Should the U.S. Use Gas?

The horror and repugnance aroused by the use of gas in World War I is still alive. Sensitive U.S. citizens shuddered at an editorial last week in the New York Daily News and the Washington Times-Herald entitled "We Should Have Used Gas At Tarawa."

The debate touched off by the editorial shocker pointed up one of the great areas of American ignorance about war. Americans are rightly opposed to the use of poison gas by U.S. troops -- but for the wrong reasons. The U.S. imagination has been fed by lurid writings of super-scientists and pacifist writers, picturing a "dew of death" which would wipe out whole cities overnight. Real scientists scoff at any such invention. Gases today are basically the same as in World War I. The real reason for not using gas is not that it is inhumane or immoral, but that it is ineffective.

Death or injury by poison gas is horrible. But it is also horrible to have a leg or face blown away by a high-explosive shell, to be buried alive by a bomb, to be instantly charred by the machine-gun-melting heat of a flamethrower, or to be impaled by a bayonet.

Bombing has destroyed the moral argument against injury to noncombatants. Chemical Warfare soldiers point to the last war's casualty lists to prove that gas is more humane than most weapons. Gas killed only one man in 13 who was injured by it; other weapons killed one in four.

The civilized world renounced gas as a weapon of warfare at The Hague in 1899, again at Geneva in 1925. But, after examining the issue realistically, the U.S. declined to sign either agreement.

The effectiveness of gas in killing or injuring depends chiefly on lack of preparation against it. The Allies at Ypres in 1915 were taken by surprise. Ignorant civilians might still be panicked by it. But soldiers and civilians who have masks and know what to do are relatively safe. (The Japs at Tarawa were well equipped with masks.) Gas attacks can, of course, seriously hamper military or civilian movement. But on the other hand war gases are readily blown or washed away by wind, rain and snow, and they may be blown back in the faces of their users. The blister gases (mustard and Lewisite) cling to solid surfaces for days or weeks. To an advancing army they would be a dangerous nuisance.

To be really effective in attack, gas must be dropped from airplanes in enormous quantities. A U.S. Chemical Warfare officer summed up last week: "Gas is not a good weapon unless its users have air supremacy, and with air supremacy there is no need for gas."

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