AERONAUTICS: Anaesthetic Warfare

Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, a British General Staff officer, speaking before an audience of London physicians painted an unpleasant picture of aerial warfare. The purpose of the lecture was to prepare medical men for coping with tens of thousands of gas cases, and to popularize methods of self-protection among the civilian population. Five hundred airplanes could capture London by anaesthetizing the entire population—if the attacking fleet were humane enough to avoid poison gas. When the matter-of-fact British seriously consider such possibilities, there is little doubt that the next phase of aerial warfare might spell the destruction of civilization.