The War of the Worlds (radio drama) relatively few listeners. The one-hour program began with the theme music for the "Mercury Theatre on the Air" and an announcement that the evening's show was an adaption of "The War of the Worlds". This was followed by a prologue read by Orson Welles which was closely based on the opening of H.G. Wells' novel. The next half hour of the broadcast was presented as typical evening of radio programming which was interrupted by a series of news bulletins. The first few bulletins interrupt a program of dance music and describe a series of odd explosions observed on Mars. This
The War of the Worlds infrastructure such as armament stores, railways, and telegraph lines; it appears to be intended to cause maximum casualties, leaving humans without any will to resist. These tactics became more common as the twentieth century progressed, particularly during the 1930s with the development of mobile weapons and technology capable of surgical strikes on key military and civilian targets. Wells's vision of a war bringing total destruction without moral limitations in "The War of the Worlds" was not taken seriously by readers at the time of publication. He later expanded these ideas in the novels "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899), "The War