Monitor

Monitor (pronounced mon-i-ter)

(1) A student appointed to assist in the conduct of a class or school, as to help take attendance or keep order (largely obsolete).

(2) A person appointed to supervise students, applicants, etc., taking an examination, chiefly to prevent cheating; proctor.

(3) A person who admonishes, especially with reference to conduct.

(4) Something that serves to remind or give warning.

(5) A device or arrangement for observing, detecting, or recording the operation of a machine or system, especially an automatic control system.

(6) An instrument for detecting dangerous gases, radiation, etc.

(7) A receiving apparatus used in a control room, especially to provide a steady check of the quality of an audio or video transmission.

(8) A similar apparatus placed in various parts of a studio so that an audience can watch a recorded portion of a show, the performer can see the various segments of a program, etc.

(9) Any such receiving apparatus used in a closed-circuit system, as in an operating room.

(10) The screen component of a computer, especially a free-standing screen.

(11) In early computing, a control program which handled the primitive file-loading, essentially a precursor to operating systems.

(12) A type of armored warship of very low freeboard, having one or more turrets and used for coastal defense (now obsolete).

(13) In architecture, a raised construction straddling the ridge of a roof and having windows or louvers for lighting or ventilating a building, as a factory or warehouse.

(14) An articulated mounting for a nozzle, usually mechanically operated, which permits a stream of water to be played in any desired direction, as in firefighting or hydraulic mining (also called giant).

(15) Any of various large predatory lizards of the genus Varanus and family Varanidae, of Africa, southern Asia, the East Indies, and Australia, fabled to give warning of the presence of crocodiles.

(16)  To listen to or observe something.

(17) In Engineering, a tool holder, as for a lathe, shaped like a low turret, and capable of being revolved on a vertical pivot so as to bring the several tools successively into position.

1540-1550: From the Latin monitor (one who warns) from perfect passive participle monitus (warning) from the verb monēre (to remind, bring to (one's) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach) from the primitive Indo-European moneie- (to make think of, remind), source also of the Sanskrit manayati (to honor, respect) and the Old Avestan manaiia- (making think), a suffixed (causative) form of the root men- (to think), source also of the Latin memini (I remember, I am mindful of) & mens (mind).  The notion was "one who or that which warns of faults or informs of duties".

The first use in English was to describe a "senior pupil at a school charged with keeping order" (vaguely analogous with the block kapo in a concentration camp), from the Latin monitor (one who reminds, admonishes, or checks," also "an overseer, instructor, guide, teacher).  The lizard picked up the name in 1826 because of the fable in which it was said to give warnings of Nile crocodiles.  The squat, slow-moving ironclad warship was first used in 1862 during the US Civil War, the name chosen by the inventor, Swedish-born U.S. engineer John Ericsson (1803-1889), because it was meant to "admonish" (in the sense of the senior pupil at a school) the Confederate leaders in the U.S. Civil War.

Use in broadcasting dates from 1924 when it meant "a device to continuously check on the technical quality of a radio transmission signals" and it was borrowed in 1931 during the development of early television broadcasts to describe "a TV screen displaying the picture from a particular camera."  It soon came to mean electronic screens of any type.  The general sense of monitoring stuff emerged in 1944 to describe certain wartime intelligence operations.  Interestingly, as early as 1918 the romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) used it in the sense of "to guide".

Lindsay Lohan wearing court-mandated ankle monitor.  Strangely, despite attaching around the ankle, these are more frequently called bracelets than anklets.

Chanel Ankle Bags, Spring 2007 collection (left) and companion boot (right).

In one of several examples of the Lohanic influence on fashion and design, in their Spring 2007 collection, Chanel included a range of ankle bags.  Functional to the extent of affording the wearing a hands-free experience and storage for perhaps a lipstick, gloss and credit card (and the modern young spinster should seldom need more), the range was said quickly to "sell-out" although the concept hasn't been seen in subsequent collections so analysts of such things should make of that what they will.  Chanel offered the same idea in a boot, a design actually borrowed from the military although they tended to be more commodious and, being often used by aircrew, easily accessible while in a seated position, the sealable flap on the outer calf, close to the knee.

