Didn’t the japanese use some sort of bubonic plague on the Chinese ? Experimentally perhaps if not militarily. They intended to disperse these bug carrying bombs over the US with long range means.
As for the Germans… I think Hitler’s own experiences during WWI held him back. Probably using gas didn’t fit the Uber race image either. Blitzkrieg managed to do way more “damage” to the enemy than any WMD could anyway. There were few deadlocked situations that warranted much Poison or Nerve Gas use.
It was American gas on an American ship . This article gives more detail :-
Ok, I must reply. I used the phrasing “at the end of the war” instead of “to end the war” only because it is an issue of minor debate whether or not the US actually needed to deploy them. Some argue that Japan was willing to offer conditional surrender, which would have been good enough. The US wanted unconditional surrender, and so dropped the nukes to force it. I used my phrasing to avoid responses like “the war was already over, the US didn’t need to drop them.”
I did a little research, and the term dates back to 1937:
So originally, the term referred to conventional bombs; not nukes, not chemical weapons, and not biological weapons. In that sense, we are all wrong. 
As regards to the mass/energy being conserved, I say that changing forms is a form of destruction of that form. If you melt ice, certainly the water molecules are still there, but the ice form has been destroyed.
My knowledge of the inner workings of fusion and fission is limited, so I didn’t want to advertise my ignorance by getting it wrong, but I wanted to type “when the nucleus is split, the mass is converted to energy, destroying the atom in a blaze of energy release.”
It’s hard to argue the point in light of the London Times cite, and even harder in light of this quote:
Damn, I hate being wrong.
It still doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, when you want to avoid destruction, you use chemical/biological agents to oust the people. Why? Because they are weapons of zero destruction. I did not make this up; I heard or read it somewhere during the early nineties.
Oh well. grumble mumble
Both cites from here.
After some biased researching, I ran across this cite:
Gert doesn’t use my reason, though. (And his cite is unavailable.)
Sorry, I guess I didn’t start this thread properly…what I meant was, in the 1930’s, all of theworld’s armies were preparing for chemical warfare. Indeed, the French MAGINOT LINE forts were fitted with gas filtration systems, and had huge compressor plants to get poison gas out. Even in the US Army, standard issue for an infantryman included a gas mask. So, given the huge investment in chemical/biological weapons, why were they abandones? Seems like poison gas would have made the capture of Stalingrad a piece of cake!
I think the best answer is that after witnessing the horror of chemical weapons in WWI, Hitler decided not to use them for fear they would be used against Germany in retaliation.
Basically, a WMD is any weapon that people decide is so bad they won’t use it for fear of it being used back against them, which is the main reason a nuclear war never broke out between the US and USSR.
Oh hey, that’s a good answer in another sense. You could make a similar argument that so much energy and effort was put into the nuclear arms race, so why didn’t they get used in Vietnam?
Ellis Dee – I’d guess that the Times article you cite was referring to poison gas, as well as strategic aerial bombing. The 1936 movie version of H.G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come gives a pretty good picture of what people expected the next war to look like, with both the aforementioned weapons figuring prominently.
It’s also something of a misconception, as it was in the case of the neutron bomb, that the purpose of chemical and biological weapons is to kill enemies while leaving material assets intact. Chemical and biological weapons are means of killing large numbers of the enemy with disproportionately small effort, particularly when that enemy is heavily fortified against conventional weapons. The disadvantage of both is that they are unwieldy and difficult to control. The application of both is subject to the whims of wind and weather, and both carry “friendly fire” hazards well in excess of conventional weapons. Biologicals have the further disadvantages of being slow to act, and uncertain in effect. As such, biologicals are almost always considered strategic, rather than tactical, weapons. Gas wasn’t used in World War I because either side particularly wanted to seize trenches and lifeless no-man’s land “intact”. Rather, gas had the potential to sink into dugouts and heavy fortifications that would have been resistant to heavy bombardment.
ralph124c – Building on the above in answer to your revised question, I think a large part of the reason chemical weapons weren’t used in World War II is that they were recognized to not be worth the effort. Against prepared defenders, gas doesn’t really do much more harm than heavy artillery bombardment would. The only time gas really could have won a battle in World War I was when it was first used by the Germans at Ypres, but German cautiousness in employing a touchy weapon with such ghastly effects kept them from gaining much anyway.
