But self-interest as well as humane reasons demand that the warring nations should endeavour to gain their end of the moral subjugation of the enemy with the infliction of the least possible permanent injury to life and industry, for the enemy of today is the customer of the morrow, and the ally of the future. To inflict widespread death and destruction is to damage one’s own future prosperity, and, by sowing the seeds of revenge, to jeopardize one’s future security. Chemical science has provided mankind with a weapon which reduces the necessity for killing and achieves decisive effects with far less permanent injury than in the case of explosives. Gas may well prove the salvation of civilization from the otherwise inevitable collapse in case of another world war. Even with the lethal gases of the last war, the use of which was decried as barbarous by conventional sentiment, statistics show that the proportion of deaths to the numbers temporarily incapacitated was far less than with the accepted weapons, such as bullets and shells! Moreover, chemistry affords us non-lethal gases which can overcome the hostile resistance, and spread panic for a period long enough to reap the fruits of victory, but without the lasting evils of mass killing or destruction of property. Yet we still find that, in defiance of reason and history, the governments are again striving by international legislation to prohibit the use of gas, and to confine the blows of aircraft to the traditional military objectives. It is a strange reflection on the all-too-frequent lack of vision and common sense, that the opposition to the use of gas in war comes from an alliance between those unwonted bedfellows, the traditional militarist and the sentimental pacifist. The humanization of war rests not in “scraps of paper,” which nations will always tear up if they feel that their national life is endangered by them, but in the enlightened realization that the spread of death and destruction endangers the victor’s own future prosperity and reputation. This deeper understanding of war and its goal, and consequently more humane methods, can only come by stripping war of its professional and pacifist catchwords, and grasping that the true national objective in war lies in the after-war. If the civilized world is to be saved from collapse, there is an urgent need to produce true grand strategists to replace the colour-blind exponents of mass destruction, who can only see “red.”