Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, Issue 45 — page 129: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION unseen, undestroyable, to dis- gorge the fighting men on the shores of the enemy. There can be no doubt that shifting an army underwater would be a considerably easier task than doing the same thing on the surface. Imagine the invasion of North Africa, of Normandy, of Greece, carried out with submarines. How easy it would be! Pro- vided there were no good measures of countering the menace. This opens up an- other line of thought. [Is it a good thing for humanity in general that counter-measures will be devised ? Superficially, it would seem that the answer in an unequivocal affirmative. But let us look deeper. The battles of nations have often been compared to the battles of chess-players, and the analogy has many points of advantage. Nations and _chess-players seem to be in- _ ately belligerent. No nation can be excused from this statement, for all nations have at one time or another been belligerent; and all nations give first thought to forceful settlement of disputes —why else are there armies coexistent with preachings of disarmament desires? And all chess-players are character- ised by the desire to have a gameand beat their opponents. What stops them? Probably nothing. But they tend not to play games with opponents who they know they cannot beat. The game loses its point when the end is foreknown. Perhaps—and we say this guardedly because so many factors are involved in all human relations—per- haps, if weapons of war could be devised such that there was no possibility of countering them, and if all nations possessed those weapons, there would be an end to war. It is a fond hope that man will change his nature and outlaw wars by using his intellect. That is also, ap- parently, a futile hope. It may be that man will have to outlaw wars even though his nature is still belligerent. If all nations possess tremen- dously potential weapons against which there is no defence, going to war would be even more lunatic than it is today. Some people thought that there would be no defence against the atomic bomb, but this is not really so. It could be that the less sensational atomic submarine has a far greater potentiality for both war and peace than 128 comiclooks.cormn