A Higher Form of Killing Read Online Free PDF Page B

gas. In 1846 the Admiralty this time responded that using sulfur gas would not “accord with the feelings and principles of civilised warfare,” Furthermore, if Britain deployed it others would surely follow.
    In 1854 during the Crimean War, the now near-octogenarian Cochrane tried again, proposing the use of stink ships to expel the Russians from the Baltic port of Kronstadt. Anticipating counterarguments about “civilized war,” he put forward an argument often to be used to defend highly destructive new weapons: “No conduct that brought to a speedy termination a war which might otherwise last for years, and be attended by terrible bloodshed . . . could be called inhuman.” As others would do, he also suggested that advanced weapons such as poison gas would have a deterrent effect: “The most powerful means of averting all future war would be the introduction of a method of fighting which, rendering all vigorous defence impossible, would frighten every nation from running the risk of warfare at all.” A secret committee rejected his ideas, some members calling them “so horrible” that “no honourable combatant” could resort to them.
    Undaunted, the following year Cochrane urged the use of his “secret weapons” to dislodge the Russians from the Crimean port of Sevastopol and asked for: “Four or five hundred tons of sulphur and two thousand tons of coke” to vaporize it as well as “a couple of thousand barrels” of tar and a large amount of straw, hay, and firewood to create smoke. He also suggested floating naphtha near Sevastopol and then “igniting it by means of a ball of potassium.” By these means, he assured Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, Sevastopol’s outer defenses would be “smoked, sulphured and blown up” and “thousands of lives” saved. Sevastopol fell soon afterward without chemical intervention.
    While the Crimean War was still under way, British chemist Lyon Playfair [ sic ] recommended firing shells filled with toxic cacodyl cyanide at Russian ships since “such a shell going between the decks of a ship would render the atmosphere irrespirable and poison the men if they remained at their guns.” When the government suggested this was a low trick akin to poisoning the enemy’s water supply Playfair responded with another argument often to be used to defend poison gas: “It is considered a legitimate mode of warfare to fire shells with molten metal which scatters among the enemy, and produces the most frightful modes of death. Why a poisonous vapour which would kill men without suffering is to be considered illegitimate is incomprehensible.”
    The American Civil War saw several proposals for the use of poison gas but again none were taken up. Chemist William C. Tilden contacted Union general Ulysses S. Grant with “a scheme for producing chemically a means of settling wars quickly by making them terribly destructive.” Grant responded, as the British Admiralty had to Cochrane, that “such a terrific agency for destroying human life should not be permitted . . . by the civilized nations of the world.” In 1862, New Yorker John Doughty sent the U.S. War Department his proposal for a projectile to clear Confederate troops from fortified positions. For the first time it suggested the use of the chlorine gas that was to be used so destructively on April 22, 1915: “Chlorine is a gas so irritating in its effects upon the respiratory system, that a small quantity diffused in the atmosphere produces incessant and uncontrollably violent coughing—It is 2 ½ times heavier than the atmosphere and when subjected to a pressure of 60 pounds to the inch it is condensed into a liquid, its volume being reduced many hundred times. A shell holding two or three quarts would therefore contain many cubic feet of the gas.”
    The Hague Conference agreed to a ban on asphyxiating gases that in its detailed clauses was framed against projectiles containing them. The only dissent came from