No More Learning

The Strategic Bombing of Japan
Any appraisal of results of the strategic bombing of Japan must start from consideration of the military conditions prevailing at the time the campaign really got under way, which was quite late in the war. The raids that began in the fall of 1943 by B-29's based in China, and supplied entirely by air transport over the "hump" from India, were on much
too small a scale to have strategic significance. The U. S. S. B. S. report suggests that with their limited sortie rate, those forces would have been more effectively used in the campaign against Japanese shipping. The inauguration of the strategic air offensive against Japan is reasonably dated not earlier than November 1944. Toward the end of that month bomber at- tacks were initiated from recently won Saipar,, and later from Tinian and Guam.
However, the intensive air attack on the Japanese that marked the latter stages of the war began only in March 1915, at which time some radically new tactics worked out in General Curtis LeMay's headquarters were introduced. These tactics involved "maximum effort" low-level attacks at night, with great compression of force in space and time. The in- tensity of attacks increased gradually, until an attack oc-
curred on the southwest portion of Tokyo on May 23, 1945 in which 520 bombers dropped 3,646 tons of incendiary bombs
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on an area of about eleven square miles. For two hours dur- ing that attack the bombs were dropping at an average rate of ~,ooopounds per second. ''
The plight of the Japanese Empire at the time this cam- paign began is summarized by a single sentence from the U. S. S. B. S. report: "By March 1945, prior to heavy direct air attack on the Japanese home islands, the Japanese air forces had been reduced to Kamikaze forces, her fleet had been sunk or immobilized, her merchant marine decimated, large por- tions of her ground forces isolated, and the strangulation of her economy well begun. ""
At that time, moreover, the Japanese had already lost the Philippines and Iwo Jima, and were suffering the investment of Okinawa. They were sending no further supplies to their ground forces outside the home islands, and they were con- centrating solely on defense against invasion. How long they would have continued to endure even in the absence of a concentrated strategic-bombing campaign is questionable, because the blockade resulting from destruction of the J a p anese merchant marine had, among other things, brought the national diet to below subsistence levels. The situation was thoroughly understood by many Japanese military leaders. Some of the senior naval officershad been secretly working since the previous September, that is, since before the Battle for Leyte Gulf, to take the country out of the war. ''
So long as the American goal was unconditional surrender,
'$1 am indebted for this information, and for much more that I have not been able to include, to my colleague Dr. Alexander W. Boldyreff.
I TU. S. S. B. S. , Summary Report (Pacific War), p. g.
U. S. S. B. S. ,lapan's Struggle to End the War, p. 4. See also Robert J. C.
Butow, lapan's Decision to Surrender, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1954, which effectively supersedes the U. S. S. B. S. document and which pro- vides an excellent and fascinating narrative of relevant events.
and especially so long as we were eager to achieve it as quickly as possible, there seemed at the time to be no ques- tion that some kind of direct assault on the Japanese home islands was necessary. A full-scale invasion was accordingly being projected for the following November. It is unequivo- cally to the credit of the strategic-bombing offensive that it secured all the objectives of the planned invasion before the latter could be mounted. It did so at immeasurably less cost in American lives, and no doubt also in Japanese lives, than might otherwise have been the case. Nothing can diminish or gainsay the value and importance of this accomplishment, which had no parallel in Europe. By the same token, it is both unreasonable and ungracious to the other services-as well as to the tactical air forces which conducted four years of marvelously successful and effective operations over land and water-to equate that accomplishment with the winning of the war.
The strategic air offensive against Japan was remarkably different from that against Germany in character as well as result. It was much more concentrated in time, and had the benefit of the more advanced technology then available. Japan was more urbanized than Germany, its cities were more vulnerable to fire, and its active defenses at the time of the campaign were of a low order of effectiveness, being al- most confined to antiaircraft guns. " Thus, more was accom- plished with fewer bombs. Only 160,800 tons of bombs were dropped on the home islands of Japan, compared with
1,360,000 tons dropped within the borders of Germany. Sixty- six Japanese cities received 104,000 tons of bombs (mostly incendiaries) as compared with 542,554 tons dropped on
Of which, however, there were some 500 heavy guns (88 rnrn. or larger) in the Tokyo area alone.
