Armaments Quotes
Bryan participated as a prosecutor in the infamous Scopes Trial in Tennessee where a school teacher was convicted of a crime for discussing the idea of evolution in a high school classroom. He had written this for his summary to the jury, but the summaries were dispensed with when it was obvious that Scopes would be convicted. He had admitted to breaking the law, but the law itself was on trial.
Commenting on military weapons procurement:
This was the earliest version of a variant of the great WWII propaganda phrase, “Arsenal of Democracy”. See --{624746} and {624747} for quotations related to this famous phrase.
The pope attempted a boycott of weapons against the Ottomans who were threatening Crete, then controlled by Christian Venice. The French and others did not respect the boycott. As in modern times, boycotts were easily broken by those wishing to profit from trade. Crete fell. The Catholic boycott had actually started in the 16th Century with minimal effectiveness, but Clement IX made a vain effort to enforce it.
In WWII as later, defense contractors and military weapons designers were always trying to improve the design and proto-models, thus stalling production and utilization. Arnold’s statement galvanized the program and B-29s reached the Pacific theater to help win the war.
The atomic bomb had just been used the year before. However, in the next decades, nuclear weapons were not used again as those nations with nuclear capability also had potential enemies with nuclear weapons. The fear of Mutually Assured Destruction prevented nuclear weapons from being used for a long time.
