Chapter ID: CBB710107059

Military-Industrial Interactions in the Development of Chemical Warfare, 1914–1918: Comparing National Cases Within the Technological System of the Great War (2017)

unapi

Johnson, Jeffrey Allan (Author)


Springer International
Pages: 135-149
Publication date: 2017
Language: English


This chapter examines the development of chemical warfare on the Western Front in the context of the large-scale technological systems developed by each of the major powers—Germany, France, Britain, and later the United States—in order to coordinate their industrial, academic, and military resources. As chemical warfare intensified from the tentative, small-scale experiments of 1914–1915 to the massive bombardments of 1918, it also changed qualitatively. Each side’s innovations forced similar responses from their opponents, in an escalating arms race in which military exigencies increasingly overrode ethical concerns while tending to institutionalize chemical warfare. This process exemplified the war’s increasingly “total” nature as a technological meta-system integrating the fighting fronts and home fronts on each side and across the lines. On the verge of permanently institutionalizing chemical warfare and militarizing its supporting industries, the process abruptly ended as the German system collapsed. But by then the war had transformed the image of chemical science and technology from a progressive force to one associated with the horrors of war.

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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

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Authors & Contributors
Peter B. Thompson
Bogousslavsky, Julien
Ede, Andrew G.
Epting, Susan
Freemantle, Michael
Lepick, Olivier
Journals
History and Technology
Ambix: Journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry
Bulletin for the History of Chemistry
Circumscribere: International Journal for the History of Science
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Journal of the History of the Neurosciences
Publishers
Springer International
Cambridge University Press
Harvard University
University of Pennsylvania
History Press
University of Nebraska Press
Concepts
World War I
Chemical warfare
Technology and war; technology and the military
Science and war; science and the military
World War II
Chemistry
People
Babinski, Joseph
Haber, Fritz
Myers, Charles Samuel
Roussy, Gustave
Wagner-Jauregg, Julius von
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century
Places
Germany
Great Britain
France
United States
Austria
Japan
Institutions
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten
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