The Monitors

Monitors were curious looking, relatively small warships which, while neither fast nor heavily armored, carried disproportionately large guns, sometimes a single barrel as large as eighteen inches (460mm).  First used in the US Civil War, they saw service in several navies during both world wars and some were built by the US Navy as late as the 1960s to support costal operations in the Vietnam War.  Essentially a floating gun platform, they could be used only in shallow waters and were thus restricted to river and coastal duties where they were used as shore bombardment vessels.  Monitors have the distinction of firing heavier shells than other warships.

HMS Marshall Ney (1915-1957)

The Royal Navy has a sense of history and maintains in the service a great veneration for her most illustrious ships, names like Dreadnought, Victory & Vanguard often re-used on newer vessels to maintain the links with a history which dates back almost five-hundred years.  One ship not often mentioned in the annals is HMS Marshal Ney, laid down in 1915 as the first of two monitors of her class.  Designed to use 15 inch (380 mm) guns with mounts and turrets which became available when the Admiralty opted to reconfigure the battleships Renown and Repulse as battle cruisers, Marshal Ney and her sister ship Marshal Soult were named in recognition of historically unusual situation of the French being allies rather than enemies.  Built with the same armor as earlier monitors which mounted 12 inch (300 mm) guns, the original plan had been also to use the same well-regarded and reliable engines but an unfortunate decision was taken to use some diesel engines which were otherwise unallocated.  In short order, HMS Marshal Ney would come to be known as “the worst ship in the navy”.

The Vickers engines in the Marshal Soult, though underpowered, were reliable but those in her sister ship, built by the German company of MAN were a disaster, the problems thought a consequence of it being impossible in wartime to employ the German technicians experienced in servicing them or obtain the spare parts needed to fix them.  On the rare occasions the engines successfully started, they rarely ran for long without something “blowing up” and the engineers reports make clear, this expression was literal rather than used in the figurative sense often heard in engine rooms, pieces of shrapnel flying around with disturbing frequency.  Remarkably, there were only minor injuries.  As a result, the navy removed the big gun and installed it on the better performing monitor HMS Terror though in one of the coincidences of war, one of its barrels was on HMS Repulse when she was sunk by the Japanese in 1941.  The Admiralty re-armed the Marshal Ney, firstly with a single 9.2 inch (235 mm) gun and later, six with 6-inch (150 mm) bores but made no attempt to replace the engines, using the ship instead as a floating gun platform in the Channel, towed from port to port as required.  Despite being “the worst ship in the navy”, HMS Marshal Ney had a longer life on the active register than many more storied warships.  After the First World War, she became first a depot vessel and later an accommodation ship, renamed three times between 1922-1947, becoming successively Vivid, Drake and Alaunia II.  She was decommissioned in 1957 and sold for scrap, something which many sailors believed she'd been from the day she was launched.

Deadman

Deadman (pronounced ded-man or ded-muhn)

(1) In architecture and civil engineering a heavy plate, log, wall, or block buried in the ground that acts as an anchor for a retaining wall, sheet pile etc, usually by a tie connecting the two.

(2) A crutch-like prop, used temporarily to support a pole or mast during the erection process.

(3) In nautical use, an object fixed on shore temporarily to hold a mooring line.

(4) In nautical use, a rope for hauling the boom of a derrick inboard after discharge of a load of cargo.

(5) In mountaineering a metal plate with a wire loop attached for thrusting into firm snow to serve as a belay point, a smaller version being known as a deadboy.

(6) In slang, a bottle of alcoholic drink that has been consumed (ie is empty).

(7) In the operation of potentially dangerous machinery, a control or switch on a powered machine or vehicle that disengages a blade or clutch, applies the brake, shuts off the engine etc, when the driver or operator ceases to press a pedal, squeeze a throttle, etc; known also as the deadman throttle or the deadman control.  The hyphenated form dead-man is often used, both as noun and adjective.  Deadman is a noun and the noun plural is deadmans which seems ugly and a resulting formation such as "seven deadmans" is surely clumsy but most authoritative reference sources insist only "deadmans" will do.  Deadmen or dead-men is tolerated (by some liberal types) on the same basis as computer "mice" although "mouses" doesn't jar in the way "deadmans" seems to.

