entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 238 ] The Future
and Brodie, 1973, p. 70). Benjamin Franklin, on seeing the first balloon
flight, predicted that balloons might make war obsolete (Sherry, 1987, p. 92).
John Hay, Abraham Lincoln's personal secretary and later Theodore
Roosevelt's secretary of state, assumed it to be "the plain lesson of history
that the periods of peace have been longer protracted as the cost of destructiveness
of war have increased" (Sherry, 1987, p. 92). Victor Hugo had a
similar prediction regarding flying machines. He thought they would make
armies "vanish, and with them the whole business of war, exploitation and
subjugation" (Clarke, 1966, p. 3). Jack London said that "the marvelous and
awful machinery of warfare. .. today defeats its own end. Made preeminently
to kill, its chief effect is to make killing quite the unusual thing" (Sherry,
1987, p. 92). This has been quite the popular theory among inventors: Robert
Fulton, Alfred Nobel, and Thomas A. Edison are among those who assumed
their new technologies would make war unfightable (C. H. Gray, 1994).
Henry Adams and H. G. Wells predicted either human suicide or the end of
war. As R. Buckminster Fuller put it, "Either war is obsolete, or we are"
(Sherry, 1987, p. 92). But why hasn't everyone accepted that war is obsolete?
It is true, and important, that war is no longer universally considered
necessary, inevitable, or even good, as John Mueller notes:
Many of the most fervent war supporters seemed beyond logical or
practical appeal because they were so intensely romantic about their
subject. Others were attracted to war because they believed it to be
beneficial and progressive, and many, including some who loathed war,
considered it to be natural and inevitable. Most of these views, particularly
the romantic ones, were encouraged by the widespread assumption that
war in the developed world would be short and cheap. . . . None of these
lines of thinking has serious advocates today, particularly as far as they
pertain to international war in the developed world. (1989, p. 39)
Mueller is too optimistic. War obviously has its supporters to this day, but
now they are on the defensive. While there have always been those who
argued war was insane, lately the number has been growing. During World
War I this became a mass movement among soldiers. The British antiwar
soldier poets and the Russian, French, and German mutinies were all
reflections of the terrible lesson of trench warfare: war is now inhuman.
This idea became broadly held in the United States during the
Vietnam War. Widespread draft resistance, desertion, and mutinies in the
field, at sea, and even in Guam and California shook the U.S. military.
Only American English has a special word, "fragging" (from fragmentation
grenades), for soldiers' killing of their own officers. Once back in "the
World" (the United States) vets formed a number of antiwar groups, most
notably Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Today such activ-