The scientist and war (1955)

From the September 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard 

“Do not reproach chemistry with the fact that nitro cellulose, of which the first application was to heal wounds and to advance the art of photography, was stolen away from these ultra pacific purposes for making smokeless powder and for loading torpedoes.

Do not curse the chemist when phenol, which revolutionised surgery, turned from the blessing to humanity into a fearful explosive when it had been discovered that nitration changes it into picric acid.

Let us hope in the meantime that war carried to its modern logical gruesomeness, shorn of its false glamour, deceptive picturesqueness and rhetorical bombast, exposed in all the nakedness of its nasty horrors, may hurry along the day when we shall be compelled to accept means for avoiding its repetition.” 

(Dr. L. H. Baekeland, in an address before the American Chemical Society, Seattle, Washington, 1915. Quoted by R. R. Butler in “ Scientific Discovery,” English Universities Press, 1947.)