In light of White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s recent gaffe saying that “even Hitler” had not stooped to Assad’s use of chemical weapons (a breathtaking lapse that ignored Hitler’s use of gas to murder millions of Jews during the Holocaust and for which Spicer abjectly apologized), it’s worth revisiting the issue. Over the years, any number of explanations have been put forward for Hitler’s unwillingness to use gas as a battlefield weapon, including the hypothesis that having been gassed himself in World War I, he did not want to visit the same horror on others. That seems unlikely, to say the least. It’s more plausible that Hitler and his commanders understood the weapons’ battlefield limitations.
Whatever was really behind Hitler’s reluctance, it confirms what advocates for the banning of certain classes of weapons have suspected for years—that the world’s militaries are loath to ban weapons that kill effectively, while acceding to bans of weapons that they don’t need. Put another way, military leaders agreed to the banning of poison gas in 1925 not because it was horrifyingly effective, but because it wasn’t.
“It is a fickle weapon that can be turned on the attacker,” says retired Army Col. Paul Hughes, who served as a senior staff officer at the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. “So it was easy to negotiate its ban because it wasn’t as effective as conventional artillery.” But Hughes disagrees with the notion that the military will agree to ban only a weapon that is ineffective, pointing out that the U.S. military “eliminated all of its nuclear artillery rounds and its family of nuclear-capable intermediate range missiles, even though both would have been useful in a fight with the USSR.”
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