Spicer

A Weapon Seen as Too Horrible, Even in War
By STEVEN ERLANGER SEPT. 6, 2013
LONDON — Wilfred Owen, the British soldier­poet, wrote in his best­known work,
“Dulce et Decorum Est,” an effort to depict the horrors of chemical warfare, “If you
could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth­corrupted lungs.”
Germany is recognized as the first to use chemical weapons on a mass scale, on
April 22, 1915, at Ypres, Belgium, where 6,000 British and French troops
succumbed. Chemical weapons, rarely used since that war, have once again emerged
as an issue after the massacre in Syria last month, in which the United States says
nearly 1,500 people, men, women and children, were killed, many as they slept.
As in World War I, that represents only a small fraction of the more than
100,000 lives that have been lost during the two and a half years of Syria’s civil war.
Yet, President Obama is prepared to initiate a military attack in response.
Why, it is fair to ask, does the killing of 100,000 or more with conventional
weapons elicit little more than a concerned shrug, while the killing of a relative few
from poison gas is enough to trigger an intervention?
Whatever the reasons for the distinction, it has long been recognized.
Roughly 16 million people died and 20 million were wounded during World
War I, that “war to end all wars,” yet only about 2 percent of the casualties and fewer
than 1 percent of the deaths are estimated to have resulted from chemical warfare.
Nevertheless, the universal revulsion that followed World War I led to the 1925
Geneva Protocol, which banned the use, though not the possession, of chemical and
biological weapons. In effect from 1928, the protocol is one of the few treaties that
have been almost universally accepted and become an international norm. Syria, too,
is a signatory.
No Western army used gas on the battlefield during the global slaughter of
World War II. Hitler, himself gassed during World War I, refused to order its use
against combatants, however willing he and the Nazis were to gas noncombatant
Jews, Gypsies and others.
Since World War II and the atomic bomb, which redefined warfare, chemical
weapons have been categorized as “weapons of mass destruction,” even if they do
not have the killing power of nuclear weapons.
The Geneva Protocol was not even the first effort to ban the use of poison in
war, said Joanna Kidd of King’s College London. “Throughout history, there has
been a general revulsion against the use of poisons against human beings in warfare,
going back to the Greeks,” she said. Some date a first effort to ban such weaponry to
1675, when France and the Holy Roman Empire agreed in Strasbourg not to use
poisoned bullets.
With the industrial revolution and advances in chemistry, many nations agreed
in the Hague Convention of 1899 not to use “projectiles the sole objective of which is
the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases,” which were not then widely
understood. There was a follow­on agreement in 1907, but World War I proved just
how hollow that effort was.
There have been only a few known instances of poison gas being used since
1925, and in each case the perpetrator never openly admitted it. In the first two
cases, gas was used by authoritarian regimes against those they considered lesser
races. In 1935­36, Mussolini used several hundred tons of mustard gas in Abyssinia,
4/19/2017 A Weapon Seen as Too Horrible, Even in War ­ The New York Times
www.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/world/middleeast/a­weapon­seen­as­too­horrible­even­in­war.html 3/5
now Ethiopia, and in 1940­41, the Japanese used chemical and biological weapons
widely in China, where unexploded poison gas shells are still being dug up at the
expense of the Japanese government.
François Heisbourg, a special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research
in Paris, argued that one reason Japan stopped the use of chemical weapons, while
then denying their use, is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped in and, in
quiet diplomacy, “told the Japanese that we knew of the use and that there would be
consequences.”
In 1965­67, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt ordered intermittent use of
chemical weapons in the course of a long and disastrous war in Yemen, and the
American use of Agent Orange in Vietnam was widely criticized, but it was legally
considered a defoliant, despite its impact on human health.
It was only in the Iran­Iraq war of 1980­88, started by Iraq after the Islamic
Revolution in Iran, that chemical weapons were again used in large amounts, and by
the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein against Iranian forces and his own Kurds. The
Iraqis used both first­ and second­generation nerve gases to blunt Iranian offensives
in southern Iraq and forestall defeat. Given American and Western unease with
Iran’s revolution, there was little public outrage as Muslims used poison on other
Muslims.
The world’s indifference altered sharply, however, in March 1988, when Mr.
Hussein killed between 3,200 and 5,000 Kurds around the town of Halabja and
injured thousands more, most of them civilians, some of whom died later from
complications.
The Halabja killings, considered the largest chemical warfare attack ever
directed at civilians, led to the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, in force since
1997, which bans not just the use but also the possession, manufacture and transfer
of chemical weapons. It has since been signed and ratified by 189 states, according to
the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which carries out the
treaty. Syria is among only five states — with North Korea, South Sudan, Angola and
Egypt — that have neither signed nor ratified it.
4/19/2017 A Weapon Seen as Too Horrible, Even in War ­ The New York Times
www.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/world/middleeast/a­weapon­seen­as­too­horrible­even­in­war.html 4/5
Tellingly, said Camille Grand, who worked on chemical disarmament for the
French Foreign Ministry, Iraq never used its chemical weapons again — not in the
Persian Gulf war in 1991, although American troops were prepared for their use, or
in the 2003 American invasion, which overthrew Mr. Hussein.
“Halabja changed nothing but changed everything,” Mr. Heisbourg said. “In the
gulf war the dechemicalization of Iraq became a war aim, and we achieved it, even
though we didn’t know or believe it.”
That still leaves the question of why Syria’s use of chemical weapons to kill
perhaps 1,500 people has elicited such a strong response.
Former Senator Richard G. Lugar said the difference lay in the danger of
proliferation. “We are talking about weapons of mass destruction, we are talking
about chemical weapons in particular, which may be the greatest threat to our
country of any security risk that we have, much more than another government, for
example, or another nation because they can be used by terrorists, by very small
groups,” he told the BBC. “The use of these weapons of mass destruction has got to
concern us, and concern us to the point that we take action whenever any country
crosses that line and uses these weapons as have the Syrians.”
Others say that by using gas against its own civilians Syria is violating taboos
built up over more than a century that need to be defended. “We signed up for over
100 years to not use these weapons,” Ms. Kidd of King’s College said, “and if we just
stand by and not do anything, what is the value of the treaty and the norm?”
Mr. Grand agreed, saying that “it really breaks a taboo and puts Syria in breach
of its own commitments in Geneva and a long list of international norms.”
While militaries find chemical weapons hard to control, given the vagaries of
wind and weather, they can be effective against the unprepared, and especially
deadly to unsuspecting civilians. “You just have to watch the videos from Syria from
Aug. 21,” Mr. Heisbourg said. “This is killing people like cockroaches and using the
same chemicals to do it.”
4/19/2017 A Weapon Seen as Too Horrible, Even in War ­ The New York Times
www.nytimes.com/2013/09/07/world/middleeast/a­weapon­seen­as­too­horrible­even­in­war.html 5/5
Thousands of people were killed by machetes in Rwanda, he noted. “That’s
gruesome,” Mr. Heisbourg said, “but the production and sale of machetes is not
considered a threat to international security.”
A version of this article appears in print on September 7, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with
the headline: A Weapon Seen as Too Horrible, Even in War.