About 100 years ago the industrial machine barreled into the 20th century and brought with it the most horrifying war man had seen to this date. Progress and innovation through technology promised that the world would be a more civil place in the 20th century. However, along with the solutions to modern living like washing machines and phonographs also came solutions to ending modern life as we know it. The tank, the submarine, the airplane and poison gas all came into popular use in World War 1. Britain dominated the war with it’s new tanks, while Germany’s best strategic weapon was the submarine.
After the war the notion of war as a gentlemen’s game was over. Suddenly war was not a contest between two armies of men with guns, but a contest to see who had the most dominant technology. The powers that won the war made sure that they were to stay in control of these technologies. Germany was banned from maintaining an air force and in 1922 the United States introduced the treaty on the Use of Submarines and Noxious Gases in Warfare, known as the Washington Treaty designed to further eliminate Germany’s most powerful strategic weapons, however France who came out of the war with the second largest fleet of submarines struck down the treaty. After years of deliberation about the conduct of war many nations had discussed the banning of tanks, warplanes and submarines that seemed to make war so much more barbaric. In the end though it was only chemical weapons, the weapon of the defeated Germany, which were eliminated from use at the Geneva conference of 1925 with only Japan and the United States refusing to sign. From that point on wars were not won through the use of strategy but rather the use of blunt force which the industrialized countries had in spades.
Before the beginning of world war 2 airplane warfare would be perfected and used to crush peasant uprisings across the world, most notably in the Spanish Civil War and the US banana wars in South America. It was in Haiti that the technique of dive bombing, which would later be used to win Franco’s war in Spain was perfected by US marines:
“Dive-bombing- more accurately, what we would today describe as glide bombing- had earlier been employed in Haiti. During the intervention there in 1919, Lt Lawson Sanderson of the 4th Squadron realized that the usual practice of horizontal release of bombs by the rear observer was inaccurate, to say the least. By trial and error, Lieutenant Sanderson settled upon the technique of dropping the nose of his aircraft in what was then considered a steep dive of 45 degrees. Flying directly at the target, Sanderson then released the bomb himself at an altitude of roughly 250 feet. The tactic proved considerably more accurate than horizontal bombing, and the other pilots in the squadron soon abandoned the old method in favor of the new one. Such accuracy would prove its worth to the Marine Corps in Nicaragua.” –Airpower and Restraint in Small Wars, Marine Corps Aviation in the Second Nicaraguan Campaign, 1927-33
American air power was able to produce between 3,000-12,000 black corpses with virtually no white deaths and any of the psychological repercussions that come with bayoneting someone through the stomach in face to face combat. A victory for western dominance and technology. Now war could be waged with virtually no bad PR as long as the opposing army didn’t have an air force. From this point on casualty rates exploded in warfare with civilians suffering the worst. The Mexican revolution of 1910 was fought on horseback with it’s most dangerous piece of hardware being the machine gun. The number of civilians killed vs the number of soldiers killed was roughly 1:1 meaning for every soldier killed one civilian died. According to the red cross wars since the mid century have produced a collective civilian casualty ratio of 10:1 meaning one soldier death for every ten civilians.
To many the march of progress meant the death of democracy and any hope that despotic regimes could be resisted by just a well armed militia with good intentions. George Orwell had fought alongside the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and had seen the way planes could be used to decimate popular movements. To him the musket was the weapon of democracy while the airplane would always be the weapon of fascism. In 1939 he reflected on what he had seen:
” The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day. After the musket came the breech-loading rifle. This was a comparatively complex thing, but it could still be produced in scores of countries, and it was cheap, easily smuggled and economical of ammunition. Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccans–even Tibetans–could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only three–ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914.”
Although the signers of the Geneva conventions were subject to never use chemical weapons in warfare it did not prohibit them from producing them in the interwar years and major powers began stockpiling musatrd gas with the British stockpiling 40,719 tons, the Russians 77,400 tons, the Americans over 87,000 tons and the Germans 27,597 tons. The largest release of mustard gas in world war 2 was from a US ship which was clandestinely transporting mustard gas in the port of Bari, Italy. Axis forces bombed the ship releasing 100 tons of mustard gas into the bay where it reacted with the oil that was already floating from the rest of the decimated fleet. The servicemen who had abandoned ship swam through the murky water, the mix of oil and mustard clinging to their skin. 1,000 servicemen and just as many civilians died in the bombing. Figures about how many died due to mustard gas are unknown due to the fact that Winston Churchill ordered all documents pertaining to the incident destroyed.
After the war President Truman officially abandoned the Geneva protocol altogether and began stockpiling biological weapons.Many experiments testing the effects of chemical and biological agents occured during the 1950’s and were usually done on unwitting subjects. In 1961, president Kennedy increased military spending on chemical weapons from $75 million to more than $330 million much of the money going to the Monsanto corporation. Chemical weapons such as agent orange and white phosperous were used extensively during the vietnam war causing birth defects in both the Vietnamese and American soldiers as well as large scale defoliation of Vietnamese crop land. in 1974 following the war the US finally ratified the 1928 Geneva convention prohibiting chemical weapons.
In the 1980’s the Reagan administration supplied Iraq with the means to build powerful nerve agents such as Sarin and mustard gas which it used on Iranians as well as it’s own Kurdish population. When the US began bombing these 28 facilities in the early 90’s it was many of it’s own servicemen who were exposed to the gas released after the targets had been blown up producing large plumes of “green smoke“. Not long after strange symptoms began appearing among the Iraqi population that were synonymous with chemical weapons attacks. In America this phenomenon became known as “Gulf War Syndrome”.
Similarly in the early part of the second gulf war it was the use of depleted uranium, a substance which is banned by virtually every other country except the United States, that was to be the subject of suspicion for strange health phenomena occurring across the Iraqi war zone. Fallujah which was the subject of large scale fighting was to become one of the largest cancer clusters in the world, with more health problems than occured in Hiroshima after the atom bombs were dropped.
It has only been for political reasons that certain methods of spreading death on the planet have been made taboo over others and it is always the victors who get to decide. Chemical warfare became outlawed rather than aerial warfare because the US had an air fleet and Germany didn’t. France was actually the first power in World War I to use chlorine gas in combat but they weren’t as efficient as the Germans would later become and they abandoned it, not because it was immoral but because it was tactically disadvantageous. If the French had been more successful you might see a world today where submarines were illegal in warfare and not mustard gas. Similarly, for five years after the dropping of the atomic bomb no one in America was concerned that a weapon existed that could destroy life on the planet. It was only after the Soviet Union tested their first bomb that anti nuclear hysteria took hold in America.
Likewise it is only now that the use of Sarin gas has brought so much concern from world powers. When it was Saddam Hussein gassing our enemies the Iranians it was tactically advantageous for us to shut our mouths and keep writing checks to Saddam Hussein. To quote George Orwell again “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” John Kerry, one of the people who controls the present made a speech a few days ago in which he claimed:
“Our choice today has great consequences. It matters that nearly 100 years ago in direct response to the utter horror and inhumanity of World War I that the civilized world agreed that chemical weapons should never be used again. That was the world’s resolve then. And that began nearly a century of effort to create a clear red line for the international community.”
His outright lie leaves out the chemical weapons that were used in a war in which he participated and later demonstrated against for peace. Now that John Kerry is a political player he will use the socially acceptable method of dropping bombs from high places to pursue a cynical Machiavellian politics against those who were not lucky enough to be the authors of history.
Town Destroyer 