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sixty-one German cities. Also, a disproportionately large part of the Japanese tonnage was dropped on a very few large cities. Of the sixty-six Japanese cities attacked, only six were struck before the last three months of the war. " Yet some 40 per cent of the built-up areas of those sixty-six cities was destroyed.
In Japan, unlike Germany, the urban-area bombing seems to have contributed more to achieving the desired results than did the precision bombing of specific industries. This was due not alone to the fact that there was less opportunity for recuperation among Japanese cities than there had been in Germany, but more importantly to the fact that in Japan economic objectives counted for less than psychological ones. The precision bombing was, as in Germany, much more ef- fective per bomb in reducing Japanese war production, and immeasurably more discriminating about the kind of pro- duction reduced, than was the urban-area bombing. But Japan had already lost the battle of production; her economy
had already proved grossly inadequate to the political and strategic ambitions of her leaders; her losses in a merchant fleet that had been inadequate from the start had already caused, through denial of raw materials, a sharp contraction in production. Greater contractions would have followed inevitably, even without bombing. " It must be added that her overwhelming military defeats, by practically wiping out her navy and isolating most of her army, had greatly re-
20 U. S. S. B. S. , Eflects of Air Attack on Iapanese Urban Economy, Sum- mary Report, pp. ivf.
21The U. S. S. B. S. estimated that by August 1945,"even without direct air attack on her cities and industries, the over-all level of Japanese war production would have declined below the peak levels of 1944 by 40 to 50 per cent solely as a result of the interdiction of overseas imports. " (Sum- mary Report [Pacific W a r ] , p. 15. )
duced the demands which the military forces were making upon the economy.
Japan was already defeated. It was necessary only to make her government develop a clear consensus on that fact, and then openly concede it. The U. S. A. A. F. may not have cor- rectly appreciated the situation, but it acted as if it had. What was wanted was not a discriminating pruning out of this or that kind of military production, but simply the maximum of direct military pressure upon the population and the govern- ment. The awful terror of the great fire raids on the cities,
culminating in the two atomic attacks, copiously provided that pressure.
The Attack on German Morale
It is difficult to tell just what proportion of the bombs dropped on Germany in World War I1 was deliberately aimed at German morale, but it was unquestionably very large. A good deal of the area bombing of cities was so directed, especially by the R. A. F. Although Sir Arthur Har- ris in his Bomber Offensive speaks sarcastically of "psycho- logical" objectives as among the "panaceas" thrust upon him by uncomprehending but meddling civilians, it is abundantly clear from the whole text of his memoirs that the "German will to resist" was precisely what he was most interested in
attacking. Douhet too, as we have seen, had considered it the most important target after the enemy air force.
The huge share of Allied bombs spent in the attack on German morale failed to achieve any important end results. Bombing did indeed seriously depress the morale of German civilians. The oft-expressed view that the bombing of cities 1, ,P stiffens the will of the populace to resist finds no support -
in experience. But in Germany the depressed morale had no
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critical effects-at least until the very last months of the war, when all was lost anyway-on either the political struc- ture or the capability of the German war economy to support the troops in the field.
The reason that this was so is to be found largely in a distinction, which the German Internal Security Service consistently emphasized throughout the latter part of the war, between Stimmung (attitude or feeling) and Haltung (behavior). It was one of the important discoveries of the war that the influence of the former upon the latter was much less immediate and direct than had been generally supposed. Some degree of influence there was bound to be, but from the Allied point of view it was disappointingly small.
The attack upon Stimmung or attitude was remarkably successful, but this success did not have much meaning for the things that counted. Depressed morale, plus the problem of copingwith the physical deprivationsresulting from bomb ing, significantly increased absenteeism of industrial workers beyond the normal. It also significantly lowered the produc- tivity of those who reported for work. In combination, these effects-and notice that morale was depressed by defeats in the ground battles as well as by air raids-resulted in a loss of output of at least 25 per cent during the last year of the war. That looked serious enough to those responsible for keeping the war machine going. But as for stopping or vitally impairing the functioning of that machine, the effects were spread too broadly across all industries, were at best marginal, and therefore counted as nothing compared to the knocking out of a single essential industry such as oil production or transportation.
