The New Nation - Internet Edition

Paul Kennedy

ABOUT a century ago, in the years before the First World War, the dynamic service head of the Royal Navy, Admiral "Jackie" Fisher, was enthusing about a recent underwater vessel, the submarine, and pushing for its large-scale development and production.

Forgetting his equally fervent enthusiasm for battleships a few years earlier, Fisher now preferred this much smaller wonder weapon. Above all, it would check the efforts of the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet to become dominant in the North Sea. Fear of the submarine, enthused Fisher, would keep the German ironclads firmly in their harbours, out of concern for likely destruction by these unseen predators. Britannia would still rule the waves.

One of Fisher's correspondents, Sir Arthur Balfour, a wise old owl who had been a prime minister with a deep interest in defense matters, was less impressed. In his view, Britain's focus should have been less upon what the Royal Navy's submarines could do off German harbours than what German subs could do off British ports and to the Empire's worldwide security. This weapon might be a nifty addition to the country's armoury, but what if it gave an even greater advantage to rival navies?

Balfour turned out to prescient. As we know from history, the U-boat did indeed prove to be the single greatest threat to the British and allied sea lanes, on two occasions (1917 and 1943) causing concern that the Allies were going to lose the Battle of the Atlantic.

I was reminded of this debate between Fisher and Balfour when my eye caught a LiveScience.com report about the US military entitled "Navy Tests Incredible Sci-Fi Weapon." Without knowing its contents, I started to groan.

The product in question is a high-velocity electromagnetic railgun. It shoots a solid metal "slug" at seven times the speed of sound (Mach 7) to a distance of more than 230 miles. There would be no explosion as the shell entered the enemy's side and went out the other - just devastation. Rogue states, beware.

The US Navy's justification for this new slug-weapon is pure Jackie Fisher: "I never ever want to see a sailor or Marine in a fair fight. I always want them to have the advantage," said the chief of naval operations, Admiral Gary Roughead. "We should never lose sight of always looking for the next big thing, always looking to make our capability better, more effective than what anyone else can put on the battlefield."

But there's the rub. What if, perchance, the United States is announcing a new weapon that somebody else can also put on the battlefield? Right now, the US Navy possesses two weapons-systems that are unique to the service, two systems that other powers would find difficult to match (at least for a decade or more, perhaps for most of the century).

The first of these are the gigantic nuclear-powered aircraft carriers like the Nimitz. They are unique not just because of their sheer size and number of aircraft they carry, but because their construction requires a fantastic array of high-tech and exact-science sub-subsystems. It would probably take a rising world power about 25 years to fashion such an industrial-logistical supply chain, by which time the US would have moved on.

The second weapons-system consists of the navy's fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines, and of ballistic missile submarines, which again demand an extraordinary array of subsidiary industries and technologies to make them function. Now, the navies of China, Russia, Iran, India and other countries that wish to escape from American maritime dominance - not to contest for mastery of the seas, but at least to be secure in their own waters - know this.

Each of them may have plans for a fleet aircraft carrier for a generation to come, but right now they are concentrating on what are known as "asymmetrical weapons" in order to curb America's global reach. These range from ultra-quiet, anti-detectable diesel submarines to coastal-based, sea-skimming missiles that fly under the radar screens of offshore fleets. Already, the Pentagon is very nervous.

If what I have written above is true - even roughly true, since so much of this high-tech weapons development world is kept from civilian eyes - then the Pentagon might do well to think a little more before it plunges ahead with this new video-game superslug. To be sure, if America has it and the other guys don't, one can imagine all sorts of advantages accruing to the US armed services in regional conflicts to come. An "incredible sci-fi weapon" located on a platform in the Gulf could really intimidate Iranian military commanders; nobody wants one of those things bursting through the hangar door, or the 15-foot cement walls of a nuclear facility.

But, as the old saying goes, sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander. What if this new wonder weapon initially benefits the United States but can be swiftly taken up by others?

China, India, Iran and Russia each contain vast numbers of scientists and engineers, research institutes, sophisticated defense staffs and large capital resources. Unless there are features to this electromagnetic railgun and its all-metal slug that I have missed, it isn't too hard to imagine that it could be tested and produced by other defense establishments in fairly short order - certainly in a lot quicker time than it would take to create a fleet of nuclear-powered fleet aircraft carriers.

Now, just suppose that those four countries, or perhaps others, developed or purchased their own railguns, each with a 230-mile range, and a slug that could go through one side of an aircraft carrier and out the other. That would really cramp America's option in future confrontations.

Right now, the United States is enjoying a very special moment in world-historical affairs. The Bush administration's policies may have made it highly unpopular in many parts of the world, and America's relative economic heft is nowhere as great as it was 50 years ago, but in terms of sheer military power, the United States is unequalled, not just in relation to other countries like China and Russia but in all of history.

(Paul Kennedy is professor of history and the director of International Security Studies at Yale University. He is currently writing a history of the Second World War. Distributed by Tribune Media Services)