‘An Armed and Agile Nation’

Abstract

In the years following the First World War, there emerged within the United States the tension which has in different forms continued as an element of American chemical warfare policy to present times.¹ In the early 1920s, the public, inspired in part by the horrors of the war and in part by the excesses of a campaign by the chemical industry to win support for chemical weapons production, strongly favoured a ban on chemical weapons. The US War Department, suspicious of chemical warfare, doubtful about its value, and with other expenditure priorities, sought to disband the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) and to limit CW activities to those strictly necessary for defence and retaliation. Congress, however, backed the CWS in its attempt to maintain and improve a CW combat capability that was not necessarily restricted to retaliation.²