Circa 1895: A compound word, the construct being dead + man.  Dead was from the Middle English ded & deed, from Old English dēad, from the Proto-West Germanic daud, from daudaz.  The Old English dēad (a dead person; the dead collectively, those who have died) was the noun use of the adjective dead, the adverb (in a dead or dull manner, as if dead," also "entirely") attested from the late fourteenth century, again derived from the adjective.  The Proto-Germanic daudaz was the source also of the Old Saxon dod, the Danish død, the Swedish död, the Old Frisian dad, the Middle Dutch doot, the Dutch dood, the Old High German tot, the German tot, the Old Norse dauðr & the Gothic dauþs.  It's speculated the ultimate root was the primitive Indo-European dheu (to die).

Man was from the Middle English man, from the Old English mann (human being, person, man), from the Proto-West Germanic mann, from the Proto-Germanic mann (human being, man).  Doublet of Manu.  The specific sense of "adult male of the human race" (distinguished from a woman or boy) was known in the Old English by circa 1000.   Old English used wer and wif to distinguish the sexes, but wer began to disappear late in the thirteenth century, replaced by mann and increasingly man.  Man also was in Old English as an indefinite pronoun (one, people, they) and used generically for "the human race, mankind" by circa 1200.  Although often thought a modern adoption, use as a word of familiar address, originally often implying impatience is attested as early as circa 1400, hence probably its use as an interjection of surprise or emphasis since Middle English.  It became especially popular from the early twentieth century.

Calameo Dual-purpose MIL-SIM-FX mechanical dead-man and detonator switch (part-number MIL-12G-DMS).

The source of the name is the idea that if something is likely to in some way be dangerous if uncontrolled, operation is possible only if some device is maintained in a state which is possible only by a person not dead or in some debilitated condition.  The classic example is the train driver; if the driver does not maintain the switch in the closed position, the train slows to a halt.  Some manufactures describe the whole assembly as a "deadman's brake" and the part which is subject to human pressure as "deadman's switch" (or deadman's handle".  The phrase "dead man's fingers" is unrelated and is used variously in zoology, botany and in cooking and "dead man's rope" is a kind of seaweed (a synonym of sea-laces).  The legend of the "dead man's hand" (various combinations of aces and eights in poker) is based on the cards in the hand held by the unfortunate "Wild Bill" Hickok (1837–1876) when shot dead at the poker table.  A "dead man's arm" was a traditional English pudding, steamed and served in the cut-off sleeve of a man's shirt.  The phrase "dead man walking" began as US prison slang to refer to those on death row awaiting execution and it's since been adopted to describe figures like politicians, coaches, CEOs and the like who are thought about to be sacked.  Reflecting progress in other areas, dictionaries now list both "dead woman walking" and "dead person walking" but there scant evidence of use.

May have come across the odd dead man: Lindsay Lohan in hoodie arriving at the Los Angeles County Morgue to perform court-ordered community service, October 2011.

Deadman and the maintenance of MAD

The concept of nuclear deterrence depends on the idea of mutually assured destruction (MAD): that there would be certain retaliation, even if a nuclear first-strike destroyed the usual command and control structures of an adversary, that would not guarantee there wouldn’t be a nuclear counter-strike.  All front-line nuclear-weapon states employ systems to ensure a residual capacity to retaliate, even after suffering a catastrophic first strike, the best known of which are the Russian Мертвая рука (Dead Hand) and the US AN/DRC-8 (Emergency Rocket Communications System), both of which are often referred to as doomsday devices.  Both exist to close the strategic nuclear strike control loop and were inventions of the high Cold War, the USSR’s system later taken over by the successor Russian state.  The metaphor of a deadman is accurate to the extent of the need to keep closed a loop, the difference being the consequences.

Test launch of ground-based Russian RS-24 Yars ICBM from the Plesetsk facility in northwestern Russia, 9 December 2020.

