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Journal Article

Citation

van Bergen L, Abbenhuis M. First World War Stud. 2012; 3(1): 1-23.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/19475020.2012.652442

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article investigates the different discourses that surrounded the use of gas (The Dutch tended to use the descriptor 'gas' to cover all kinds of chemical weaponry, including those, like mustard gas, that were not actually gases.) as a weapon of war in the Netherlands during and after the First World War: among the public, within military and medical circles, among pacifists and Red Cross workers and between the political leaders of this neutral nation. Importantly, there was no consensus view on the potential impact of chemical warfare although there was also very little open debate on the topic during the war years. Where the military and government leadership concerned itself mostly with the strategic and logistical consequences as well as possible opportunities presented by gas weaponry, some medical professionals grappled with the ethical dilemmas posed by the impact of gas attacks on human bodies, while the wider public struggled to come to terms with the inhumanity of chemical warfare more generally. Gas, for the latter two groups at least, symbolized the horror of what was a horrible war, and the wider public's revulsion became the mainstream media view. It was not until the middle of the 1920s and going into the 1930s that the Dutch -- spurred by the ambivalent position of the Dutch Red Cross and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the matter -- debated the value of chemical warfare publicly in a variety of media.

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