278 CHAPTER EigHT ■ War and Strife
this restriction. Weapons of choice have ranged from swords and shields to bows,
guns, and cannons; to industrialized armies fielding infantry and riding in tanks; to
navies sailing in specialized ships; and to air forces flying fixed- wing aircraft. Such
weapons are used to defeat the enemy on a territorial battlefield. The key attribute of
conventional weapons is that their destructive effects can be limited in space and time
to those who are the legitimate targets of war. Conventional wars are won or lost when
the warriors of one group, or their leaders, acknowledge defeat following a clash of arms.
The two world wars challenged the prevalence of conventional war in three ways.
World War I saw the first large- scale use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. Near
the Flemish (Belgian) town of Ypres, in 1915, German forces unleashed 168 tons of
chlorine gas against French positions. French troops suffered 6,000 casualties in just a
few minutes as prevailing winds carried the poisonous gas across the fields and into
the trenches. But German forces were unable to exploit the four- mile- wide gap in French
lines that opened as a result. Many German troops had been wounded or killed in
handling the gas or by moving through areas still affected and they were unable to
exploit the temporary advantages gained. In addition, the effects of the weapons had
proved difficult to restrict to combat. Chemicals leached into the soil and water table,
affecting agriculture for months afterward. After the war, winners and losers signed a
Geneva Protocol outlawing the use of chemical weapons in war.
World War II added two additional challenges to the prevalence of conventional
weapons. First, the advent of strategic bombing led both to the possibility of large- scale
harm to noncombatants and to a reexamination of who or what a “noncombatant” actu-
ally was. Prior to the war, the simple rule had been that civilians were to be protected
from intentional harm. But the belligerents possessed large fleets of ships, armored vehi-
cles, and planes, all of which demanded a constant supply of inputs. Were the civilians
who made and supplied these great engines of war to be protected, too? What about
the farmers who fed the soldiers, airmen, and sailors? As the war intensified, the divid-
ing line between those who were to be protected from deliberate harm and those who
could be legitimately targeted broke down. By the war’s end, both sides had taken to
using massive air strikes to deliberately target civilians. In March 1945, well before the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, bombers from the U.S. Eighth
Air Force targeted Japan’s capital, Tokyo, with incendiary bombs. The ensuing flames
killed over 100,000 Japa nese in a single raid, most of them civilians. World War II also
fast- forwarded the development of a nuclear weapon.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 did not have an
immediate and dramatic impact on war- fighting capability. Conventional means, to
some extent, had already matched the destructiveness of the atomic bomb and its capac-