2 - Controlling Scientific War

Summary

Chapter Two explores British discourses on disarmament and international organization in the 1920s. Its central argument is that conceptualizations of disarmament and collective security were transformed by internationalists searching for broader solutions to the problems of international affairs. Internationalists such as Philip Noel Baker and David Davies came to envisage armaments as products of modern science, and so to see disarmament itself as an increasingly technical and scientific project requiring the guidance of experts schooled in international relations or with a specialized understanding of armaments. Disarmament and collective security came to be seen also in broader political and institutional terms – intimately connected to and dependent on a powerful international organization to organize, operationalize and police them. Aviation was central to this transformation. Apparently successful in policing and controlling vast imperial territories cheaply and effectively, to most observers aviation promised not only connectivity and internationality, but military domination too. Thus for internationalists it came to represent the only weapon capable of giving international organization the teeth required to build legitimacy, enforce international law, and police arms control.