From at least the beginning of 1944 the average German had become disillusioned with the Nazi leadership, increas-
ingly frightened by the war's toll and its potential threat to himself and his family, and persuaded with growing cer- tainty that all would end in defeat. Yet he stuck to his job and his machine for as long as it was physically possible to do so, and in so doing kept a disastrous war going to its ulti- mate ruinous conclusion. Why did he do so? The answer is to be found in need combined with habit, in coercion, and in propaganda-in descending order of importance-all add- ing up to the plain circumstance that the German worker had no real alternative open to him.
The effect of habit is in part reflected in the fact that un- authorized absenteeism was much more marked among women than among men, especially in those occupations in which female labor was strictly a wartime phenomenon. T h e man kept to his job largely because that was what he had always done, in calm and in crisis, and because he and his family needed his wages in order to eat.
The coercion of the government extended to all sorts of restrictions about changing or leaving one's job without per- mission, and applied with special vengeance to overt expres-
sion of feeling-let alone action-against the regime. More telling was the fact that over the years the regime had suc- ceeded in eradicating practically all organized political op- position, so that no means existed for giving direction to and translating into action the feelings of disaffection which un- doubtedly developed. There could be no peace party in Ger- ' many (outside the army, where the dissident group was liquidated after the abortive putsch of July 1944) simply be- cause there could be no party outside the control of the Nazi leadership.
This absence of organized opposition is the feature of totalitarian countries that must give pause to those who would ,
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count heavily on defeating them by psychological means. In that connection, a critical difference between wartime Germany on the one hand and Italy and Japan on the other was that the latter two countries, though quasi-totalitarian, had in their monarchiai systems a latent means of crystalliz- ing an effective and legal opposition to the war party. Those countries surrendered before hostile troops had effectively invaded their main territories, while Germany did not sur- render until Hitler was dead and the eastern and western fronts had merged in the center of the Reich.
Although habit and coercion worked exclusively for the benefit of the German government, propaganda was the one means by which the Allied governments could hope to com- pete with the Nazis in giving guidance to the German work- man and soldier. The Allied bombing helped induce Ger- mans to listen to enemy radio broadcasts, partly because its success gave the lie to so many Nazi claims, and also because German stations had to go off the air to avoid serving as beacons. The invading aircraft themselves dropped millions of leaflets. Allied propaganda during the last year or more of the war concentrated on the hopelessness of the German military position, something which the huge formations of British and American bombers ranging freely over Germany effectively drove home. That was all right so far as it went, but it left a hiatus into which Goebbels and Company promptly moved.
The great propaganda achievement of Goebbels, in which he was aided and abetted by Allied word and actions, was to exploit sheer desperation as a means of keeping the Ger- mans fighting. There was no "will to win" because, espe- cially after the collapse of the hopes based on "secret weapons," there could be no expectation of winning. What
took the place of a will to win was an apathy about politics combined with a driving fear of what defeat would bring. One of the grimmer aphorisms then current in Germany was "Geniess den Krieg; der Friede wird schrec~lichsein" (En- joy the war; the peace will be terrible). The number of Al- lied casualties in the last year of the war testifies to the e? - fectiveness of this combination of negative incentives.
One lesson the bombing attack on morale brought home was that a people accustomed to responding to authority- and all peoples are, in modestly varying degrees-will con- tinue to respond even under very great physical stress. As physical conditions approach chaos, the population becomes more dependent upon authority, because of greater need for guidance and succor combined with the absence of alterna- tive. Besides, the person of independent mind who forms his own opinions on the evidence of his senses and the fruits of his logic is an ideal form of human being which, like other ideal forms, rarely exists in nature. Even most intellectuals- always a small minority in a population-tend in their think- ing merely to follow more refined fads. Moreover, it takes a very profound revolution of the mind and spirit to accept those cues for behavior provided by the acknowledged enemy as against those offered by one's own leaders.
Granting that it is behavior rather than morale that most interests both attacker and defender, there are nevertheless a few features about the response of German morale to Al- lied bombs which are especially interesting in view of the new weapons that have appeared since World War 11.
One surprising finding of the U. S. S. B. S. was that the most heavily-bombed cities did not necessarily show lower morale than those less severely hit. As between unbombed towns and lightly-bombed ones, morale was much lower in the lat-
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ter. It suffered a further but less sharp decline as the status of bombing progressed from "light" to "medium. " But as the weight of bombs progressed from "medium" to "heavy," the morale of the target population appeared, if anything, to recover somewhat. " Much, of course, depends on how one measures morale, and the returns used in the survey were undoubtedly too gross to confirm a real upturn in morale. But what is firmly established is the absence, after a relatively modest weight of bombing, of any significant correlation between additional bombs dropped and further depression in morale.
