Warfare at Troynovant:
battling among the history & concepts of
war, general weaponry, & philosophy of war;
listed by Title

Note that many fine novels & poems, films, or stories which include battles or a wartime setting and the like are not listed here unless the work or the review struggles with general ideas about warfare as a literary genre, the warrior's code in men and women, the nature of war or intercultural conflict, and so on. The American Civil War has its own index, as does Weaponry.
  

Next month, Anson MacDonald [a pseudonym for Robert A. Heinlein] presents a story about an irresistible weapon — "Solution Unsatisfactory," and the title is the Editor's. MacDonald, rather dissatisfied himself, called it "Foreign Policy." The point is that the author's solution to the problem raised in the story — that of a nation, our nation, in possession of an irresistible, but easily imitated weapon — is not tenable. Furthermore, it isn't a pleasant solution anyway. But the trouble is, there doesn't seem to be any solution save the one MacDonald advances — and that one is one no American could accept with equanimity. It's dictatorship, in fact, in the harshest, most stringent form possible, with a super-police force empowered to deal life and death to whole cities at their discretion.

The story's a challenge as it stands. There is no irresistible weapon now, of course, and all the history of war has shown that cries of "It's irresistible!" have been false. But, as MacDonald points out in his story, the little boy cried "Wolf! Wolf!" until when the wolf came nobody believed it. But the wolf did come.

And MacDonald suggests that the weapon will come — and come in about three years. Personally, I'm most desperately afraid he's absolutely correct.

Read the yarn, and let's have your suggestions as to how to get a satisfactory solution ...

The Editor

John W. Campbell, Jr.
Astounding Science Fiction, April 1941