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.