Why is this so? One reason, no doubt, is the simple fact that the person preoccupied with dodging enemy missiles does not find much time to think about other matters which might otherwise disturb him. He is unlikely to be brooding on the historic sins and errors of a government to which he can scarcely conceive an alternative. He is politically apa- thetic, and his apathy may look a good deal better to those whose job it is to control him than did the discouraged rest- lessness that perhaps preceded it. Besides, if he has been bombed out of house and home, he is grateful for small of- ferings, and he may acquire a more favorable attitude toward
T h e following classification for degrees of bombing was adopted by the Morale Division of U. S. S. B. S. : Group I (heavily bombed), cities re- ceiving 19,100 tons to 47,200 tons (average: 30,000 tons); Group I1 (medi- um bombed), cities receiving 1,700 to 13,100 tons (average: 6,100 tons); Group III (lightly bombed), cities receiving 300 to 800 tons (average: 500 tons). Since these figures and categories ignore the size of the city con- cerned, they cannot give a good index of the intensity of bombing for any one city. However, a recheck of the results described in the text above according to the percentage of destruction for each city confirms the general conclusions reached. See The Eflects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale, vol. I, Morale Division, U. S. S. B. S. (Item #64b for Euro-
the regime merely from being given coffee at the refugee station.
On the other hand, we learned also that depression in morale, while not necessarily proportional to weight of bombs dropped, does vary with degree of personal involve- ment, such as the death or severe injury of members of one's family, or the destruction of all one's worldly goods, or forced evacuation. Despite the large amount of physical de- struction in German cities, the statistics of personal involve- ment were quite different from what one would expect- certainly different from what one would have to expect with nuclear weapons. Only one-third of all Germans lived in cities that were subjected to bombing. One-half of I per cent of all Germans were killed by bombing, and I per cent were injured; that is, only 5 per cent of that minority of Germans actually subjected to bombing were killed or in- jured. One-fifth of all civilians were at one time or another deprived of water, gas, or electricity. And one out of fifteen civilians was evacuated.
These figures are impressive when converted to absolute numbers of people, and it is also true that virtually no Ger- man escaped some measure of hardship or suffering as a result of the bombings. But the great majority of Germans escaped the more serious kinds of heartbreak or horror. Un- der atomic weapons, even ignoring the effects of fallout, the proportion of persons exposed to risk in the cities would be much greater, the incidence of casualties and of lost homes would be multiplied, and the disorganizing effects upon the surrounding countrysides would be immeasurably more im- mediate and direct. Certainly the amount of warning per- mitted by missiles and by attacking cells of planes moving at or above the speed of sound would be much less.
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It is true that the effects of reduced morale upon German production look very different if one concentrates on the last two months of the war rather than on the entire two years of heavy bombing. In the end, the overwhelming conviction that there simply was no use in going on did indeed control events. The efforts to restore damaged facilities finally col- lapsed for complete want of incentive. With nuclear bombs such a state of affairs would occur within days or hours of the onset of the attack.
TheAttackonJapaneseMorale
The physical and social context of the bombing attack on Japanese morale was sufficiently different from that of Ger- many to provide distinctive instruction; yet it serves also to emphasize the striking similarity of the results. The bombing of urban areas in Japan was both more concentrated in time and more intense than in Germany, and it resulted in a higher incidence of both physical destruction and casualties. Also, the campaign reached its awesome and dreadful cul- mination in two atomic explosions.
As in Germany, only more so, the effect of the bombing on Japanese morale was to produce, by whatever kind of measurement one adopts, an immediate and precipitous de- cline.
