The specter and horror of poison gases engulfing the trenches of WWI is one of those history lessons that I learned well. Not the facts but the brutality and inhumanity of such weapons. So horrible that much of the world quickly came together and outlawed the use of such weapons with the Geneva Protocol in 1925.
It prohibits the use of “asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices” and “bacteriological methods of warfare”. This is now understood to be a general prohibition on chemical weapons and biological weapons, but has nothing to say about production, storage or transfer. Later treaties did cover these aspects — the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).
The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was over 37 million. There were over 16 million deaths and 20 million wounded ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history.
The total number of deaths includes about 10 million military personnel and about 7 million civilians.
Nevertheless disease, including the Spanish flu, still caused about one third of total military deaths for all belligerents.
That would be over 3 million combatants that died from the Spanish flu and other diseases. Civilian fatalities for WWI also include 6 million that died from related malnutrition and disease.
The estimated casualty figures WWI chemical weapons are: fatalities 88,498 and injuries 1,240,853. Further:
By the end of the war, chemical weapons had lost much of their effectiveness against well trained and equipped troops. At that time, chemical weapon agents were used in one quarter of artillery shells fired but caused only 3% of casualties.
That 3% casualty figure out of the total casualties of 37 million is likely misleading as the preponderance of those casualties were likely suffered by the combatants. Almost all of whom went home and lived with their injuries, many debilitating and painful, for the rest of their lives. As did all the other millions that were shot with bullets, injured by bombs (that also require chemicals), and/or stabbed with bayonets.
What was remarkable about the Geneva Protocol was that it was proactive in banning biological weapons that had yet to be developed and that it was quickly approved by such a large number of countries. (The US wasn’t among those nations until 1975.) It can’t be known if it or the fear of retaliation resulted in the WWII Allies and Axis powers not using chemical weapons against each other, or other weapons were more reliable and available. The WWII death toll was 60 to 85 million (unlike WWI, there are no cited and accepted figures for the number wounded and missing military and civilian persons.)
War, at least among industrialized countries, has changed several times in the past hundred years. WWI can be viewed as the dividing line between armies and ships massing and firing at each other. Guernica took us to the intentional aerial bombardment of civilian populations; London, Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Deadly and expensive wars. For richer nations and peoples. Or so we thought until Vietnam and oddly enough it was the rich and mighty US that resorted to the cheaper chemical weapons in that war and not the Vietnamese peasant guerrilla fighters. But we don’t do that anymore (except for the first CW used by France, teargas, on our own people when the authorities determine that the rabble is unruly). And gosh darn it, if anyone dares to release a CW we’re going to go kick their butts with our cruise missiles, drones, and whatever else we have in our civilized (and very expensive) armory.
A thoughtful piece Marie but a few points. The gases of the Great War were meant to be debilitating and were used as part the of siege warfare doctrine which relied on a number of innovative techniques to dislodge enemy formations from fixed field defences. A temporarily blinded or asphyxiated enemy was as good as a dead one tactically.
So they were intended to incapacitate; fatalities were a side-effect and there is even some unpleasant literature from the time analysing the relative strain placed on the enemy’s medical and logistical resources by large numbers of blind, lame and disabled casualties and concluding that this was a preferred outcome. So a top-level analysis of tons of payload to number of fatalities is perhaps missing the point.
Deterrence was certainly a compelling factor in the Second World War; most combatants maintained chemical weapons in their operational establishments and the cases of chemical use were limited to isolated encounters against an enemy not so equipped.
The Third Reich, however, had the nerve agents we are now encountering; tabun, sarin and soman. That these weren’t ultimately used as payloads for the strategic V-1 cruise and V-2 ballistic missiles is a puzzling question:
Perhaps if the V-1 and V-2 launch sites had not been overrun or disabled Hitler would have later reconsidered. Anyone familiar with Hitler’s sociopathic last will and testament would know the mythological importance he placed on German racial evolution; it is plausible that he feared for their extermination.
But these are the agents the world now confronts. Bear in mind the resources of Aum Shinrikyo were adequate to produce these substances. It beats me what human aspiration is served by diminishing the necessity of prohibiting or containing their proliferation.
It is Pandora’s Box we are debating opening if we relax the international ban. Why can’t we discuss the alternate responses besides “kicking their butts with our cruise missiles” rather than argue that the use of these weapons is of no concern to us or consequence to others?
Public opinion supported the ban and doubt that opinion was based on the intent of the warring combatants for using gas to disable troops. You’re correct that the nerve agents were developed later and are deadlier, but cool enough heads prevailed for whatever reasons and they weren’t used in WWII or since then to any appreciable extent with the exception of Iraq with US supplied chemicals and cover-up during the Iraq-Iran war.
