John Kerry said in regard to last
week's chemical attack in Syria "this is about the large scale,
indiscriminate use of weapons that the civilised world long ago
decided must never be used at all."
Is he right? Absolutely not. Well, not
the way he means it. Here's the modern history of chemical weapons.
The Nineteenth Century saw the rise of
chemical weapons in warfare, but nothing substantial. Members of the
Napoleonic school of warfare, where men march lock step into
artillery and machine guns, hated the idea of using deadly gas to
turn the tide in battle. Why, poison gas takes the nobility out of
the gentlemanly sport that is warfare! When white men fight against
savages in foreign lands they can use whatever dirty tricks necessary
to bring those subhuman animals under the proper yoke, but when good,
civilised white European men fight they must wear their best dress
blouses and shake hands first before taking their proper sides of the
field and marching lock step to certain death like a bloody good
match of polo or association football. The good white European nation
states got together and signed a treaty vowing to never use poison
gas as a means of ending the unnecessary suffering men would face on
the battlefield by getting shot to death.
The United States disagreed. The
upstart, boorish, backwater that had bested the British twice said it
would not hold back its own technological progress because a bunch of
stuffed shirts thought it ungentlemanly. But what did a bunch of damn
Yanks know?
Scottish
chemist Lyon Playfair sided with the Americans. He wanted to launch
cyanide shells on the Russians to end the Crimean War. He couldn't
understand the reaction of the good civilised white Europeans:
There was no sense in this
objection. It is considered a legitimate mode of warfare to fill
shells with molten metal which scatters among the enemy, and produced
the most frightful modes of death. Why a poisonous vapor which would
kill men without suffering is to be considered illegitimate warfare
is incomprehensible. War is destruction, and the more destructive it
can be made with the least suffering the sooner will be ended that
barbarous method of protecting national rights. No doubt in time
chemistry will be used to lessen the suffering of combatants, and
even of criminals condemned to death.
But he's a Scot! They're almost as bad
as Americans, so you can't trust him.
Well, the good civilised white
Europeans broke their own "rules of war" in 1915 when the
stalemate of the trenches had already condemned a million men to
death. The French used it first, but the Germans were the ones who
figured out how poison gas was supposed to be used.
On the afternoon of 22 April the
Germans released 150 tons of chlorine gas into a stiff wind that took
it over a four mile stretch of the front occupied by French colonial
troops. Heavier than air, the chlorine sank into the trenches and
filled the eyes and lungs of the men, turning into acid and eating
away at the insides of their bodies. Thousands of men died within
minutes and thousands more turned and fled in blind panic. No one had
ever imagined a weapon this effective could exist, not even the
Germans themselves! Stunned by their own success at breaking the
French line the Germans failed to take advantage of the attack and
made only insignificant gains.
Courage only goes so far. When a man
sees his end at the hands of an unfeeling cloud inexorably rolling
across the landscape there is not a thing in this world that can make
him stand his ground. Self-preservation takes over. Deep down inside
every man is the brain of a lizard, responsible for the basic
functions of survival. Whenever the organism is threatened the lizard
brain overpowers the rational mind of man and the inner animal is
unleashed to fight or flee. And there is no way to fight a cloud of
death, so the man takes to his feet and hauls ass in the opposite
direction.
A man whose lungs are destroyed by
chlorine cannot be saved. Doctors cannot alleviate his suffering. He
fights for hours to pull life giving breath from the air to no avail
until he finally succumbs to the inevitable. It's not a good death,
but then again neither is bleeding to death from shrapnel. And
chlorine does one thing shrapnel cannot: it breaks trenches. Chlorine
could have won the war in 1915 if the Germans capitalised on their
initial success. They could have saved the lives of tens of millions
of men and reshaped the destiny of the continent. It's possible the
Holocaust could have been avoided had poison gas been used to its
fullest for a swift German victory, but there is no way to know for
sure.
The point of war is not to kill your
enemy, it is to get your enemy to surrender with the least amount of
force expended and the fewest friendly casualties. A war that can be
won without killing a single man is the most successful war of all.
The Mongol horde utilised terror to force cities to surrender before
their horses even got within earshot of the city walls. Poison gas
can do the same. Men will run away from gas by the thousands,
territory can be occupied without having to kill anyone, and wars can
be won by terror alone. As horrible a death asphyxiation is, it is a
lot better for a few thousand men to die by poison gas than millions
to die from attrition in the trenches.
And that is what happened. The Germans
held back, the Entente developed countermeasures, and the gases got
more deadly. A chemical arms race began that would eventually lead to
the production of enough lethal nerve gas to kill everyone on the
planet several times over at the height of the Cold War.
Once the First World War had ended a
new treaty was signed, and once again the good civilised white
Europeans agreed never to use poison gas. If a war can be won without
attrition, without millions dying from bullets and shells, without
protracted land battles, why that isn't fair! That's not the
gentleman's war, is it? Why should the smartest country, the country
that invests the most in science, the country most invested in the
preservation of land and human lives win the war instead of the
country willing to make the most human sacrifices? Surely chemical
warfare is evil because it spares millions from being interred
beneath soil contaminated with millions more tons of lead fragments.
Chemical warfare does not produce lost villages, so badly
contaminated that they can never be inhabited again. A cloud of gas
rolls over an enemy line and vanquishes it, it does not persist until
the last private has bled out in a shell hole somewhere in the mud.
No, chemical weapons, when used
correctly, are the most humane weapons of all. It is only backward
thinking, the inertia within the minds of politicians and military
planners, that draw a line in the sand and seek to prevent quick wars
that do not throw men and treasure into the fires of destruction. It
is their thinking that is a moral outrage, not the weapons they
revile so fervently.
