Military-Industrial Interactions in the Development of Chemical Warfare, 1914–1918: Comparing National Cases Within the Technological System of the Great War (2017)
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.
...MoreBook Bretislav Friedrich; Dieter Hoffmann; Jürgen Renn; Florian Schmaltz; Martin Wolf (2017) One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences.
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