Norbert Mayberry is a character in Isaac Asimov's science-fiction short story "The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use".
About Norbert[]
Professor Norbert Mayberry was a brilliant but politically naïve scientist. He dedicated his work to the goal of ending war, believing he could create a technological instrument of ultimate peace. His breakthrough was the invention of the Negation Field, a defensive weapon capable of instantly disintegrating any form of projectile or explosive material within its operational radius, rendering all conventional warfare utterly obsolete.
Convinced he had created the perfect deterrent, Mayberry demonstrated the device for General Weider at a remote testing ground. The demonstration was a complete success; shells from the largest cannons vanished upon entering the field, and high-explosive bombs were neutralized without a trace. Mayberry expected the military to see his invention as he did: as a tool that would force humanity to abandon war forever, as any conflict would become a futile stalemate.
However, General Weider immediately grasped the weapon's true, horrific implication. He explained that the nation possessing the Negation Field would be invulnerable to attack and could therefore advance with impunity. Faced with certain defeat and the inability to fight back conventionally, the enemy's only logical recourse would be to deploy biological weapons, bacteria and viruses which are not physical projectiles and would therefore pass through the Negation Field unimpeded. This would not lead to peace, but to a final, desperate war of annihilation where plague would be unleashed upon the civilian populations of both sides, ensuring mutual destruction.
Mayberry was utterly horrified by this conclusion. His idealistic dream of peace was instantly shattered, replaced by the grim certainty that his invention would be the catalyst for the very apocalypse he sought to prevent. He realized that by making conventional war impossible, he would make the most dreadful form of warfare inevitable.
Faced with this unbearable moral responsibility, Mayberry took decisive and final action. He chose to sabotage his life's work. He returned to his laboratory and systematically destroyed all of his notes, blueprints, and the device itself, ensuring the Negation Field could never be replicated or used.
His final, sobering realization was that humanity was not yet ready for such absolute power. He concluded that it was better to allow conventional wars to continue than to push civilization toward a final, genocidal conflict with biological agents, the true "weapon too dreadful to use."
Appearances[]
Trivia[]
- The story, also known simply as "The Weapon", is one of Asimov's earliest explorations of the "unintended consequences" theme, where a well-intentioned scientific solution creates a far greater problem.