From C.P. Snow’s Science and Government, 1961:
[Discussing disagreements over the equations used to determine percentage of German city destruction in the British strategic bombing campaigns of World War II]
Let me break off for a minute. It is possible, I suppose, that some time in the future people living in a more benevolent age than ours may turn over the official records and notice that men like us, men well-educated by the standards of the day, men fairly kindly by the standards of the day, and often possessed of strong human feelings, made the kind of calculation I have just been describing.
Such calculations, on a much larger scale, are going on at this moment in the most advanced societies we know.
What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity?
They will have the right.
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