War of Nerves

Zusatztext ChillingÉ a history of the race between the advance of this taboo technology and the political efforts to abolish it. TuckerÉhas a gift for making military science readable The New York Times [Tucker] writes clearly and forcefully! making his case not through argument but through the patient accumulation of appalling detailÉAn immensely useful book! presenting a vast trove of vital information in highly readable form. The San Francisco Chronicle Compelling Éoffers a comprehensive history of chemical weapons! the most widely used WMD in modern history. The Washington Post Book World Outstanding. . .fascinating. . . Everyone who believes weapons of mass destruction exist only in fantasy need but read this book. They are closer than you think. The Decatur Daily Informationen zum Autor Jonathan B. Tucker received a B.S. in biology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in political science, specializing in defense and arms control studies, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the past ten years, he has been a chemical and biological weapons specialist at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Dr. Tucker previously worked as an arms control specialist for Congress and the State Department and as an editor at Scientific American and at High Technology magazine, where he wrote about biomedical research, biotechnology, and military technologies. He lives in Washington, D.C. Klappentext In this important and revelatory book, Jonathan Tucker, a leading expert on chemical and biological weapons, chronicles the lethal history of chemical warfare from World War I to the present.At the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of synthetic chemistry made the large-scale use of toxic chemicals on the battlefield both feasible and cheap. Tucker explores the long debate over the military utility and morality of chemical warfare, from the first chlorine gas attack at Ypres in 1915 to Hitler's reluctance to use nerve agents (he believed, incorrectly, that the U.S. could retaliate in kind) to Saddam Hussein's gassing of his own people, and concludes with the emergent threat of chemical terrorism. Moving beyond history to the twenty-first century, War of Nerves makes clear that we are at a crossroads that could lead either to the further spread of these weapons or to their ultimate abolition. The Chemistry of War In the fall of 1914, the opposing armies on the western front huddled in their trenches near the Belgian town of Ypres, lobbing artillery shells at each other across a barren no-man's-land strewn with thickets of rusty barbed wire, craters, and splintered trees. Germany had launched the war in August by carrying out the Schlieffen Plan, a massive surprise attack through neutral Belgium that sought to achieve the rapid conquest of France in the west, followed by a knockout blow to Russia in the east before the United States decided to enter the war. The initial operations had gone according to plan, but when the kaiser's armies were thirty miles from Paris, a last-ditch counterattack by the French and British forces at the Battle of the Marne had halted the German offensive. Seeking cover from the lethal hail of shrapnel and machine-gun fire, both sides had dug in, building labyrinthine trenches that would ultimately extend some four hundred miles from the North Sea coast of Belgium to the Swiss border. By fall, the adversaries found themselves trapped in a bloody stalemate in which neither side was able to advance. Infantry offensives inevitably bogged down after taking negligible amounts of territory, at a heavy cost in lives. Seeking to break the deadlock and regain the offensive, the Germans began to consider the use of toxic chemicals delivered by artillery shells to force the enemy out of his trenches. ...

Auteur

Jonathan B. Tucker received a B.S. in biology from Yale University and a Ph.D. in political science, specializing in defense and arms control studies, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the past ten years, he has been a chemical and biological weapons specialist at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Dr. Tucker previously worked as an arms control specialist for Congress and the State Department and as an editor at Scientific American and at High Technology magazine, where he wrote about biomedical research, biotechnology, and military technologies. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Texte du rabat

In this important and revelatory book, Jonathan Tucker, a leading expert on chemical and biological weapons, chronicles the lethal history of chemical warfare from World War I to the present. At the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of synthetic chemistry made the large-scale use of toxic chemicals on the battlefield both feasible and cheap. Tucker explores the long debate over the military utility and morality of chemical warfare, from the first chlorine gas attack at Ypres in 1915 to Hitler's reluctance to use nerve agents (he believed, incorrectly, that the U.S. could retaliate in kind) to Saddam Hussein's gassing of his own people, and concludes with the emergent threat of chemical terrorism. Moving beyond history to the twenty-first century, War of Nerves makes clear that we are at a crossroads that could lead either to the further spread of these weapons or to their ultimate abolition.

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The Chemistry of War

In the fall of 1914, the opposing armies on the western front huddled in their trenches near the Belgian town of Ypres, lobbing artillery shells at each other across a barren no-man’s-land strewn with thickets of rusty barbed wire, craters, and splintered trees. Germany had launched the war in August by carrying out the Schlieffen Plan, a massive surprise attack through neutral Belgium that sought to achieve the rapid conquest of France in the west, followed by a knockout blow to Russia in the east before the United States decided to enter the war. The initial operations had gone according to plan, but when the kaiser’s armies were thirty miles from Paris, a last-ditch counterattack by the French and British forces at the Battle of the Marne had halted the German offensive. Seeking cover from the lethal hail of shrapnel and machine-gun fire, both sides had dug in, building labyrinthine trenches that would ultimately extend some four hundred miles from the North Sea coast of Belgium to the Swiss border.

By fall, the adversaries found themselves trapped in a bloody stalemate in which neither side was able to advance. Infantry offensives inevitably bogged down after taking negligible amounts of territory, at a heavy cost in lives. Seeking to break the deadlock and regain the offensive, the Germans began to consider the use of toxic chemicals delivered by artillery shells to force the enemy out of his trenches. This idea was not entirely new: in 1862, during the American Civil War, a New York City schoolteacher named John W. Doughty had written to the Secretary of War suggesting the use of poison gas shells against the Confederate forces. He had designed a 10-inch projectile in which one compartment was filled with a few quarts of liquid chlorine and the second with explosives; when the shell burst, the explosion would convert the chlorine into an asphyxiating gas. But the Union’s chief of ordnance, Brigadier General James Ripley, had been resistant to new ideas and had rejected Doughty’s invention.

Because Germany possessed the world’s most advanced chemical industry, it enjoyed an inherent advantage in this type of warfare. The main obstacles were the existence of an international treaty specifically banning the use of shells to deliver asphyxiating gases and the deeply held belief that toxic weapons were illegitimate. This “chemical weapons taboo” appears to have originated…