Saturday, January 17, 2009

Weapon Links


The first use of the term "weapons of mass destruction" on record is from The Times (London) in 1937 in reference to the aerial bombardment of Guernica, Spain:

“ Who can think at this present time without a sickening of the heart of the appalling slaughter, the suffering, the manifold misery brought by war to Spain and to China? Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction? ”

At that time, there were no nuclear weapons; biological weapons were already being researched by Japan (see Unit 731), and chemical weapons had seen wide use, most notably in World War I.

Following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and progressing through the Cold War, the term came to refer more to non-conventional weapons. The application of the term to specifically nuclear and radiological weapons is traced by William Safire to the Russian phrase oruziye massovovo porazheniya.

He credits James Goodby (of the Brookings Institution) with tracing what he considers the earliest known English-language use soon after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (although it is not quite verbatim): a communique from a November 15, 1945 meeting of Harry Truman, Clement Attlee and Mackenzie King (probably drafted by Vannevar Bush – or so Bush claimed in 1970) referred to "weapons adaptable to mass destruction".

That exact phrase, says Safire, was also used by Bernard Baruch in 1946 (in a speech at the United Nations probably written by Herbert Bayard Swope). The same phrase found its way into the UN resolution to create the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)), which used the wording "…atomic weapons and of all other weapons adaptable to mass destruction".

An exact use of this term was given in a lecture "Atomic Energy as an Atomic Problem" by J. Robert Oppenheimer. The lecture was delivered to the Foreign Service and the State Department, on September 17th, 1947. The lecture is reprinted in The Open Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).

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