Obviously The War of the Worlds is premised on the use of technology for mass killing and destruction, but the aliens are the ones in possession of it. Interplanetary travel, laser-like weaponry (the heat-ray), and poison gas (the "black smoke") are all used by the Martians in their attempt to take over Earth and kill or subjugate its population. In the course of the story, the aliens are also apparently testing what we would now label conventional air travel. (Wells and other nineteenth-century science fiction writers, including Jules Verne, tended to envision interplanetary flight in terms of a projectile shot from a cannon, a simpler technology than that of the airplane or the spacecrafts that actually were to become a reality in the twentieth century.) None of this had been developed yet by man at the time Wells wrote his story. Despite the destructive power of these devices, the Martians are defeated by natural causes, their lack of resistance to the microorganisms they encounter for the first time on Earth.

It's become commonplace to see Wells's novel as an allegory of the European conquest of Asian and African peoples. The story is also a prophecy of what the Europeans would inflict upon each other with the technology that would soon be developed. But in some sense this aspect of the story is a kind of facade, behind which the more significant themes are both the vulnerability and the immorality of man. The ruthlessness of the aliens and their use of the Earth people essentially as cattle to be herded and fed upon, form a parable of man's own "inhumanity" towards other humans and towards the animal population. The ultimate message could be that the more "powerful" humans become (symbolized as they are by the Martians in this allegorical interpretation), the more they lose their moral "restraint," such as it is. But ironically, they also increase their potential for self-destruction. Wells envisioned an apocalyptic scenario in which aliens could potentially wipe man off the planet, not knowing that by 1945, which was to be the year before his death, man would have this same ability, with atomic weapons.