Primordial air-power ~ shamans soaring through the sky ~ Zeus casting thunderbolts ~ Indra keeper of the universe striking with vajras ~ an archeological hot-air fantasy imagines Nazca Indians flying a smoked balloon Peru, 500 BCE – 500 CE Cyrano’s trip to the moon with bottles of sun heated dew 1655 ~ the mythical Chinese dragon becomes a war kite, a windsock with a smoking torch used by Mongols, Dacians and Romans as a signaling device and to scare their ennemies. Then the Chinese dragon takes the shape of a two-stage gunpowder rocket setting cities ablaze ~ Samurai warrior borne aloft by giant Wan-Wan kite, also used to enter or leave besieged cities.. "Will You sweep away the righteous with the wicked?" asks Abraham ~ in the end only Lot and his daughters escape God’s judgement of fire and brimstone that devastates Sodom and Gomorrah Genesis 18:28. The semi-devine monkey Hanuman destroys the corrupt city of King Ravana on Lanka with his lashing tail of fire: "The friendly wind conspired to fan the hungry flames that leapt and ran" Ramayana book LIV. ‘The sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind" Revelation 6:12. The Revelations of St. John become an apocalyptic human judgement when German catholic troops bombard German protestants in Magdeburg in 1631: 20,000 dead (symbol of the horrors of war in it's time). Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519, painter of the Mona Lisa, was also a military engineer travelling with the armies of his warring patrons, producing 'undiscovered inventions': ballistic machines and flying vessels. Swift’s flying island of Laputa 1727 casts stones or crushes earthly rebels ~ Jesuit priest Lana Terzi 1631-1687 decides - God forbids it - not to develop a vacuum and wind driven airship capable of bombing ships and cities. The hot-air balloon not just for pleasure cruises or scientific observations, but also imagined as a war machine, as in this British plan 1799 for the annihilation of the French fleet by timed self-exploding balloons. Jules Verne’s airship, the Albatross 1886 as intervention force against West African "barbarians" ~ US fleet bombards the Lybian pirate city of Tripoli 1810 beginning of interventionist American 'Big Stick' naval policy. Graf General Von Zeppelin 1838-1917 perseveres in his plan for an invincible imperial German air fleet and sows terror in Antwerp, Paris and London during World War I: "Zeppelin kommt!". The Italian general Douhet 1869-1930 calls for bombardments on the ‘will of a nation’ Il dominio dell’area, 1921 Douhet finds supporters among strategists from all emerging air-power nations, though civil moral proved to be stronger as thought. The Japanese bombardments of Chinese cities like Shanghai, Canton, Nanking and Hankow in 1937 were condemned by British and American governments as 'barbaric acts' against defenseless civilians. The Second World War took the bounds of 'barbarity' even further levelling the difference between combattants and civilians completely, everything, everybody on ennemy territory became a 'legitimate target'.