【研究生学术英语读写教程翻译 中国科学院大学Unit8】

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Unit 8 Science Goes to War

科学走向战争

There were many, like the submarine inventor John P. Holland’, who insisted that the sheer destructiveness of the modern weapons that science had provided would make war so terrible, no sane nation would fight one. What sane nation would jeopardize the great industrial civilization that had brought so much benefit to so many people? What sane nation would allow the cultural treasures, the great cities, and the flourishing towns of Europe to be destroyed in the name of war?

有许多人，比如潜艇发明家约翰·P·霍兰德，坚持认为科学提供的现代武器的绝对破坏性会使战争变得如此可怕，没有一个理智的国家会与之战斗。哪个理智的国家会危及给这么多人带来如此多好处的伟大工业文明？哪个理智的国家会允许欧洲的文化宝藏、伟大的城市和繁荣的城镇以战争的名义被摧毁？

Yet, the signs were there. The mad race for an ultimate military security - to develop the most advanced and destructive armaments, to construct mighty military edifices, to build huge fleets, to conscript millions into vast armies, to overlay the Continent with a network of railroads to move troops rapidly, to stockpile mammoth amounts of ammunition and guns, to prepare war plans that called for armies of millions to fall upon each other in mass battles - amounted to a gargantuan powder keg, needing only a single political spark to set off Armageddon. For nearly a hundred years, Europe had enlarged the Napoleonic concept of total war with scientific and technical advances to make it even more total. Science finally had been mated indissolubly to war, creating a juggernaut that no one was able to stop. But politicians and generals thought that although modern total war would be incredibly violent, like nothing ever seen before, it would be short. European generals dreamed and planned for a short war in which the outcome would be decided in one great Napoleonic campaign, the decisive blow, using the full might of modern armaments, to destroy an enemy totally. No one who directed any of these mighty military machines seemed to doubt that the fruits of modern science - metallurgy’, chemistry, industrial machinery, radio, turbines, diesel engines, hydraulics, fire-control mathematics, gun balli