Against a prepared defense, gas ends up being counterproductive, in that it requires one’s own attacking forces to don protective gear, thus slowing the pace of their advance. That might make it sound like it has value on the defense, but on the modern battlefield, mobility is important on the defense too. Moreover, an attacker at least has the advantage of choosing the time and place of his attack, and can bend such things to accommodate the use of gas, while a defender has no such luxury.
I doubt, then, that gas would have made Stalingrad a “piece of cake”. The Russians carried gas masks too, and both sides were in such close proximity that gas would have made the job of the attacking Germans as difficult as that of the defenders. In fact, the Russians made a point of trying to infiltrate and entangle themselves with the Germans to complicate the Germans’ employment of artillery. It would only have been worse with gas.
In a true surprise attack, or against an enemy with no defensive or retaliatory capability to speak of, chemical weapons can indeed be devastating, which is why the Italians used it in Ethiopia, and the Japanese against the Chinese. And Saddam against the Kurds, for that matter. In a “self-immolation” scenario, like an invasion of Japan, a defender might choose to use gas just to maximize the attacker’s casualties without regard to its own, but history has not yet seen such circumstances happen. Alternatively, the attacker might encounter controlled circumstances, such as caves filled with ill-equipped but fanatical defenders, where the benefits of gas would stand out. Public opinion might weigh against this today, but might not have in an alternative 1946.
Hitler’s personal aversion may have counted for something, but I’d be hesitant to attribute any action to an altruistic spirit on his part. I think that his experience mainly helped drive home the idea that gas just “wasn’t worth it” as a weapon.
The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction is indeed a manifestation of this dynamic, though at an intensified level. It might be better described in the case of chemical weapons as Mutually Assured Inconvenience and Suffering.
Other reasons why, even though conventional strategic aerial bombing was called a WMD in the late 30s, it is not considered so these days, may be:
(a) that CSAB proved, during WW2, to not have the expected “terror weapon” effect – it did not immediately break the will of entire populations and rather than bring to a dead stop the enemy’s production assets it just ground them down progressively. In the 1930s, with the limited examples of incidents like Guernica, many analysts thought that mass air bombing would make societies and economies just fall apart in the panic.
(b) that CSAB achieves its “mass” quality by, well, massive numbers of what are otherwise plain old weapons of limited destruction. Wave after wave of medium and heavy bombers (plus fighter escort), dropping dozens of HE or incendiaries apiece over several days and nights in a row, looks too much like hard work.
Obviously something like the Dresden raid IS “mass destruction”, but it required a heavy proportional investment of materiel and manpower to deliver.
Even rocks and sticks can achieve “mass destruction” if you just have enough barbarians and get them well-organized.
Interesting thread.
BTW In the sea between Scotland and Northern Ireland lies Beauforts Dyke, where the UK MoD dumped (still dumps as far as I know) old munitions. Including chemical weapons.
Stuff from this area has been washing up on the shores of both places for a while now. In fact when I was at school we were having a class trip to the beach (the school was beside it) when one of my classmates was injured by a phosphouros bomb from it…
Because Vietnam was something of an anomaly, as was Korea: It wasn’t a fight between North and South Vietnam but a fight between China/USSR and the USA. Since both sides had plenty of nukes and itchy trigger fingers, using nukes in such a trivial war would have been suicide for both parties.
Clausewitz said that war is politics by other means, and nowhere was that more apposite than in the proxy wars between the USA and the USSR and China.
hehheh, that tickled my funny bone.
Excellent post, Umbriel. I could feel the ignorance pouring out of my ears while reading it. After a quick calculation of your post count vs. registration date, I think you should post more often.
IIRC a truly vast amount of explosives got dumped there (and still remains). When they came to laying underwater cables, for some new-fangled thing called the “interned” or some-such, they found some of the ships dumping the explosives hadn’t bothered going the whole way out to Beauforts Dyke, so a lot of it lies not far from shore, and in shallow waters. (which maybe why so much is washing up)
If folks want to debate the meaning and history of the term “WMD”, here’s a pretty good summary with many cites for further reading
I think the Nazis did use WMD: they are more commonly known as concentration camps.