The most extreme scenario is one in which there is left not a living soul with access to the loop.  In this case, the system switches from one designed to instigate a launch of ballistic missiles to one where some act is required to prevent the attack and is thus dubbed fail-deadly, the reverse of the fail-safe systems designed to prevent inadvertent launches.  The doomsday systems use a variety of mechanical and electronic monitoring protocols designed to (1) detect that a strike has occurred, (2) determine the extent of damage and (3) attempts to maintain or restore the usual communication channels of the military chain of command.  If the systems determine worst-case circumstances exist, a retaliatory launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) will be triggered.  Neither the Kremlin nor the Pentagon tend to comment on such things but, over the years, there have been (what are assumed to be managed) leaks that the systems are usually inactive and activated only during times of crisis but the veracity of this is unknown.

Royal Navy test launch of UGM-133 Trident II nuclear submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) from Vanguard class submarine HMS Vigilant, 28 October 2012.

One obvious theoretical vulnerability in the USSR’s and US systems is that at points it is electronic and therefore reliant on hardware, software and an energy source.  The UK government has an entirely analogue system which uses only pen and paper.  Known as letters of last resort, each incoming prime minister writes, in their own hand, four identical letters which are placed in a sealed envelope, given to the captain of each of the navy’s ballistic missile submarines who keeps it in his on-board safe.  The letters are only to be opened if an enemy (presumably nuclear) strike has damaged the chain of command to the extent it is no longer possible for the civilian government to instruct the military on what retaliatory action to take.  As soon as a prime-minister leaves office, the letters are, unopened, destroyed and replaced with ones from the new premier.  Those circumstances requiring a letter to be opened have never transpired and no prime-minister has ever commented publicly on what they wrote so the contents remain a genuine secret, known only to the writer and whomever they told.  So, although the only people who know the contents have never spoken, the consensus has long been the captains are likely to be given one of four options: 

(1) Retaliate.  Each of the four submarines is armed with up to sixteen 16 Trident II SLMBs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles), each missile equipped with up to twelve independently targeted warheads with a range of 7,000 miles (11,000 km).  There is always at least one at sea and the Admiralty never comments on its location although, in times of heightened political tension, additional boats may be activated.

(2) Not retaliate.

(3) The captains should use their judgment.  This, known as “the man on the ground” doctrine has a long tradition in the military although it was in some circumstances rendered redundant by advances in real-time communications.  In this case, it’s “the man under the water”.  An interesting question which touches on constitutional, international and military law, is the question of the point at which a state ceases to exist and the orders of a regime can be no longer said legally to be valid.

(4) Proceed to a place under an allied country's command or control.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900).

There is also a probably unexplored fifth option: a prime-minister could leave in the envelope a blank page.  This presumably would be substantively the same as option (3) but would denote a different political message to be mulled over in whatever remained of civilization.  No prime-minister has ever commented publicly on the thoughts which crossed their minds when writing these notes but perhaps some might have recalled Nietzche’s words in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886): "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.  And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."  Although troubled when he wrote that, he wasn't yet quite mad.

Dreadnought

Dreadnought (pronounced dred-nawt)

(1) A type of battleship armed with heavy-caliber guns in turrets: so called from the British battleship HMS Dreadnought (1906); A name used by the Royal Navy for many ships and submarines.

(2) A garment made of thick woolen cloth that can defend against storm and cold.

(3) A thick cloth with a long pile.

(4) Slang a heavyweight boxer, sometime extended to the largest or heaviest in a given field.

(5) A person who fears nothing; something that assures against fear.

1800-1810: The construct is dread + nought.  Dread is from the Middle English dreden, from Old English drǣdan (to fear, dread), aphetic form of ondrǣdan (to fear, dread), from and- +‎ rǣdan (from which English picked up read); corresponding to an aphesis of the earlier adread.  The Old Saxon was antdrādan & andrādan (to fear, dread), the Old High German was intrātan (to fear) and the Middle High German entrāten (to fear, dread, frighten).  Nought is from the Middle English nought & noght, (noȝt), from the Old English nōwiht & nāwiht (the construct being nay +‎ a +‎ wight), which in turn came from ne-ā-wiht, a phrase used as an emphatic "no", in the sense of "not a thing".  In the transition to Modern English, the word reduced gradually to nought, nawt and finally not; a doublet of naught.  The alternative spelling (though never used by the Admiralty) is Dreadnaught.

