Volume 54, Number 6 · April 12, 2007
The Poor Man's Atomic Bomb
By Daniel J. Kevles
War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda
by Jonathan B. Tucker
Pantheon, 479 pp., $30.00
All the major belligerents in World War I save one were party to the Hague Convention of 1899, whose signers had agreed 'to abstain from the use of all projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.' The exception was the United States. The idea of outlawing poisonous weapons dated back to the American Civil War, but Alfred Mahan, the naval theorist and an American delegate at the Hague conference, explained that no such chemical artillery had yet been developed and that 'until we knew the effects of such asphyxiating shells, there was no saying whether they would be more or less merciful than missiles now permitted.' Mahan added that
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