In Japan as in Germany, low morale was reflected in loss of the people's confidence in their leaders and in one another, as well as in their becoming, as the U. S. S. B. S. puts it, "more and more obsessed with finding individual solu- tions to their own severe and urgent personal problems. " In Japan there was no more tendency than there was in Germany for the low morale to find expression in any or- ganized popular movement to revolt, or in manifest pressure upon the government to surrender. On the contrary, the
Emperor's announcement of the surrender was apparently greeted by a majority of the population with stunned dis- belief and dismay. Only a relatively small minority of the whole population later admitted to their American inter- rogators a feeling of relief at hearing that the war was over. Even among those who had personally experienced ten or more air raids, barely 52 per cent were ready to cite cessation of such raids as a sufficient reason for satisfaction at the end- ing of the war. 23
That is not to say that the low state of public morale played no part in bringing about the surrender. In the peculiar oligarchical system by which wartime Japan was ruled, the peace faction which gradually emerged and moved toward ascendancy had to proceed most cautiously-even conspiratorially-with respect to the die-hard faction. The leaders of the peace-seeking party, ostensibly led by the Premier, Admiral Kantaro Suz~ki,~h'ad to assure them-
selves that the people knew enough of the general state of affairs to accept a surrender decision and to refrain from s u p porting a possible coup d'etat by the army die-hards. The latter faction also had to be persuaded that the mood and condition of the people made absurd any talk of a last-ditch defense in which civilians would fight off the invaders with bamboo spears. Even so, the maneuvers of the peace group were delicate in the extreme, and required finally the per-
sonal intervention of the Emperor.
The part played by the two atomic bombs cannot be un-
2a See The Effects of Strategic Bombing on \apanese Morale, U. S. S. B. S. (Item #14 for Pacific War), pp. 15of.
24 The real leader of the movement was Shigenori Togo, whom Admiral Suzuki had selected as Foreign Minister, knowing that he had been o p posed to the war from the beginning; but Togo on one or two critical occasions had to stiffen Suzuki's determination to end the war. See Butow, opht. , chs. 1x1 and vrx.
138
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equivocally determined by what was said or not said in cabinet meetings and comparable conferences. It would be hard to believe that they failed to have a positive and power- ful effect on the surrender deliberations, but very little seems to have been said about them in those deliberations. So far as the populace was concerned, few people outside the target areas had any real comprehension of what the bombs meant, and those within the areas seem to have been psychologically affected in no significantly different way from the people of other cities who had experienced severe HE or incendiary attacks. 26
The cabinet had already initiated peace proposals to the Soviet government before the atomic bombs were dropped, and there is no reason to suppose that acceptance of the Pots- dam Declaration would have been long delayed in the ab- sence of such bombing. In the meeting of August 9-10 (after the second bomb had exploded) the cabinet was still dead- locked on the minimum terms under which Japan could agree to quit the hopeless fight, and it was this deadlock that the Emperor personally resolved. No doubt the atomic bombs affected him; but they could hardly have affected him de- cisively, because he had impressed upon the new Premier as early as the preceding April the need for finding the quickest possible means of ending the war. "
="bid. , p. 94. See also Part I of Air War and Emotional Stress, by Irving L. Janis, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1951. A remarkable document in this connection is Dr. Michihiko Hachiya's Hiroshima Diary: The 1ournal of a lapanese Physican, August &September 30, 1945, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1955.
26 See Butow, op. cit. , pp. 63f. My RAND colleague, Dr. Paul Kecskemeti, argues cogently in his Strategic Surrender: The Politics of Victory and Defeat (Stanford University Press, 1958) a position very close to the one that I have presented here, based on a completely independent examination of the same evidence. He tends, however, to allow even less
In summary, we can say that, insofar as the low morale of the Japanese people influenced the governmental decision to surrender, it did so in a quite passive way. The leaders who spearheaded the peace movement had been convinced for more than a year before the end that Japan had lost. The terrible destruction and death rained down on Japan in the summer of 1945 naturally compelled a mood of urgency on the part of the peace-seekers, and made speedier and easier the acceptance by the erstwhile die-hards of almost-uncondi- tional surrender. No reasonable observer can deny that the aerial bombardment hastened the end of the war and sufficed to make invasion unnecessary. But what must be denied, for the sake of clarity in strategic thinking, is that this process operated to any important degree through the direct pressure of public feeling. 27
All this must of course be related to the singular political and social structure of wartime Japan. But under any form of government, an orderly surrender usually requires the initiative of political leaders who are already in authority or close enough to it to acquire it without waiting upon popular r e v o l u t i ~ nP. ~op~ular revolutions do not thrive under
weight than I do to the influence of the two atomic bombs in ending the war (Strategic Surrender, pp. 199-206).
