CBW - What Hope for Restraint

Abstract

There is a general horror of chemical and bacteriological weapons; weapons aimed directly and exclusively at living things. This special horror is not entirely rational. James Conant, who as a young chemist in World War i helped produce Lewisite, remarks in his memoirs that development of new and more effective gases seems to me no more immoral than the manufacture of explosives. It would be as unfair to take his remark as evidence of lack of compassion, as to take revulsion against chemical warfare as evidence of concern for humanity. The awfulness of these weapons is best described by their victims (if they survive). In the passage that follows, a German soldier described how it felt to be blinded temporarily in this instance -by British gas at Ypres: I stumbled back with seering eyes, taking with me my last report of the war. A few hours later, my eyes had turned into burning coals; it had grown dark around me. (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf) That there is an element of the irrational in our horror of chemical weapons seems undeniable. We single out toxic (i.e., poisonous) chemical weapons and treat them in our minds quite separately from weapons which use chemicals to produce energy that in turn kills. The devices that depend on the energy of chemical reactions include such appalling things as fragmentation bombs (that release a huge number of shards of metal) and napalm. It has, in fact, frequently been argued that chemical warfare is particularly humane. The argument is a very shaky one indeed. We have no right, however, to be too scornful of such talk; in civil life, for example, many of us have concurred in the use of poison gas as the most humane means of execution for capital offences.