Plan to End War.

Cromwell Argus, Volume LXIV, Issue 3341, 19 November 1934, Page 6

Plan to End War.

CONTKUE or BAKE METALB. With about twelve gases that will either kill or incapacitate, and with shells loaded with explosives that will blast a hole 30ft. deep, it is evident enough that modern warfare is essentiially chemical in ils nature. Yet, differing with the statesmen who compose international conventions designed to preserve the peace, it is not gases or explosives or other diabolical ingenuities that Professor Ward Y. Evans, of Northwestern University, would abolish in preventing war. Control a handful of rare but indispensable metals —such is lijs formula, In a paper written for the American Chemical Society, Professor Evans points out that both modern civilisation and war as wo know them are impossible without such metals as chromium, vanadium, manganese and nickel. Without these we would have to go back to bows and arrows to tight and conquer. What the War Showed. To make his point clear, Professor Evans tells what happened during the World War. Great Britain had obtained her tungsten from ,South Burma —her own possession. The metal is needed for high-speed tools by which nearly all steel c|uttiug is done. Germany refined the ore and sent it to England. At the outbreak of the war Great Ijritaju cut off the supply of tungsten from Germany. Whereupon Germany substituted molybdenum, bought at a high price from Norway. The British checUmated this move by cornering t(io avail* able supply of the metal. Nickel steel will also cut well. So Germany turned to nickel, which came from Canada, was bought by Norway and sold by her to Central Europe, Many a British soldier was killed by munitions made with the aid of Canada’s nickel.

The lesson is obvious. Stop the traffic in rare metals so necessary in modern industry and war is impossible —at least, op the scale on which it was waged from .101-1 to 1018. Professor Evans is too sensible noc to weigh the psychological factor. There must be a desire for international peace in the first place. If that is assured, the next stop is a survey of the world’s minora} wealth and its relation to the changing industrial picture.