WAR LIST ‘I SEE…’

Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Churchill, best known as the prime minister of the United Kingdom during World War II, clearly had the gift of prescience. In an article titled “Fifty Years Hence,” first published in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s in late 1931 and reprinted a year and a half later in Popular Mechanics, Churchill predicted that the accelerating evolution of technology would yield everything from wireless telephones and televisions to explosives that could “annihilate whole nations,” materials 30 times stronger than steel, and synthetic foods—lab-grown chicken breasts, for instance—that would be indistinguishable from the real thing.

Years earlier, Churchill had also foreseen that a vast conflict would soon engulf the world. In August 1911, nearly three years before World War I broke out, Churchill—at the time British home secretary—wrote a threepage memorandum for the Committee of Imperial Defence, “Military Aspects of the Continental Problem,” in which he accurately forecast a series of battlefield scenarios that would indeed come to pass.