Chapter ID: CBB391479808

The Genie and the Bottle: Reflections on the Fate of the Geneva Protocol in the United States, 1918–1928 (2017)

unapi

For Americans serving in the First World War, the advent of chemical weapons made a deep impression. For chemists and soldiers, the experience of meeting—and then making—variants of “poison gas” bred both fear and determination. The wartime creation and post-war struggles of the Chemical Warfare Service reveal the deep divisions these tensions caused, both during the war and through the 1920s, when the United States extensively debated, but failed to ratify, the Geneva Protocol. By the close of the 1920s, the popular optimism that greeted postwar science and invention was clouded by visions of science as a source of new and terrible weapons. In the case of chemical weapons, professional resolve to prepare for future wars competed with a desire to protect the ideals that science represented. In ways that now seem familiar, the profession of chemistry, the chemical industry and the military became powerful allies. This paper examines a subject neglected by historians, and considers how political and professional factors combined to frustrate and delay the early ratification of the Geneva Convention by the United States. As we shall see, our knowledge of these circumstances is far from complete, and will remain so until we have a deeper understanding of the history of America’s complex relationship with this toxic legacy.

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Book Bretislav Friedrich; Dieter Hoffmann; Jürgen Renn; Florian Schmaltz; Martin Wolf (2017) One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences. unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB391479808/

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Authors & Contributors
Peter B. Thompson
Khary Oronde Polk
Courtney Q. Shah
Marion Girard Dorsey
David Marks
Vilensky, Joel A.
Concepts
World War I
Science and society
Science and war; science and the military
World War II
Chemical weapons
Technology and war; technology and the military
Time Periods
20th century, early
Progressive Era (1890s-1920s)
Places
United States
Germany
Great Britain
Russia
Poland
France
Institutions
Young Men's Christian Association, World’s Committee (Genewa)
Boy scouts of America
Science and Technology
Phipps (Henry) Psychiatric Clinic
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten
Johns Hopkins Hospital
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