研究生学术英语读写教程中国科学院大学Unit8TextA Goes to War

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Goes to War

Ernest Volkman

There were many, like the submarine inventor John P. Holland, who insisted that the sheer destructiveness of the modern weapons that science had provided would make war so terrible, no sane nation would fight one. What sane nation would jeopardize the great industrial civilization that had brought so much benefit to so many people? What sane nation would allow the cultural treasures, the great cities, and the flourishing towns of Europe to be destroyed in the name of war?

Yet, the signs were there. The mad race for an ultimate military security - to develop the most advanced and destructive armaments, to construct mighty military edifices, to build huge fleets, to conscript millions into vast armies, to overlay the Continent with a network of railroads to move troops rapidly, to stockpile mammoth amounts of ammunition and guns, to prepare war plans that called for armies of millions to fall upon each other in mass battles - amounted to a gargantuan powder keg, needing only a single political spark to set off Armageddon. For nearly a hundred years, Europe had enlarged the Napoleonic concept of total war with scientific and technical advances to make it even more total. Science finally had been mated indissolubly to war, creating a juggernaut that no one was able to stop. But politicians and generals thought that although modern total war would be incredibly violent, like nothing ever seen before, it would be short. European generals dreamed and planned for a short war in which the outcome would be decided in one great Napoleonic campaign, the decisive blow, using the full might of modern armaments, to destroy an enemy totally. No one who directed any of these mighty military machines seemed to doubt that the fruits of modern science - metallurgy ', chemistry, industrial machinery, radio, turbines, diesel engines, hydraulics, fire-control mathematics, gun ballistics, optics -- provided an irresistible force that that guaranteed victory.

But when the great cataclysm of World War I finally arrived, events soon proved this belief a tragic chimera. By the end of 1914, the mass armies were locked in stalemate and, inevitably, they turned to the one weapon they believed would end that stalemate and bring victory: science. And that would cause the gravest crisis of conscience in the history of science, one that remains unresolved to this day.

It was a crisis summarized in the career of one of the century's greatest scientific minds, a mind that simultaneously could provide the science to improve mankind existence and the science to destroy it.

In 1909, the German chemist Fritz Haber electrified his scientific discipline with an amazing discovery: recovering nitrogen from the atmosphere by “fixing" it in a process that involved synthesizing ammonia. The implications of that discovery were enormous: With the process, agricultural fertilizer could be mass-produced at low cost, the development that set off the agricultural revolution in which per-acre yields increased a hundredfold, allowing nations for the first time to produce enough food to feed their growing populations.

Fertilizer had been relatively expensive up to that point, since its key ingredient. sodium nitrate’, had to be imported, mostly from large deposits in Chile. Haber'sprocess eliminated the need for that chemical in fertilizer production. The feat would earn him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and in 1911 he was named head of one of the scientific institutes Kaiser Wilhelm had set up to establish German preeminence in science.

Haber was busily at work at the institute in 1914 when an alarmed German HighCommand approached him for help in solving a serious logistical problem, one that involved a subject Haber knew well: sodium nitrate. The problem, Haber was told, stemmed from the fact that sodium nitrate was a key ingredient in explosives. Germany's stock of the chemical would be exhausted by 1916, given the vast expenditure of artillery ammunition the war required, And since a British naval blockade had cut off Chilean supplies, Germany faced the prospect of running out of ammunition. Could Herr Doktor Haber find a solution?

In short order, Haber found the solution, which amounted, basically, to a refinement of the process that had revolutionized world agriculture, this time involving a new process of making gun cotton that eliminated the need for sodium nitrate. Haber had taken a fateful step, for he was now using his scientific genius not for the betterment of mankind - as he once claimed - but for its destruction. And there was worse to come. In 1915 the German High Command approached him again, this time with a problem involving battlefield tactics. Artillery, even great barrages of fire, was proving insufficient in driving enemy troops out of their trenches; they simply dug deeper, Was there some kind of chemical Haber could devise that would be fired into enemy trenches, forcing the troops out? Haber's solution was a relatively mild form of chlorine gas, highly irritating (though not fatal) to the human respiratory system. But the gas, launched toward enemy trenches by large blowers, proved subject to wind conditions, and was easily defeated by soldiers holding wet handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths. The trench deadlock continued, and desperate for something to end it, the High Command turned to Haber again. This time he had a drastic solution in mind: poison gas, the greatest evil ever spawned by the union of science and war until the advent of thermonuclear weapons.

In 1916 the German army created the Chemical Warfare Service and named Haberas its chief, with a mandate to come up with poison gases that could be packed inside the warheads of artillery shells, then exploded in enemy lines and spread deadly fumes capable of wiping out entire armies. Working nearly around the clock, Haber finally came up with phosgene', which could kill a man in seconds mustard gas, which even if not fatal, almost invariably caused blindness and severe lung damage. That year, these terrible new weapons were unleashed against a section of French-held front; several thousand soldiers were killed outright and many thousands of others ran in panic. The Germans didn't have the mobility to exploit the success, and the Allies quickly came up with countermeasures, especially the invention of the gas mask.

But poison gas would now forever be linked to the name of Fritz Haber, an odiousness that did not appear to bother him. He was puzzled when he heard about the controversy that broke out in Britain when a prominent British chemist. Frederick Soddy, refused to do any research connected with poison gas, and was threatened with incarceration in the Tower of London as a “traitor” To Haber, the theSoddy case made no sense, he assumed that Soddy was as fervid a British patriot Haber was a German one. And in a time of war, a scientist's first duty was to his country, not to mankind or pure science. If a scientist was called upon to invent new and greater ways of killing other human beings, that was an unfortunate but necessary by-product of war.

For that reason, Haber felt no discomfort when his closest friend, Albert Einstein, berated him for using his great scientific talents to slaughter so many of his fellow human beings. In Haber's view, Einstein was a hopeless dreamer when it came to politics, a brilliant scientific mind who did not understand that Germany's very existence hung in the balance. He insisted that in a total war, where science was the major determinant of national survival, a scientist was just as much a soldier as the man with a rifle on the front line. Despite the great chasm between them on this subject, Haber and the lonely pacifist remained good friends. The same, however, cannot be said of relations between Haber and his wife. Appalled that her husband was personally responsible for so many deaths, she begged him to stop and follow the example of his close friend Einstein, who refused to have anything to do with any science that involved war. She and her husband had increasingly bitter arguments on the subject; finally, when she realized she could not sway him, she committed suicide.

Even this tragic event in his life failed to change Haber's mind. At the end of the war, he was shocked to learn that the victorious Allies were considering bringing him up on war crimes charges. The plan was dropped after a number of scientists rushed to Haber's defense, notably the distinguished British biologist J.B.SHaldanet4, who argued that the war was intrinsically evil before the invention of poison gas, and would have remained evil because of high-explosive shells, the tank, the submarine, and barbed wire. So how could Haber take something that was already evil beyond comprehension and make it even more evil?

An interesting question. The answer would come sooner and more terribly than Haldane could have realized.

1. Which of the following statements has best summarised the theme of Text A of Unit 8?

A、Science pushed the war to end more destructively and more quickly.

B、Scientists are greatly tortured when they exploit war to promote science.

C、Science should never be involved in modern warfare.

D、Science has empowered modern weapons to bring about destruction whose magnitude is beyond imagination.

2. What is the writing purpose of the second sentence in Para. 2?

A、to objectively describe the preparation of a modern war.

B、to vividly illustrate the great military races before a war.

C、to systematically report what happens before a war.

D、to sadly explain how a political issue leads to a war.

第一次做选了D错了，现在觉得选B