The dreadnoughts

HMS Dreadnought, 1906.

Launched in 1906, HMS Dreadnought is often said to have revolutionized naval power, the design so significant it proved the final evolution of what had, by the late nineteenth century, evolved into the battleship.  Subsequent vessels would be larger, faster, increasingly electronic and more heavily armed but the concept remained the same.  HMS Dreadnought rendered instantly obsolete every other battleship in the world (including the rest of the Royal Navy) and all other battleships then afloat were immediately re-classified as pre-dreadnoughts. 

HMS Dreadnought.

Her main design features were speed, armor, steam turbine propulsion and, especially, firepower almost exclusively of weapons of the largest caliber.  In the decades after her launch, British, German, American, Japanese and other navies would build larger and heavier dreadnoughts until, during world war two, their utility was finally seen to been eclipsed by both aircraft carriers and submarines.  The last dreadnought, HMS Vanguard, launched in 1946, was scrapped in 1958 but the US Navy maintained, on either the active or reserve lists, at least one of the four battleships it retained from WW2 until 2004 when the last was decommissioned.

HMS Dreadnought, 1908.

That it was the Royal Navy which first launched a dreadnought doesn’t mean the British Admiralty was alone in pursuing the concept.  Naval strategists in several nations had noted the course of battle between the Russian and Japanese fleets in 1905 and concluded the immediate future of naval warfare lay in the maximum possible deployment of big guns, able to launch attacks from the longest possible range, subsidiary smaller caliber weapons seen even as a disadvantage in battle.  That the Royal Navy was the first with such a ship afloat was a testament to the efficiency of British designers and shipbuilders, not the uniqueness of its plans.

Much read in palaces, chancelleries and admiralties around the word was a book released in 1890 called The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 by US naval officer and theorist Captain Alfred Mahan (1840-1914).  Published in what, in retrospect, was a historical sweet-spot (technologically and politically) for the views it espoused, it brought Mahan great fame and exerted an extraordinary influence on diplomacy, military planning and the politics of the era.  The book was not alone the cause of the naval arms-race in the decade before the First World War but was at least a sharp nudge, push or shove depending on one’s view.  Curiously though, although a work primarily about naval strategy, while many of the maritime powers seemed convinced by Mahan’s arguments about the importance of naval sea power in geopolitics, not all admiralties adopted the strategic template.  What all agreed however was they needed more ships.

The nineteenth century of Pax Britannica ("British Peace", echoing the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire), describes the century of relative great-power stability between the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) and the outbreak of war in 1914 encompasses the idea of British Empire as the global hegemon, a role possible only because the Royal Navy enjoyed an unchallenged ability to patrol and protect the key maritime trade routes.  The effective control of these transport corridors not only guaranteed the security of the British Empire but it meant also the British effectively controlled maritime access to much of Asia, the Americas, Oceania the south Pacific, although, one factor in the success was it was that London ran things essentially in accordance with US foreign policy, assisting Washington in enforcing the Monroe Doctrine which upheld the US preponderance of interest in the Americas.  It can be argued the roots of the so-called "special relationship" took hold here.

The British Empire, in terms of the impression created by a map of the world on which its colonies and dependencies were colored usually in some shade of red, was deceptive, the remit of the local administrators sometimes extending little beyond the costal enclaves, even the transport links between towns not always entirely secure.  Never did the Empire posses the military resources to defend such vast, remote and disparate territories but it was the control of the sea, uniquely in history, which allowed the British for centuries to maintain what was, with no disparagement intended, a confidence trick.  The reason the empire could be maintained was not because of control of big colonies, it was all the little islands dotted around the oceans which enabled the navy to operate outposts which housed the ports and coaling stations from which ships could make repairs or provision with fuel, food and water.  All those little dots on the map were the "keys to the world".  Mahan’s book had drawn its influential conclusions from his study of the role of sea power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; what the British did was take advantage of the circumstances of the nineteenth century and deploy their sea power globally, in competition when necessary, in cooperation when possible and in conflict when required.  The practical expression of all this was British naval policy: that the Royal Navy must be of sufficient strength simultaneously to prevail in war against the combined strength of the next two biggest navies, either in separate theatres or as a massed fleet.

