Clash by Night

I started to read David Drake's Surface Action and discovered in the introduction that this Novella was its inspiration.  Fortunately, almost all the Golden Age Science Fiction magazines are available online through the Luminist Archives and I was able to download a free copy of the 1943 Astounding Science Fiction Stories Issue containing it (under the Kuttner/Moore alias of Lawrence O'Donnell).  This is a pretty good military science fiction story.  All war on Venus is conducted by mercenaries.  They are segregated on the planet surface, far away from the general populace centres which live in underwater Domes and emulate Italian city states.  The loser pays a ransom to the winning Mercenary Company the the Dome that hired them, rather than have their Domes/society destroyed.  What I found most fascinating about this story, was its treatment of Atomic weaponry and it's inherent threat to mankind's survival.  I didn't realize that prior to Hiroshima, the destructive power of those bombs was widely understood.  I certainly didn't expect to find a story published in the middle of WW2 describing the Earth's total atomic destruction.  At a time when the US and Germans were in an Atomic Arms race, Kuttner/Moore wrote of a future where in the last refuge of humanity, the colonists of Venus have banned all atomic research and weapons.  There is war, but it has rules and those that fight in it are a very different sort than those that dwell below.  The story does an interesting job of examining that as well.