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Foreword A little more than a century ago, international law was made seeking to prevent the use of “asphyxiating gases” in warfare. Less than twenty years later those weapons—chemical weapons—were usedduringtheFirstWorld War. That use, ¤rst by the Germans but later by the Allies, broke international law.More dramatically,it appalled people throughout the world.The stories of the choking,blistering,pain,and convulsions suffered by victims were heard with horror. So the community of nations went back to the legal drawing board and made further law—the 1925 Geneva Convention. This Convention sought to strengthen the prohibition on any use of chemical weapons. Whereas it is dif¤cult to de¤ne very precisely what constitutes a weapon of mass destruction, chemical weapons have been seen as such for the past one hundred years, and they are unique in the extent to which they have attracted international consensus that they should be outlawed. But chemical weapons have also had a seductive history. Simultaneously with efforts to outlaw them, they have repeatedly been the subject of research , manufacture, weaponization, deployment, and use. The story of lewisite encapsulates the key elements of the history of chemical weapons and their continuing seductive power. That power, at its simplest, has been the notion that rather than suffer the rigors and losses of direct combat, an army could vanquish adversaries by spraying them with substances from the air or blowing a cloud of poison in their direction . From the First World War to the present time, in countries and situations across the globe, attempts have been made to produce the droplets or gases that would grant this power. Throughout this period, lewisite has always been involved. The fantasy of chemical weapons has never approached reality. From the beginning there have always been problems of use and safe disposal of chemical agents. This book records the repeated instances of injury and accident associated with lewisite use, and the decisions taken against using lewisite, partly because there was uncertainty whether its use would also, in fact, harm the user. In addition to such complications, ethical and legal issues needed to be addressed. As is typical in arguments about war, there were always those voices advocating that any means that would help our side win were justi-¤able. Early in the history of lewisite, arguments were advanced to the effect that it was actually a humane weapon. Death or injury from a good dose of lewisite was presumed to be less agonizing than that from bullets and bayonets. There were, of course, also arguments that any weapon that brought a war to its end sooner rather than later should be viewed as bene-¤cial and admissible.Inthiscontext,Winford Lee Lewis argued that knowledge of the planned use of lewisite by the Allies was an important factor promoting Germany’s sudden agreement to an armistice. Joel Vilensky’s book, Dew of Death, is a detailed and immensely useful account of the development and history of one of the major chemical weapons of our time. It contains both the required scienti¤c detail, and historic and political perspectives. It also identi¤es principles and issues that apply to weapons of mass destruction generally. The ¤rst and most important of the latter is what I would call the axiom of proliferation. This asserts that as long as any state possesses weapons of mass destruction, others will seek to acquire them. This assertion does not simply derive from logic or some alleged principle of human behavior, although both of these means of analysis do support the axiom. Rather, it is a statement of fact based on experience. The history of chemical weapons —and certainly of lewisite, as recorded in this book—is a perfect example. Every use of chemical weapons has been met with a like response. More particularly, as states have acquired chemical weapons capability, others, especially those who deem themselves in an adversarial relationship with such a state, then act to acquire a similar capability. The axiom of proliferation has been ful¤lled in vastly greater measure for chemical weapons than for any other comparable weapon of mass destruction . Nuclear weapons have constituted a slightly different, more restricted case, but there is great anxiety today that this will not remain so. I shall return to this concept later. The central meaning of this mechanism of proliferation is that the only way to be safe in the face of the existence of weapons of mass destruction technology is to establish...

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