William M. Creasy Quotes
I was attempting to, with a good cover story, test to see what would happen in subways, for example, when a cloud was laid down on a city. It was denied on reasons that always seemed a little absurd to me
He actually wanted to release substances in aerosol clouds in the New York City Subways filled with innocent, unknowing civilians, who would not be informed and would not know unless something went wrong. He was so insensitive that he was genuinely puzzled that people would see moral and ethical problems.
William M. Creasy, Army General & chief officer of the Army Chemical Corps, Congressional Testimony
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The General was experimenting with LSD and other substances that would cause major mental effects to be used as a weapon. This was before the ban on chemical warfare.
The threat was to use nuclear weapons on Iraq if Saddam Hussein fired any missiles at Israel armed with Chemical Weapons which Iraq had at the time. Saddam fired some missiles but all had conventional explosives which did little damage. However, Israel was not even involved in the Gulf War. The threat obviously worked.
See Hans Bethe {628530} for a practical implication of this principle.
This quotation not only illustrates the discomfort of the atomic scientists who developed the atomic bomb regarding the ethics and decision making regarding use, but also how complex a man Teller himself was. Here he sounds like a left-leaning centrist. A little later he would side with the hawks in the military and the political world and slander his colleague Oppenheimer publicly advocating an arms race and the development of the hydrogen bomb when the existing technology of the atom bomb could wipe out Russia or any other nation. His new allies however kept everything about nuclear weapons a secret and thus the public could never weigh in and influence any nuclear decision making. This state existed until President Eisenhower declassified much of the nuclear weapons information as part of his Atoms for Peace program.
The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb. Hundreds of thousands of American troops were on their way to join the invasion of Japan where there were huge American casualties expected when the two atom bomb drops ended the war. At the time, surprising to most people now, the use of the atomic bomb was not an issue of controversy at all. There were no Congressman who questioned it, no newspapers which editorialized against the use of the bomb. There were not even any other counties which protested its use. The blessing of ending the war, even at the cost of less than 200,000 deaths seemed a clearly desirable tradeoff when compared with the many millions of deaths that would have occurred had the bomb not been used. As an example, the conventional bombing of Tokyo before the nuclear weapons were used killed as many Japanese as either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
The Scientific Project that developed the Atomic Bomb
Almost every use of war weapons of mass destruction in history have been justified with the rationale that the total casualties would be reduced. It sometimes has been such as with the use of the atomic bomb in WWII but usually it has not. The same argument was made incidentally by Dr. Gattling, the inventor of the machine gun. In WWI far more men were killed by machine gun fire than poison gas.
