I had to laugh at that part, as well. Sure, a B-24 is a "Liberator", and B-17s were, uh, friendly???

I think they meant to write "desperate", rather than "diabolical", for a plan to blow random holes in the countryside. Not that I would want to be under one when it came down, regardless of country of origin.

In Japan, a very crowded country, it might have seemed effective to drop bombs at random - killing people at random as a terror campaign. But California is mostly empty space. Making random black spots on remote pastures and empty hillsides has a lesser effect on moral.

I think it likely that the Japanese command were merely profoundly ignorant of the living situation in America including population density.

As I recall there was no expectation that the bombs themselves would cause any significant casualties. The intention was for them to start forest fires, which would hurt US civilian morale and require manpower to put out.

One of the clever things that Ian M. Banks did in his Culture series was naming military ship classes. So rather than "Liberator", he had "Torturer", "Gangster", and "Psychopath" classes of ship.

Those names make me think more of British ship names[1], which tend to be more aggressive, which makes sense given Bank's nationality. Also the background of The Culture trying to be taken more seriously by other civilisations who thought they were too soft. A sort of "We might be soft, but we can make machines that definitely aren't".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astute-class_submarine#Boats_o...

Right and the reference to the atomic bomb is of a 'secret project'. The discrepancy is a little bit jarring to read.

Plenty of WWI ordinance being found, now a hundred years on. Much of it still dangerous, and as recently as March of 2014 two people were killed by a WWI bomb in Belgium.

Pigeon-guided missiles also come to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon