Introduction
Chemical Warfare came into being during an era of unprecedented change in the technology of war.[1] The introduction of gas warfare by Germany in April 1915 presented new problems of military techniques with which none of the Allied Powers was then prepared to cope. In the United States, the War Department, by the fall of 1915, began to show an interest in providing troops with protection against gas and assigned responsibility for the design and development of respirators to the Medical Department.
In carrying out his responsibilities, The Surgeon General detailed certain Medical officers to the British and French Armies as observers, and these officers sent back periodic reports, which included information on gas defense.[2] The Army took no steps to supply the troops with masks or to prepare for offensive gas warfare until the first part of 1917.
It was not the War Department but a civilian branch of the government that took the first step in preparation for the employment of toxic agents. Early in 1917, the Secretary of the Interior surveyed his department to determine how it might contribute to the national defense and decided that the Bureau of Mines, which, since its establishment in 1910, had been investigating poisonous gases in mines, might be utilized in assisting the Army and Navy in developing a gas war program. On February 8, Van H. Manning, the director of the Bureau of Mines, wrote to the services.
It was not until the German Army in July 1917 began the use of dichloroethyl sulfide, the so-called mustard gas, as a liquid, toxic filler for projectiles that the War Department began to give serious consideration to preparations for gas warfare. Mustard gas was persistent, it proved to be a high casualty producer, and it considerably widened the scope of chemical warfare.
As the gas warfare needs of U.S. troops in France became known in Washington, they were referred to the War Department bureau, to which each seemed to relate. The basic requirement was a gas mask; this item, because of its prophylactic nature, was assigned to the Medical Department for procurement and distribution. Training of individuals in the use of the mask then became a Medical responsibility. The War Department assigned the responsibility for the manufacture and filling of gas shells to the Ordnance Department, which erected a new arsenal for this purpose at Edgewood, Maryland.
The problems of gas warfare administration were, in the meantime, receiving serious consideration in the theater of operations under the urgency of an active gas warfare situation. A board of officers was appointed to plan a gas warfare organization for the American Expeditionary Forces ( AEF) on June 18, 1917, a few days after General John J. Pershing’s arrival in France. The board analyzed the gas warfare establishments of the British, French, and German Armies and considered the recommendations of Dr. George A. Hulett of Princeton University, who had spent some time in England and France studying the use of gas in war.
Colonel Fries was fortunate in securing the services of a very competent officer, Maj. Robert W. Crawford, whom he put in charge of procurement and supply activities in the Gas Service, early in September 1917. The Procurement and Supply Division, as Crawford’s unit came to be known, not only handled the purchase of matériel but also drew up plans for and supervised the construction of three separate gas depots in the First Army Area and four in the Second Army Area.
These depots were placed in operation in October 1918 under depot officers who were on the staff of the respective army gas officers. Crawford also drew up plans for the construction of phosgene-manufacturing plants, shell-filling plants, and a gas-mask repair plant. The proposed construction of phosgene and shell-filling plants in France was given up after Colonel Fries had studied the matter in detail and made a recommendation to that effect to General Pershing. The chief reason for abandoning those projects was the inability to obtain sufficient chlorine in France. But the plan for building the mask repair plant was carried to completion, and in November 1917, four officers and 110 enlisted men of the Medical Department arrived from the United States to operate this plant.
A development in connection with gas research in the theater was the Inter-Allied gas conferences for the exchange of scientific information. Three such conferences were held during the war–in September 1917, March 1918, and October 1918. From the point of view of the American scientists, the last was the most satisfactory because, by that time, the Americans felt they had come to know as much about gas as their European co-workers.
In addition to its research activities, the Chemical Service Section, from early 1918 until the end of the war, was called on more and more by the Ordnance Department for recommendations on the manufacture of gases at Edgewood Arsenal. Thus, while the purpose behind the Chemical Service Section was to co-ordinate without integrating and without disturbing functions of the statutory bureaus of the War Department, it was becoming evident that the system was developing serious defects.
The Poisonous Cloud
The work of the Institute for Coal Research and its analogs was to be mainly in the area of strategic minerals; the Dahlem complex gradually assumed the character of a research center for tactical military science and technology. The man who took the lead in this area was Fritz Haber. Despite his earlier rebuffs, Haber was determined to play a significant role in war work. In a logical outcome of his prewar research, he began by embroiling himself in the ammonia question, in which he also represented the BASF on occasion in the War Ministry.
In October and November 1914, while Haber’s institute was trying unsuccessfully to discover a more powerful explosive for artillery shells, Duisberg and Nernst, using the Bayer facilities, developed various grenades, shrapnel shells, and firebombs. Very early, they began to study nonlethal irritants like sneezing gas or tear gas, which seemed to be acceptable under the international Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Duisberg and Nernst thus developed a gas-filled shell intended to make the enemy trenches uninhabitable only long enough to clear the way for the German shock troops. In the fall and winter of 1914, both sides used such substances in limited quantities but with no obvious military success.
As Fischer had foreseen, wind conditions proved to be a key limitation, causing weeks of delay in the spring of 1915 and the repeated abandonment of planned attacks. Other practical problems also arose, and for some time, the gas canisters caused casualties only to the Germans themselves. Perhaps out of frustration, Falkenhayn began shifting his reserves to the Eastern front on April 17 for a major campaign in Galicia. Then, on April 22 before Ypres, “Disinfection” finally worked, producing initial success far beyond what anyone expected; but given the change of plans and lack of reserves and munitions, it could not be followed up by any sort of large-scale offensive. The generals had thrown away the unique psychological and tactical advantage of attacking an unprotected, unprepared enemy.
Allied retaliation came five months later, right on schedule but even less effective than the initial German attacks. For the remainder of the war, gas weapons became increasingly more sophisticated as both sides raced to find new solutions to the trench warfare problem. Haber continued to lead the German chemical warfare unit, and he gradually expanded the group under his command.
By 1917 Haber had 1,500 people on his staff, including 150 scientific workers in a wide variety of fields that had been recruited, drafted, or militarily reassigned from other positions. All the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes in Dahlem, as well as some other academic facilities, set aside space for his work, and his total budget was fifty times that of the prewar Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. Centralization was made not only for greater efficiency but also for the greater secrecy that the military authorities wanted, as they distrusted scientists in the academic institutions.
Militarily, the relative isolation of Dahlem and its wealth of talent and facilities for interdisciplinary biological, medical, and chemical research thus made it an ideal place to work on the complex problems of gas warfare, even though its transformation into a military research center was “a pure wartime measure” that was not intended to be permanent.[3]
Chemical War
Three factors prevented a similar breakdown of chemical deterrence during the Second World War. First, poor intelligence led to widespread overestimation of enemy readiness for chemical warfare. Germany, in fact, enjoyed a monopoly in the field of nerve gas but suffered from a chemical ‘inferiority complex’ because it assumed that its opponents had been forging ahead with developments while it had been restricted by the Treaty of Versailles. Although ignorant of nerve gas, they overestimated Axis chemical preparedness in other areas and were all too conscious of the deficiencies in their own preparations. Hence, no belligerent felt confident enough in its own superiority to initiate a chemical campaign.
The second important factor was that, as states gained the upper hand militarily, their advancing forces became more vulnerable to disruption by chemical attack. The commander of German chemical troops, General Ochsner, explained that gas was not employed in the Nazi blitzkrieg operations because ‘The use of chemical agents could only have reduced the speed in operations of this nature.[4] Later in the war, a major disincentive to Allied use of chemical weapons was the vulnerability of amphibious operations such as the Normandy landings or the planned invasion of Japan to chemical retaliation. This led to a dynamic balance in by enemy air superiority, while the winning side was deterred by the vulnerability of its conventional military operations.
The third factor which reinforced chemical deterrence during the Second World War was the fact that the damage which it would entail came to seem unacceptable to the belligerents, even if the enemy might be made to suffer more. In part this was the result of actual experience of the horrors of gas warfare in the First World War, but it stemmed more from the fact that developments in airpower extended the area of risk from frontline troops to civilian populations at home. The spectre of gas bombardment terrified civilians in the inter-war period, and the vulnerability of their cities prompted all belligerents except the United States to tread very carefully so as to avoid provoking a chemical war.
This last factor has become the major stabilizing influence on nuclear deterrence over the past four decades. Even in the 1950s and early 1960s, when U.S. nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union was overwhelming and when a U.S. first strike might have destroyed a large proportion of the Soviet Union’s nuclear forces on the ground, U.S. decision-makers were deterred by thoughts of the absolute damage that a handful of Soviet weapons might cause if they reached the United States. Deterrence became all the stronger when the Soviet nuclear build-up produced a situation of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction.
We shall never know if either side would have been prepared to cross the nuclear threshold had the East-West confrontation actually erupted into open warfare. Both blocs proclaimed their willingness to use nuclear weapons if required, but many former decision-makers have expressed their doubts about whether this would actually have occurred. The use of chemical weapons seems rather more plausible, given the Warsaw Pact’s extensive preparations in this field, though even here, it is far from clear that mutual deterrence would have failed.
Crucial to the possibility of restraint in NBC warfare has been the fact that NBC weapons are sufficiently distinct from other arms for there to be a fairly clear threshold defining their use or nonuse. However, there are also certain other thresholds within NBC warfare. Historically, these have had a double-edged effect. On the one hand, they have limited the consequences when NBC warfare has broken out; but, on the other hand, they have undermined the disincentive to use NBC weapons in the first place.
An important reason for the non-use of chemical weapons in the Second World War was that few states believed that internal thresholds would prove sustainable. In Julian Perry Robinson’s words, ‘each belligerent came to realize that retaliation could well be escalatory: a chemical mortar action in some distant combat theatre, even with irritant-agent projectiles, might be met by the gas-bombing of a capital City’.