By the early twentieth century, economic and geopolitical forces combined to render the policy impossible to maintain, Britain no longer able to operate in “splendid isolation” (another somewhat misleading phrase of the era), needing alliances to spread the load of imperial defense.  It wasn’t just the rapid growth of the German fleet which had changed the balance of power but that alone was enough for the British and the French to reach an accommodation which is remembered as the Entente Cordiale (Cordial Agreement) of 1904 which may or may not have been an alliance but was enough of one for the admiralties in Paris and London cooperatively to organize the allocations of their fleets.  It certainly illustrated Lord Palmerston's (1784–1865) doctrine that the country had neither eternal allies nor perpetual enemies but only permanent interests for despite the centuries of enmity between Britain and France, the self-interest of both dictated the need to align against the German threat.

Royal Navy battlecruiser HMS New Zealand, 1911.

It was in this atmosphere the great naval arms race took place, plans for which were laid before the Wright brothers had flown a hundred–odd feet, barely off the ground, torpedoes were in their infancy and submarines were little threat more than a few miles from the coast.  The measure of a fleet was its battleships and their big guns and whichever side could put to sea the most firepower was winning the race.  It intrigued the navalists, strategists and theorists who knew from history that such a race, if left to run, could end only in war, the great, decisive set-piece battle of which would be the clash of massed fleets of battleships on the high seas, trading shell-fire at a range of twenty miles (32 km), before closing for the kill as the battle climaxed.  Dreadnought was one strand of the theorists’ imagination but there were others.  There was a school of thought which favored an emphasis on radio communications and a greater attention to the possibilities offered by the torpedo and, most influentially, what seems now the curious notion of a complimentary range of faster capital ships, essentially battleships with the big guns but little armor, the loss of protection off-set by the few knots in speed gained; these ships were called battlecruisers.  The argument was they could fight at such range nothing but a battleship would be a threat and those the battlecruiser could outrun because of their greater speed.  It seemed, to many, a good idea at the time.

Super Dreadnought: HMS Iron_Duke, Port Said, 1921.

But it was the Dreadnoughts which captured the imagination and defined the era.  Impressive though she was, HMS Dreadnought was not long unique as navies around the world launched the own and, as happens in arms races, the original was quickly out-classed and the next generation of ships, bigger and more heavily gunned still, came to be known as super dreadnoughts.  War did come but the grand battle on the high seas which the navalists had, for a quarter century been planning, never happened.  There were smaller clashes of squadrons but the imperative of the Royal Navy was more practical and traditionally British: avoid defeat.  As Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty (minister for the navy), emphasized to the First Sea Lord (the navy’s senior admiral), against a continental empire like Germany, while the Royal Navy couldn’t in a year win the war, because Britain’s empire was maritime, they could lose it in one afternoon.  Accordingly, the Royal Navy made no sustained attempts to induce a massed battle, focusing instead on a blockade, keeping the German fleet confined to its ports.  It was the German admirals who attempted to force the British to a set-piece battle, venturing into the North Sea in May 1916 with a fleet of nearly a hundred, including sixteen dreadnoughts and five battlecruisers.  Against this, the British assembled a hundred and fifty odd with twenty-eight dreadnoughts and nine battlecruisers.  The action came to be known as the Battle of Jutland.

German battlecruiser SMS Goeben, 1914.

On paper, although the result described as inconclusive, it was a tactical success for the Germans but strategically, the British achieved their goal.  The dreadnoughts barely engaged, most of the action confined to the battlecruisers and, unlike the smaller Battle of Tsushima (May 1905) in the Far East, fought by pre-dreadnoughts a decade earlier between the Japanese and Russian fleets, there was no winner in the traditional sense of naval warfare.  The German's tactical success in retrospect was something of a Dunkirk moment but the strategic implications were profound.  British losses were heavier but their numeric advantage was such they could absorb the loss and had the financial and industrial capacity to restore the fleet’s strength.  Damage to the German fleet was less but they lacked the time or capacity to build their navy to the point it could be used as a strategic weapon and it remained confined to its ports.  Both sides learned well the inherent limitations of the battlecruiser.

