to cloak in secrecy the fact that they were building it in substantial numbers at Meudon. Since the French adoption preceded by only one year the wholly expected Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, one may surmise that what the French were trying to keep secret was not the design of the gun, which they must have appreciated to be widely known, but the fact that they intended to employ it in numbers and place heavy tactical reliance upon it. See Hutchison, G. S., Machine Guns: Their History and Tactical Employment, London, 1938, pp. 9–11Google Scholar; and Johnson, M. L. and Haven, C. T., Automatic Guns: Their History, Development, and Use, New York, 1941, pp. 11, 13.Google Scholar

3 It was inevitable during the war that our failures should have received a good deal more publicity than our successes. One of the important areas where we especially outclassed other nations was in the fire-control devices for our ships' guns. Our naval anti-aircraft batteries were the envy of our allies and, quite apart from the VT fuze used on our 5-inch and later our 6-inch guns, accounted in large measure for the fact that Japanese aircraft were far less effective against our ships than our aircraft were against theirs. Most of the essential developmental work in fire control had been done before the war, though few of the warships available at the time of Pearl Harbor had the most modern equipment and none of them had anything like enough antiaircraft guns.

4 The present writer, after being permitted by the Navy security authorities in 1943 to mention radar in one large printing of his Layman's Guide to Naval Strategy (Princeton, N.J.), and after Life had run a descriptive article on the subject, was required in a subsequent printing to delete those same references.

5 The VT fuze is an example of a weapon kept so secret that it was not even used against the enemy in many areas in which it would have been highly effective. For almost two years following its introduction into war operations, it was restricted to use by ships at sea against enemy aircraft, on the grounds that (a) warships are almost never captured; (b) shells fired against aircraft over the sea are never recovered; and (c) it did not automatically disclose itself to the airmen against whom it was fired—if the shell came close enough to be fired at all it would probably destroy the aircraft and its crew, and if it did not the enemy airmen would have no especial grounds for feeling that they had witnessed anything other than remarkably accurate fuze-setting. Although the fuze promised greatly enhanced effectiveness in land artillery operations by giving an entire new utility to shrapnel (which had practically dropped out of use during and after World War I), it was not so used until the Battle of the Bulge of December 1944. By that time, the war was obviously too close to its end to warrant many worries about the secret falling into the hands of the enemy. In view of what the Germans might have accomplished against our strategic bombers (and of course our land forces) had they had the secret earlier, this extreme form of security was probably fully justified.

6 Lord St. Vincent (Admiral Jervis) was not so simple as historians have made him appear when he observed in 1805, apropos of Pitt's encouragement of Robert Fulton's experiments with submarines, that “Pitt was the greatest fool that ever existed, to encourage a mode of war which they who commanded the seas did not want, and which if successful would deprive them of it.” That indeed was an age of disclosure, but the remark may conceivably retain some pertinence even to an age of (not always impenetrable) secrecy. Thus, where Mr. Vannevar Bush berates the naval officers of all countries for failing to develop a homing torpedo in the Interwar period (Modern Arms and Free Men, New York, 1949, p. 74),Google Scholar we may conclude that while our own officers were certainly blameworthy in this respect, it may in the net have been a good thing for us that they were.