27 The authors of the abovecited U. S. S. B. S. morale report go so far as to insist, in their ch. XI, that the Japanese leaders ended the war when they did to conserve not lives but rather their own special privileges under the existing class structure of Japan. The authors, however, produce no evidence in support of that view, for the insistence upon the retention of the Imperial institution cannot be so regarded. No doubt the Japanese leaders, conservatives all, were interested in preserving as much as they could of the social and political structure of Japan, but we have no reason to assume they were callous in the face of the miseries being inflicted on the populace.
28A much qualified exception is the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, followed by a Russian withdrawal from the war under peace terms (at
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conditions of wholesale destruction from the air. The kind of
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short enough to impress the reader with its specificity, four or five cities usually being named in each series, yet long enough to avoid giving any marked assistance to the Japanese air defenses. The attendant commentary took care to stress that other cities besides those named might also be hit.
Unfortunately, the U. S. S. B. S. interrogators failed to ques- tion people seriously on what they had done as a result of hearing or reading about such warnings. They asked instead how many had seen the warnings or heard of them, and how many of those who did had believed them. But the evidence indicates ( I ) that the warnings were received by most of the targeted populations, (2) that they were gen- erally believed, and (3) that they were acted upon through flight. Relatively few people left their homes until the cities in which they lived had received some bombing, but after such bombing the warnings had a most receptive audience. Many were unquestionably stimulated to move who would
otherwise have tarried.
The military situation peculiar to the closing months of
World War 11 in the Pacific was as favorable as it could be to the use of warnings, which literally cost us nothing in planes or air crews. Nevertheless, the warning technique
could undoubtedly be applied even in the future under a wide variety of military circumstances. Whether it would be employed, however, in that massive interchange of blows
which is the usual mental image of the onset of World War I11 is another matter
Relevance for the F~tture
The World War I1 experience with strategic bombing was the first of its kind in the history of warfare, and also, we
extreme destruction that can be envisaged with nuclear I weapons is rather more likely to dissolve all government than to cause the replacement of an incorrigible regime by an
amenable one.
The Japanese experience suggests also that to compel huge
evacuations is more profitable as well as more humane than to produce corpses. During the American air campaign, some eight and one-half million Japanese left their homes to be- come refugees. This figure must be considered not only in relation to the whole national population but even more to the populations of those larger industrial cities which mainly
fed the exodus. Although evacuations also took place in
I- II
1~
~
Germany, the flight of urban dwellers from Japanese cities was more concentrated in time and hence more disorganized,
and it included very much larger proportions of workers previously engaged in war industries. These panicked humans not only spread throughout Japan the full account of the horrors occurring in the cities, but they also created for the government burdens with which it showed itself unable to
cope.
This rout of citizens would no doubt have resulted in any
case from the fury of our attack, but it was given strong addi- tional impetus by an American practice introduced in the last months of the war. That was the explicit warning of impending bombing attack, which was done chiefly by dropping leaflets (scarcely 2 per cent of Japanese civilians ever heard enemy radio broadcasts) listing cities to be des- troyed "in the next few days. " Each list was designed to be
Brest Litovsk) that were comparable to surrender. On conditions of sur- render in general see the aforementioned study by Paul Kecskemeti.
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can be reasonably certain, the last. No campaign on a com- parable scale is likely ever again to be carried on between great belligerents with HE or other chemical bombs, not only because of the availability of nuclear weapons but-in the unlikely event that nuclear weapons could be outlawed and stay outlawed in an otherwise total war-also because technological developments have made long-range sorties with bombers or missiles far too costly to be acceptable as means of delivering bombs of such very limited capability.
We have offered the above chapter out of the conviction that relevant experience is always valuable, the more so as it is scarce, but insofar as our interest is not purely historical, we have to acknowledge that in this instance the relevance is qualified. There are, however, hints about the future to be found in it, perhaps the most obvious and also the most important being the reminder that men's predictions about the outcome of a wholly new kind of campaign are likely to prove highly fallible. 28
2o For a systematic dfort to apply the lessons of various disaster studies, including the strategic bombing of World War 11, to future war, see Fred C. IklC, The Social Impnct of Bomb Destruction, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1958.