ABSTRACT
Introduction The destruction of cities has always been a feature of war: think of the sacking of Magdeburg, Clausewitz’s home city, in May 1631. Only the cathedral and some 70 houses in its immediate neighbourhood were spared. The rest of the city was reduced to a wasteland of blackened timber. Western Europe would not see another city deliberately put to flames until the Allied bombing of Germany began in earnest in 1942. Four years later Aldous Huxley compared the atom-bombed city of Hiroshima to seventeenth century Magdeburg. He believed both atrocities had awakened two very different societies to the need for even tighter ethical controls in warfare. ‘Assuming . . . that we’re capable of learning as much from Hiroshima as our forefathers learned from Magdeburg we may look forward to a period, not indeed of peace, but of limited and only partially ruinous warfare.’2
