rammstein t shirt ü dağıtıyorum beyler

Germany is recognized as the first to use chemical weapons on a mass scale, on April 22, 1915, at Ypres, Belgium, where 6,000 British and French troops succumbed. Chemical weapons, rarely used since that war, have once again emerged as an issue after the massacre in Syria last month, in which the United States says nearly 1,500 people, men, women and children, were killed, many as they slept.

As in World War I, that represents only a small fraction of the more than 100,000 lives that have been lost during the two and a half years of Syria’s civil war. Yet, President Obama is prepared to initiate a military attack in response.

Why, it is fair to ask, does the killing of 100,000 or more with conventional weapons elicit little more than a concerned shrug, while the killing of a relative few from poison gas is enough to trigger an intervention?

Whatever the reasons for the distinction, it has long been recognized.

Roughly 16 million people died and 20 million were wounded during World War I, that “war to end all wars,” yet only about 2 percent of the casualties and fewer than 1 percent of the deaths are estimated to have resulted from chemical warfare.

Nevertheless, the universal revulsion that followed World War I led to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned the use, though not the possession, of chemical and biological weapons. In effect from 1928, the protocol is one of the few treaties that have been almost universally accepted and become an international norm. Syria, too, is a signatory.

No Western army used gas on the battlefield during the global slaughter of World War II. Hitler, himself gassed during World War I, refused to order its use against combatants, however willing he and the Nazis were to gas noncombatant Jews, Gypsies and others.

Since World War II and the atomic bomb, which redefined warfare, chemical weapons have been categorized as “weapons of mass destruction,” even if they do not have the killing power of nuclear weapons.

The Geneva Protocol was not even the first effort to ban the use of poison in war, said Joanna Kidd of King’s College London. “Throughout history, there has been a general revulsion against the use of poisons against human beings in warfare, going back to the Greeks,” she said. Some date a first effort to ban such weaponry to 1675, when France and the Holy Roman Empire agreed in Strasbourg not to use poisoned bullets.

With the industrial revolution and advances in chemistry, many nations agreed in the Hague Convention of 1899 not to use “projectiles the sole objective of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases,” which were not then widely understood. There was a follow-on agreement in 1907, but World War I proved just how hollow that effort was.

There have been only a few known instances of poison gas being used since 1925, and in each case the perpetrator never openly admitted it. In the first two cases, gas was used by authoritarian regimes against those they considered lesser races. In 1935-36, Mussolini used several hundred tons of mustard gas in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, and in 1940-41, the Japanese used chemical and biological weapons widely in China, where unexploded poison gas shells are still being dug up at the expense of the Japanese government.

François Heisbourg, a special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, argued that one reason Japan stopped the use of chemical weapons, while then denying their use, is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped in and, in quiet diplomacy, “told the Japanese that we knew of the use and that there would be consequences.”

In 1965-67, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt ordered intermittent use of chemical weapons in the course of a long and disastrous war in Yemen, and the American use of Agent Orange in Vietnam was widely criticized, but it was legally considered a defoliant, despite its impact on human health.

Germany is recognized as the first to use chemical weapons on a mass scale, on April 22, 1915, at Ypres, Belgium, where 6,000 British and French troops succumbed. Chemical weapons, rarely used since that war, have once again emerged as an issue after the massacre in Syria last month, in which the United States says nearly 1,500 people, men, women and children, were killed, many as they slept.

As in World War I, that represents only a small fraction of the more than 100,000 lives that have been lost during the two and a half years of Syria’s civil war. Yet, President Obama is prepared to initiate a military attack in response.

Why, it is fair to ask, does the killing of 100,000 or more with conventional weapons elicit little more than a concerned shrug, while the killing of a relative few from poison gas is enough to trigger an intervention?

Whatever the reasons for the distinction, it has long been recognized.

Roughly 16 million people died and 20 million were wounded during World War I, that “war to end all wars,” yet only about 2 percent of the casualties and fewer than 1 percent of the deaths are estimated to have resulted from chemical warfare.

Nevertheless, the universal revulsion that followed World War I led to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned the use, though not the possession, of chemical and biological weapons. In effect from 1928, the protocol is one of the few treaties that have been almost universally accepted and become an international norm. Syria, too, is a signatory.

No Western army used gas on the battlefield during the global slaughter of World War II. Hitler, himself gassed during World War I, refused to order its use against combatants, however willing he and the Nazis were to gas noncombatant Jews, Gypsies and others.

Since World War II and the atomic bomb, which redefined warfare, chemical weapons have been categorized as “weapons of mass destruction,” even if they do not have the killing power of nuclear weapons.

The Geneva Protocol was not even the first effort to ban the use of poison in war, said Joanna Kidd of King’s College London. “Throughout history, there has been a general revulsion against the use of poisons against human beings in warfare, going back to the Greeks,” she said. Some date a first effort to ban such weaponry to 1675, when France and the Holy Roman Empire agreed in Strasbourg not to use poisoned bullets.

With the industrial revolution and advances in chemistry, many nations agreed in the Hague Convention of 1899 not to use “projectiles the sole objective of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases,” which were not then widely understood. There was a follow-on agreement in 1907, but World War I proved just how hollow that effort was.

There have been only a few known instances of poison gas being used since 1925, and in each case the perpetrator never openly admitted it. In the first two cases, gas was used by authoritarian regimes against those they considered lesser races. In 1935-36, Mussolini used several hundred tons of mustard gas in Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, and in 1940-41, the Japanese used chemical and biological weapons widely in China, where unexploded poison gas shells are still being dug up at the expense of the Japanese government.

François Heisbourg, a special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, argued that one reason Japan stopped the use of chemical weapons, while then denying their use, is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped in and, in quiet diplomacy, “told the Japanese that we knew of the use and that there would be consequences.”

In 1965-67, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt ordered intermittent use of chemical weapons in the course of a long and disastrous war in Yemen, and the American use of Agent Orange in Vietnam was widely criticized, but it was legally considered a defoliant, despite its impact on human health.