New secret explosives of terrific potency have long supposed to constitute the chief nightmare of general staffs because of a supriority which would upset existing defence schemes. From the humble squib, through a mass of chemicals to the physicist's dream harnessing the atom, the desire to surpass in the discovery and control of liberated energy has been pursued, and public imagination has ccrzespondingly reacted in terms of awe and fear of greater possibilities. This is in spite of a belief that no new explosives have recently been invented but what has happened has been the more intensive application of explosives already known. Some such reaction is to by seen in the statement to the American Senate Military Affairs Committee that Germany possesses a new explosive of tremendous destructive power. Major-General Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, told the Committee that Germany does have a bomb loaded with compressed air, carbon and some form of oil which, according to one report, when used in raids on Barcelona killed everyone within a radius of a quarter of a mile. Shanghai people who remember the terrible Saturday, August 14, 1937, will recall that aerial bombs of known manufacture practically achieved that effect and covered almost the same area when dropped at Nanking Road corner and Avenue Edward VII and Vu Ya Ching corner. No single act of slaughter by single missiles has been recorded in the past two decades of unhappy strife in this world. While not ignoring the possibilities of the existence of a new form of bomb, the use of compressed air is not new. Towards the "ud of the Great War when supplies began to fail and it was necessary to conserve chemical explosives for use at the front, Germany experimented with compressed air for use as explosives in coal mines and results appear to have been fairly successful The extension to projectiles in warfare has been suspected but the report to the Senate Military Affairs Committee does not throw much light on its effectiveness er its superiority over other forms of explosives.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.