The Worst Menace of Another War
In November 1924, not long after World War I, New York Times Magazine predicted the next war (if there was one) could include planes spreading deadly gas across entire cities.
Thanks in large part to the next year's Geneva Protocol of 1925, that didn't become a standard feature of war.
As U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Fitzhugh Green wrote in his article:
Imagine a whole nation put to sleep for twenty-four hours by a gas distributed from airplanes brought secretly on submarines and launched in the blackness of night; or a whole city going to bed with no hint of an enemy near and never awakening. Possibilities like that loom very near with the constant discovery of new and deadly vapors in the laboratories of our big manufacturing plants.
Chemical weapons would be banned in warfare the following year, under 1925's Geneva Protocol, which went into effect in 1928. Fun fact: the U.S. didn't ratify it until 1975.
Some bad actors have nonetheless used chemical weapons occasionally since then. (Murder is illegal too, but it still happens occasionally.) Most infamously in recent years, Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad used chemical weapons in the 2010s Syrian civil war. Before that, the most prominent example may have been Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's 1988 use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja.
But has it been used in exactly the way described in 1924? Green warned:
If another war comes soon, further use of guns and tanks and explosive bombs and planes would be likely, though all of them would have reached more complicated forms and be wielded with a vastly more elaborate technique. But there is a crude and amateurish aspect to such weapons when considered in the light of what can be done with pilotless planes carrying gas. It makes one feel as if he were contemplating the use of Caesar's catapult or King Charles's crossbows in a modern engagement.
(Referring to either King Charles I or II from the 1600s, obviously not the 2024-era Charles III.)
The big question in the minds of those who have studied the situation is: Can civilization survive if ever in anger a nation lets loose upon it a swarm of pilotless planes with huge gas bombs aboard?
The atomic bombs used in 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan remain to this day the most devastating ever used in warfare. But those weren't gas bombs.
Green's worst fears circa 1924 didn't quite come true. Mass use of spreading toxic or fatal gases by airplane never become a standard feature of warfare. For the best.
The Worst Menace of Another War: Swarms of Pilotless Planes, With Huge Gas Bombs Aboard, Threatening a Whole Nation With Deadly Vapors, Are Pictured — No Defense Yet Found
Published: Sunday, November 23, 1924