Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a story in 1912 about a war fought from underwater submarines that sank passenger ships. Nobody believed it because nobody imagined that a civilised nation would ever cross that moral threshold. Lawrence Freedman and John Simpson look to past civilisations, and their often erroneous predictions of future warfare, to put into perspective current thinking about future conflicts. In conversation with former Guardian security and defence editor, Richard Norton-Taylor.

Lawrence Freedman is Professor Emeritus of War Studies at King’s College London. Sir Lawrence was a member of the Chilcot Inquiry into Britain’s role in the 2003 Iraq War, and was the official historian of the Falklands Campaign. He comments regularly on contemporary security issues and has written extensively on nuclear strategy and the Cold War: Strategy was an FT and Economist book of the year, and A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East won the 2009 Lionel Gelber Prize and the Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature.

John Simpson is the BBC’s World Affairs Editor. In a BBC career spanning fifty years he has reported on major world events from all corners of the globe, and was made a CBE in the Gulf War honours list in 1991. He has twice been the Royal Television Society’s Journalist of the Year, and has won three BAFTAs, the News and Current Affairs award in 2000 for his coverage, with the BBC News team, of the Kosovo conflict, and, in 2001, an Emmy for his report on the fall of Kabul. He has written four bestselling volumes of autobiography: Strange Places, Questionable People; A Mad World, My Masters; News from No Man’s Land and, more recently, Not Quite World’s End. He lives in Oxford.

Richard Norton-Taylor is a journalist and playwright.  He regularly contributes to BBC news and current affairs programmes and is a member of the Executive Committee of Liberty, the National Council for Civil Liberties. He is the author of a number of books and Tribunal Plays.