Gas weapons

Acute injuries of the eyes, primarily from effects of blast and missiles, may occur from tear-gas weapons, such as pen guns. The lnmeulate effects of these Injuries include swelling and edema of the lids, with penetration of skin, conjunctiva, cornea, sclera, or globe by gunpowder and CN conjunctival ischemia and chemosls corneal edema, erosion, Inflammation, or ulceration and focal hemorrhage. 13,20... 

One day after the accident at Haber s institute, the conception of gas weapons began to take a new turn, away from gases intended to burn a man s eyes and toward something deadlier. Chief of Staff Falkenhayn met with Emil Fischer, professor of chemistry at Berlin s university. Falkenhayn was frustrated. The offensive in the West had stalled. 

Gas weapons, he repeated on many occasions, arose from a kind of technological imperative. Gunfire demanded trenches, and trenches in turn brought forth gas. Whoever mastered this technology best would dominate the battlefield of the future. 

Chemical weapons accounted for a relatively small number of these casualties. On the western front, where gas was most heavily used, it killed or injured about 650,000 people. Gas weapons claimed most of their casualties in the last year of the war, when mustard was introduced. The numbers of casualties from the German use of gas in Poland and Russia are unknown. 

Haber also didn t tell Hartley about the activities of Hugo Stoltzenberg, an entrepreneur who had worked at Haber s institute during the war. After the war, Haber persuaded Stoltzenberg to take on the dangerous job of cleaning up a partially destroyed gas weapons plant in Breloh, on the plains of northern Germany. 

Gas weapons and gas defense turn warfare into chess Haber to Duisberg, February 26, 1919, HC 860. 

Gas was not used because at any given stage in the war there were sufficient military disincentives to stay the hand of the belligerent who reached for the gas weapon. Hider wanted peace in 1940 more than he wanted to wipe out the men at Dunkirk by the time he did want to use gas, in 1944, he no longer had the bomber force left to deliver it. The British might have used gas in France in 1940 to halt the Blitzkrieg if they had had the stocks by the time they had the poison gas and the bomber force in 1944 they were on the offensive and would have been slowed down by chemical warfare. 

The American Army had been keen to ship chemical weapons of their own to forward bases in West Germany, said Hersh. They knew the request would be politically sensitive, and so presented evidence to justify its necessity. The proof consisted of analyses made from aerial spy photographs of large storage sheds in the Soviet Union. The sheds looked similar to those at American Army gas weapon bases, and the Chemical Corps then made some calculations. The Army computed the roof size of the Russian sheds, figured out how many gallons of nerve gas could be stored in a comparably sized shed in Utah , said Hersh s normally reliable source, added a twenty per cent fudge factor, and came up with the estimate .18... 

While the United States in her role as Defender of the Free World continued to develop new gas weapons, Britain, beset by economic problems, reassessed her interest in chemical warfare. A number of considerations bore down on the British Ministry of Defence, most... 

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