WWI era German U-Boot (Unterseeboot (under-sea-boat)), anglicized as U-Boat.

After Jutland, the German admirals concluded that to venture again against the British Home Fleet would either be an inconclusive waste or lead to the inevitable, decisive defeat.  They accordingly prevailed on the politicians and eventually gained approval to use the only genuinely effective weapon in their hands, the submarine.  It was the consequences of unrestricted submarine warfare which would bring the United States into the war in 1917 as a belligerent and without that intervention, the war would certainly have followed a different course and reached perhaps a different conclusion.

Although HMS Dreadnought lent her name to an era and remains one of the most significant warships built, she's remembered for the geopolitical reverberations around her launching rather than any achievement at sea, missing even the anti-climatic Battle of Jutland because of a scheduled re-fit.  Indeed, her only achievement of note in combat was the ramming and sinking of German U-Boat SM U-29 on 18 March 1915 although that remains a unique footnote in naval history, being the only time a battleship deliberately sank an enemy submarine.  Dreadnought was decommissioned in 1920 and scrapped the next year.  Later, under the terms of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty which sought to prevent another naval arms race, most of the surviving dreadnoughts were scrapped or scuttled but many of the super-dreadnoughts remained in the fleets, some not scrapped until after World War II.  The name has a strong resonance in the halls of the Admiralty (now the Navy Command in the Ministry of Defense) and has been chosen for the class of vessels to replace the existing Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines.  Now under construction, the first of the Dreadnought class boats is expected to enter service early in the 2030s.

Mothball

Mothball (pronounced moth-ball or mawth-bawl (US))

(1) A small ball of naphthalene or sometimes of camphor for placing in closets or other storage areas to repel moths from clothing, blankets, etc.

(2) To put into storage or reserve; inactivate.

(3) Inactive; unused; stored away.

(4) A form of drug abuse where users inhale or ingest mothballs.  Users may hallucinate, feel a distorted sense of time and space, or experience rapidly changing emotions.  Side-effects include nausea, vomiting, slurred speech, headache, coordination loss, wheezing, and rashes.

1891: A compound word, (used also as also moth-ball & moth ball) used to describe the naphthalene ball stored among fabrics to keep off moths, the construct being moth + ball.  Moth (nocturnal lepidopterous insect) was from the Middle English motthe, from the Old English moþþe & moððe (mohðe in dialectical Northumbrian) and was a common Germanic word.  Related were the Old Norse motti, the Middle Dutch motte, the Dutch mot, & the German Motte (moth).  It may have been related to the Old English maða (maggot) or from the root of midge.  Until the sixteenth century, the word was used mostly to refer to the larva and usually in reference to devouring woollen fabrics, hence the translation (King James Version 1611) of Matthew 6:20 as “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”  Words for the adult moth in the Middle English included the mid-fourteenth century flindre which was cognate with the Dutch vlinder (butterfly).  As a literal description, the phrase "moth-eaten” was attested from the late fourteenth century, the figurative sense noted a few years later.  The related forms in the Romance languages are borrowings from the Germanic.  Ball was from the Middle English bal, ball & balle, from the Old English beall, beal & bealla (“round object, compact spherical body" and also "the spherical or similar object used in a game" dating from circa 1200) or the Old Norse bǫllr (a ball), evidenced by the diminutive bealluc (testicle), all from the Proto-Germanic balluz & ballô (ball), from the primitive Indo-European bholn- (bubble), from bhel (to blow, inflate, swell).  It was cognate with the Old Saxon ball, the Flemish bal, the Dutch bal, the Old High German bal & ballo, the German Ball (ball) & Ballen (bale). 

When used as a simple noun, mothballs are usually referred in the plural, that’s how they’re purchased and used.  A mothball is a small ball of chemical pesticide (typically naphthalene) and deodorant placed in or around clothing and other articles susceptible to damage from mold or moth larvae in order to protect them from this damage, the process being process is “mothballing” or to “mothball”.  In the pre-synthetic fibre era they were more widely used and the advent of modern chemical sprays has seen use diminish further.