There have been several instances of chemical weapons being used against front-line troops, but not against the enemy civilian population. In the First World War, this was due partly to the lack of suitable weapons, but in the Vietnam and Iran-Iraq wars, it was more a product of deliberate restraint. Another common phenomenon was for chemical employment to begin with irritant rather than lethal agents. Both sides used irritants in the early months of the First World War, and Iraq employed tear gas against Iranian forces in July 1982 before progressing to the use of mustard gas some months later. However, only in Vietnam did chemical warfare remain confined to large-scale use of irritants and defoliants, without escalating in due course to the employment of lethal gases.[5]
A major determinant of whether and how NBC weapons have been used in the past seems to have been the perceived military utility of such weapons compared to conventional munitions. Also important has been the mundane issue of logistics, with the lack of sufficient NBC stocks and defensive equipment immediately to hand, often helping to dissuade states from initiating NBC warfare in response to shifting military opportunities and challenges. These two sets of issues will now be examined in turn.
Another major incentive for the use of gas has been the vulnerability of opposing forces to its physical and psychological effects. This helps to explain Italian chemical attacks in Ethiopia, and Egyptian chemical attacks in Yemen, in both cases against lightly clad tribesmen lacking any form of protection. Alleged Vietnamese chemical attacks in Laos and Kampuchea, and alleged Soviet use of chemicals in Afghanistan, would fit the same pattern. Iraq found gas a useful counter to human-wave attacks by Iranian infantry, and later used it against even less-well-protected Kurdish tribesmen in the north of the country.
Nuclear weapons differ in that they clearly merit the appellation ‘weapons of mass destruction, being several orders of magnitude more destructive than conventional munitions against large area targets such as cities, and being much more difficult than chemical weapons to defend against. However, the unwieldiness of nuclear weapons against targets other than cities has been a real constraint on their military employment.
War of Nerves
The chemical warfare has frayed the nerves of policymakers for the past century. Jonathan B. Tucker makes clear that the current situation regarding chemical warfare is quite brighter than many thought possible a few decades ago. In the past United States and the Soviet Union were building up their chemical weapons stocks, and their use was considered likely if the Cold War turned hot.
Tucker makes it clear that it would be dangerous to believe that the chemical warfare problem has been solved. Few analysts would disagree with his conclusion that the international norm against chemical warfare remains fragile. The book charts chronologically the development of chemical weapons and their use from World War I to the mid-1990s, when the group Aum Shinrikyo released sarin (a nerve agent) in the Tokyo subway system.
Although Al-Qaeda is identified in the book’s subtitle, that terrorist group is featured only in the last 20 pages as one of several emerging threats. But this is not a policy book; it is a history, and in that regard, it should be the first pick off the shelf for anyone who seeks an in-depth account of the history of chemical warfare.
Tucker examine events of the 1980s, including the development of the extensive U.S. and Soviet chemical weapons programs as well as the programs of other states, including France and Egypt.
Tucker discusses the role that politics and other considerations have played in determining whether a country’s use of chemical weapons was robustly condemned or tacitly accepted.
As Tucker points out, this sporadic and inconsistent condemnation of chemical weapons use, as well as the growing arsenals in the United States, Soviet Union, and other countries, played a role in the proliferation of chemical weapons capabilities to China, Egypt, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, and Yugoslavia.
Bibliography
Bohlen, 1914), KA IV-E-498; Trumpener, “Road to Ypres,” pp. 464-65; L. E Haber, Poisonous Cloud, pp. 20-25.
Fischer to Duisberg, 1915, and Duisberg to Fischer, all in EFP; on the Kaiser’s role see Willstätter, From My Life, p. 243; Trumpener, “Road to Ypres,” pp. 468-71.
Haber, L.F. The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Krupp to Duisberg, 1914, and Duisberg to Krupp, KA IV-E-498; Fischer to Duisberg, and Duisberg to Fischer, both in EFP; L. E Haber, Poisonous Cloud, pp. 25-28.
Littlewood, Jez. “Chemical Weapons.” Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 2006.
Martin Campbell-Kelley and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine.
Spiers E., Chemical Warfare ( London: Macmillan, 1986), chs. 6, 7.
Thomas Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm.
Tucker, Jonathan B. War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from Worm War I to Al-Qaeda. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006.
- The Chemical Warfare Service was designated the Chemical Corps by Public Law 607, 79th Congress, 1946.
- The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War: XIV, Medical Aspects of Gas Warfare ( Washington: Government Printing Office, 1926).
- War Ministry to Education Ministry, 1917; Haber to Euer Exzellenz, pp. 2, 7-10, giving the outlines of the Dahlem research organization and naming Haber’s principal subordinates; both in KA IV-E-295.
- H. Ochsner, History of German Chemical Warfare in World War II, pt. 1. The Military Aspect ( Washington DC: U.S. Chemical Corps Historical Study no. 2, 1949).
- E. Spiers, Chemical Weaponry: A Continuing Challenge ( London: Macmillan, 1989), ch. 5.