Not suggesting a revisit of the chemical/biological weapons ban. But a sense of proportion, as in any crime, must be maintained. There were 37 million casualties in WWI over what? Can’t let the assassination of an Archduke go unanswered?
I can’t stand how both CW and R2P are being used by our country to justify wars of aggression. We’re not protecting anybody that way; just participating in the killing. And in Syria, our hands are dirty wrt to the civil war. The world is not a better place for our almost seventy years of covert and overt acts of aggression, meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations, engaged in international arms trade, etc.
How many children and people could have safe drinking water for the price of one cruise missile? If we really cared about the life of others, why do we ignore the million or so that die every year for lack of clean water?
You will note that 1925 corresponds to the time when strategic airpower was a hot topic among Europeans. Douhet’s The Command of the Air was published in 1921 and by 1925 the popular press had been full of accounts of the doctrine of strategic bombing for several years. That these fleets of bombers would be carrying chemical weapons was a matter of considerable public apprehension and controversy.
If you are not suggesting diminishing the ban, fair enough, but why trivialise the consequences compared to dirty drinking water? I think you underestimate the destructive potential for such ideas among people looking for excuses to justify short-sighted and selfish behaviours.
Argue the inappropriateness of a unilateral military response and leave the ban free of guilt by association with the repugnant Bush administration.
A million people a year — actual deaths not potential deaths — isn’t trivial. Nor is all the death and destruction in Iraq that we caused because too many Americans believed the Bush/Cheney lies.
All the people that have died in Syria in the past two years from conventional weapons is trivialized. That’s what we do; trivialize the big stuff and then spend an inordinate amount of time over the small stuff, usually because someone with a big megaphone and an agenda blasts it at us.
The CW ban is working well enough — better than most criminal legislation. It’s not going to deter anyone with the means, motive, and opportunity. We have a court to deal with that when it happens. Strengthen that and let that body handle it instead of these continuing calls for us to engage in military actions that kill and maim innocent people and destroy their buildings and lands. And if the crime is crystal clear and egregious enough, the world community should have the wherewithal to come together and march in to arrest the “evil doers.”
Was I doing any of that trivialising? No. We almost agree; I am just suggesting you should beware of carrying water for isolationism. You know, like the Ron Paul people. If it were up to them there would be no foreign aid, no UN, no ICC and no “collective security.”
And developing countries would be overrun by warlords and corporations. Oh, wait…
heh —
The Paulistas are into “collective security” — they just want more of it at home.
We could junk the major portion of foreign aid as it flows to US weapons manufacturers. Then increase the humanitarian aid.
Keep the UN – but member status should somehow reflect the degree that a nation’s government and its UN reps represent the people. The number one assignment IMHO for any head of state/government is insure an orderly transition to his/her successor without regimes or dynasties.
Nobel Prize winner Woodrow Wilson killed himself straining unsuccessfully to persuade the US to join the League of Nations.
After straining himself to get us into WWI to preserve the US bankers interests.
Well… Therein lies a tale. Britain and France were in hock to the US for billions by 1915; if you want to point to the moment that global power shifted from Europe to DC you need look no further. And the bankers helped make it happen. We were the China of the early 20th century.
But what would have happened if Britain and France had lost/defaulted? Who would buy all our coal, steel and wheat then? The bankers had the place sewn up by the time the rail-roads were built anyhow, if not before.
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○ Amsterdam Crash: History of EL AL Flight LY1862 with Illegal Chemicals and Plutonium
○ UK ‘approved nerve gas chemical exports to Syria’ in 2012
Stock of CW and BW was seen as a poor man’s option for a nuclear deterrent.
Thanks — I try to use links instead of presenting too many nitty grity details in my diaries to avoid overwhelming or boring readers.
Somalia is now a party to the convention as I have already posted recently.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson on All In with Chris Hayes states what the facts and history of the CW ban suggests.
Not stated is that banned CW are comparatively cheap weapons.
There seems to be this glossy, flimsy thought that civilian participation in war is a 20th century thing – that the bombing raids of WWII were an aberration.
This is just extremely historically ignorant. Civilians have ALWAYS been the “collateral damage”. The vikings of the 8-12th century involved civilians. Mongols sacked cities, killed the men, enslaved the women, and were generally unpleasant. Armies have ALWAYS marched using the provender of the region to feed themselves.
The modest attempts to keep civilians out of war from roughly 1870 on were mostly unsuccessful.
Civilians are part of wars. In fact, it is not good to keep them out. Too sterile. Makes war too easy.
Kill the women and children. that is the only way to make war too terrible to wage.
Not an aberration, but the intensity and scale, as well as civilians being direct targets for aerial bombardment was a significant change in warfare. And they still suffer all the other forms of “collateral damage.”