Their cheapness and toxicity has seen them used also to repel snakes, squirrels, bats and other rodents, despite many jurisdictions making the use unlawful and a number of studies documenting the health risks to humans and other wildlife.  They’re also often suggests as a way for gardeners to eradicate snails but evidence of efficacy is only anecdotal although it does appear the use may cause at least illness in domestic pets.  As a verb, "mothball" is used metaphorically to mean "to stop work on an idea, plan, or job, but leaving things in such a state that work can later resume.

Mothballing

Mothballed WWII US Navy destroyers, 1947.

When the military, typically after longer conflicts, have too much capital equipment (tanks, ships, aircraft etc) but are, for a variety of reasons, unwilling to re-allocate, sell or consign the surplus to scrap, the storage process is called mothballing.  With airframes or land-vehicles, this involves hermetically sealing the structure and storing them in remote places with low humidity and rainfall (such as the Arizona desert).  For an admiralty, surface and underwater vessels are more of a challenge given they’re usually moored in salt-water.

The Imperial German Navy's High Seas Fleet, interned at Scapa Flow, 28 November 1918.

Mothballed ships made in the pre-atomic age (pre 1945) are also used to provide low-background steel for use in nuclear medicine experimental physics which demands shielding material which is extremely weakly radioactive (emitting less than present-day background radiation).  Steel manufactured after the first atmospheric nuclear explosions reflect the higher ambient level of radioactivity that fallout has caused.  Some of the capital ships of the Imperial German Navy’s High Seas fleet, scuttled in 1919, were an important source of such steel although, with atmospheric nuclear testing no longer undertaken, background radiation has decreased to near natural levels, so the need for low-background steel in medical machines now not usually needed.  However, for the equipment used in experimental physics where the most extreme sensitivity is required, the pre-1945 steel is still used.

AMARG, March 2015.

The 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (309th AMARG or, in military slang, “the Boneyard”) is a United States Air Force (USAF) aircraft and missile storage and maintenance facility in Tucson, Arizona, part of the Davis–Monthan Air Force Base.  For decades, AMARG, the largest facility of its type on the planet, has stored thousand of airframes in various states of repair, it’ location advantageous because of a low-humidity climate which minimises rust and corrosion and ground that is geologically stable and sufficiently hard so even the heaviest aircraft don’t sink into the soil.

Mothballed Boeing B-52s at AMARG, 1991.

In the 1990s, under the terms of the START I treaty, (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty; a 1991 bilateral treaty between the US & USSR and successor to SALT I & II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks 1972 & 1979)), 365 of the USAF’s mothballed B-52 Stratofortress bombers stored at the Arizona boneyard were literally chopped into pieces, initially with a 13,000 (4850 kg) pound guillotine supported on a mobile crane.  The big blade was effective but brutish and the team soon switched to Husqvarna diamond-tipped fire-rescue  saws, the added precision less destructive on the surrounding equipment which afforded AMARC the opportunity to cannibalise the airframes for salvageable parts.

Wreckage of disabled B-52s of the US Air Force's (USAF) former Strategic Air Command (SAC) left in situ to permit satellite observation for purpose of verification by Russian Federation (successor-state to the USSR), 1994.

After the destruction was done, the wreckage was left in place for two months.  Under the START I terms which defined the verification process, both sides had sixty days to verify the other side’s conformity with the agreement using satellite over-flys.  Like most agreements between strategic adversaries, SALT & START operated under the principle of "trust but verify", the second element of that included because nobody believed in the first.  

Broadside (9 x 16” guns) from the USS Iowa.

The US Navy's four Iowa-class battleships were mothballed and re-commissioned several times between 1948 and 1991.  Launched between 1942-1944, their last period of active service was 1981-1991 as part of the Reagan Administration’s 600-ship navy policy.  Such was the cultural significance of the big battleships, although they were stricken from the Naval Vessel Register, instead of (as usual) being scrapped, all were donated for use as museum ships, the last in 2004.  They were big ships but not as wide as some of the Super Dreadnoughts (the beam of the Iowas about the same as the last battleship ever launched, the Royal Navy's HMS Vanguard (1946-1960)), the dimension dictated by the need to pass through the Panama Canal.