EconAir

    Dr. Andrea Dragon          Each of the  hundreds of  millions of shells Great Britain fired from thousands of field guns, howitzers and mortars during World War I contained two explosives: cordite, a kind of nitrocellulose (what Americans call smokeless powder) to propel the shell out of the artillery piece and send it flying toward the target, and TNT, the shell's high explosive payload to blow up the target on impact.   In the early months of the war, the demand for cordite far exceeded the manufacturing capacity of Great Britain's explosives factories.  To meet production demands, in October, 1914, the British Army contacted representatives from DuPont and its 1912 spinoff Hercules, who were the leaders of New Jersey's established explosives industry, and signed agreements with them to produce nitrocellulose and cordite, load it and TNT into shells, and ship them from New Jersey ports to the Western Front....

SVG  Map_Europe_alliances_1914-fr.svg   ORIGINS OF THE WAR This is an extraordinarily complicated story. One reason is that it is difficult for the modern reader to understand the mentality of the key decision-makers – their prejudices, mental frameworks, how they reacted to threats and stress. Fortunately, there are several excellent books that attempt to describe the key players’ assumptions, mentality and motivations.   World War I was started by the decisions of a very small number of men, often in secret, implementing secret agreements and understandings, who represented the most reactionary or conservative groups in their countries and governments. Most were incompetent, narrow-minded, myopic and/or delusional. They thought going to war - appealing to nationalist sentiments - would solve or subsume social problems and political challenges that were mostly the result of industrialization and rapid economic  and social change. All planned to win in short off...