perhaps because they operated a peripheral weapon , they thought more in order to justify its being and expansion . but they , too , were just as guilty as their superiors of over-estimating their weapon &apos;s effectiveness and dreaming of its potential . on the other hand , the same people were apt to divert power from their own programme by boasting . the claims of airshipmen , it appears , helped create the vast anti-Zeppelin forces which were maintained in England in the first world war . it did not take a very astute man to realize that what could be done to the enemy if we had the equipment might well be done to us when he had it , particularly if invulnerability , which the German airships possessed at first , was claimed for the delivery system . between them the enthusiasts and the reactionaries created a vast feeling of insecurity , and faced with this the responsible authorities generally erred towards the safe side . any new weapon will have its small band of disciples . but if it is to be used effectively , more personnel must be recruited . volunteers may be hard to come by owing to the lure of actual combat and the uncertainty of the future with a new-fangled device . thus the expanded staff is apt to be short on experienced career men and long on hostilities only or draftee recruits . this places the weapon at a disadvantage in the battle of Whitehall where it may have difficulty breaking the thin red tape , and in peacetime it will be out of favour , but in a commanding position as far as wartime development is concerned for it may well acquire decidedly more brains than the normal unit . the undisciplined will be quite prepared to test regulations and equipment and by empirical means come to new conclusions in both technology and technique , as the naval air service did with not only air equipment , but also with armoured cars and tanks . this is particularly important where an entirely new element is being investigated . airships presented many unknowns to be solved and these ranged from metallurgical questions to matters of aerodynamics . the new weapon also presents all decision-makers with the problem of the evaluation of intelligence from both the enemy &apos;s and one &apos;s own work . in this respect , too , there arises the question as to what is the acceptable percentage of failure ? in the case of airships , should all the money have been put into one Mayfly ? while the answer in 1908-9 was probably yes , in 1924 it should have been no . in almost any programme , the construction of but one prototype is bound to lead to delay , confusion , and losses if there is a disaster . and the likelihood of such is by no means eliminated by the present advances in technology . yet the combination of psychological and politico-economic forces in Britain still persists in an approach which may well be called into question where real economics are concerned . it is highly unscientific to place too many innovations in any one test vehicle , if for no other reason than it attenuates the whole testing period . ideally , merely one change at a time should be tried until proven , and this was well demonstrated in R101 . moreover , every new weapon needs at least three prototypes : one for operational research , one for technical modifications , and one for experimental use as a testbed for the next-generation ideas . thus the building of only one prototype provides policy-makers with the rather appalling fact that they may have to accept a 100 per cent failure rate , and yet still have to justify continuing expenditure on such work in order not to be placed in a disadvantageous position in an international race . the loss of R38 , amongst other factors , immediately suspended work on more advanced types as well as discouraging commercial incentive . the obverse of this coin is the desire to standardize too soon , for duplication there must be if a weapon is to be handled by average troops and ordinary commanders . this was the difficulty of 1916 in the British rigid airship programme : the designers were allowed to seek after perfection to the detriment of operational uniformity , while the royal flying corps had allowed similarity to preclude competitive progress . the ministerial head of a service department is always in a difficult position in peacetime . in Britain , for instance , the Treasury rules , so only a weapon with either the Prime Minister &apos;s or the Chancellor of the exchequer &apos;s approval or diffidence can get sufficient funds . after a major conflict the Treasury is most apt to insist on the payment of past debts and the consumption of available equipment before authorizing any new expenditures . this it certainly did in the years immediately after the treaty of Versailles . peace is a dastardly affair where new weapons are concerned . there is an immediate erosion of personnel . operations rapidly taper off and even constructional work will be suspended while politics and economics once more take the field to bid for the voters &apos; favour . the immediate hope is for some crisis , such as the suspicion that the Germans might not accept the treaty of 1919 , or that the whole concern can be turned over to commercial profit . but the latter can be successful only if the entrepreneurs are allowed to obtain for a reasonable sum what would otherwise be scrapped and have facilities and official support to exploit it . moreover , they must feel financially secure and not suspect that the state aims to take over once a service is established . the government may well face the choice as it did in 1919 of scrapping the whole business or of subsidizing a commercial operation . this creates a situation in which the weapons advocates may be able to divide and conquer . however , there are two difficulties - civilian acumen may be lacking , and the whole may be too peripheral and too much of a gamble for either of the other parties . as personnel and material deteriorate , immediate action is essential and this must be topped with a prestigial success which will create political pressure . this makes the odds high , and , in the case of airships , it led to R34&apos;s trans-Atlantic flight and to R101&apos;s death . how did all this affect the airship programme ? Mayfly was initiated in a period of concern with Germany &apos;s intentions and collapsed at the end of a severe political crisis in Britain . airship work was revived when another defence scare came along ; then cancelled when it was thought that the war would have cleared the air by late 1915 . the whole programme was revivified during the wide-open war economy and collapsed in the peacetime retrenchment . it then became caught up in the conflicting streams of the save-the-empire movement and the labour party &apos;s desire to run a successful national transport system . the collapse of the economy and the d&amp;eacute;nouement of R101 caused airships to be abandoned for economic reasons , which were rapidly reinforced by technological arguments in favour of the aeroplane . who made airship policy ? the original impetus appears to have come from the Germans through the naval and military attach&amp;eacute;s to Fisher and the Prime Minister . Asquith by his decision in July , 1908 placed the first sea Lord in a position to implement plans already sketched out by Bacon and other technically astute officers . Bacon guided the early design stages of Mayfly until relieved by Sueter , and the first airship programme then proceeded under its own steam and with the blessing of the committee of imperial defence until the disaster of September , 1911 . Churchill as the new first Lord with A K Wilson as his first sea Lord then decided against any further work . the second programme came into being again because of the Germans and through the joint agency of Sueter and Seely , Secretary for war , who chaired the committee of imperial defence sub-committee on aeronautics . thus in mid-1912 a further reappraisal , at least in part , influenced by a change in heart at the Admiralty , came into being with Asquith , as head of the committee of imperial defence , accepting in 1913 the need for another rigid airship . and once again Churchill in early 1915 became the one who decided that the whole thing should be abandoned and gave the order to cancel no 9 , and presumably also earlier , no 14 and no 15 . and so it went on . after the war , the transfer of lighter-than-air from the Admiralty to the air ministry again put Churchill into a policy-making role in regard to airships over which he had exercised some influence as Minister of munitions from 1917 to 1919 . as Secretary of state for air he had to reconcile his fondness for maintaining the empire with his desire for economy and political success . airships fitted into both patterns . at the same time , Churchill was also Secretary of war and gave much of his time to the army . the under-Secretary of state for air , Seely , was pro-airships as he had been as the pre-war Secretary for war , while Sir Frederick Sykes as chief of the air staff and then as Controller-General of civil aviation was also a supporter . Sir Hugh Trenchard , who succeeded Sykes , appears to have favoured airships in their place , and if prestige , the estimates , and the R.A.F could allow for them . as Seely resigned and the other Under-Secretaries were not much interested , as long as Churchill remained the air Minister , he and Trenchard made policy . but policy was also made at lower levels . in much the same class as Rickover , Whittle , and Dornberger , Sueter guided constructional and design concepts until he was posted . in the early years of the R.A.F the director of research and the air member for supply and research had their says . Maitland as superintendent of airships appears to have been left on the fringes as was Masterman after he transferred from the navy to the R.A.F . it must be recalled , however , that the director of research on one occasion made policy when he plumped for cutting R38&apos;s trials to but fifty hours with subsequent unfortunate results . in the case of the imperial scheme , policy was made by a wide variety of people . A H Ashbolt and Cmdr Burney provided the primary pressure . Trenchard was interested because he saw a way of acquiring military strength for a relatively minor expenditure on the estimates while at the same time mollifying the Admiralty , then in the process of being denied a naval air arm and the destruction of the R.A.F . Sir Samuel Hoare was openly in favour and this was in keeping with his character as a publicity-conscious air Minister . but in the case of the conservative Burney scheme there was one of those rare instances of the monarch helping make policy by taking a personal interest in a particular development . into this picture then was catapulted Lord Thomson , an obvious enthusiast , who told the air staff to screw up the conservative scheme . he and his Under-Secretary , a Bradford alderman and pacifist named Leach , knew nothing about airships and little about international commercial organizations . in the realm of civil air intelligence their natural advisor was the enthusiastic Sir Sefton Brancker , the director of the department of civil aviation at the air ministry . but Brancker was not exceptionally well-qualified to give advice on this subject . moreover , the Secretary and his Under-Secretary called largely upon the serving members of the air council for their opinions , then made a scheme and submitted it to the cabinet without allowing those very advisers time to consider it . thus the latter were forced to the unusual step of drawing up a memorandum for the cabinet for their own protection . nor was the experienced chief of the air staff adequately consulted . the cabinet then proceeded to accept a programme which had not been approved by the air council . yet in this case , while the aeronautical research committee did not have the access to the cabinet that it had had in 1909 , it did have considerable influence . it was the findings of the special technical committee on the loss of R38 which heavily influenced the Thomsonian decision to make this an experimental programme rather than an operational one . 