In 1981, the first year of the Civil War, Richard Gatling invented the first automatic fast firing weapon, the Gatling Gun. Originally from the South, he was a passionate patriot of the United States and prayed that the Union's adoption of his weapon would make war so deadly, so terrible that the South would quit the war.

The men responsible for arming Northern troops saw the weapon as a deterrent, but refused to equip the troops with it because they were afraid of the expense of "a flood of bullets" on the treasury.

So the weapon remained a secret and the war went on for three more years costing tens of thousands of lives.

Which begs a question appropriate then and today; is a secret weapon a deterrent if nobody knows about it?