POISON GAS

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLI, Issue XLI, 12 February 1921, Page 10

POISON GAS

USE OR ABOLITION

LEAGUE EMBARRASSED

The invitation issued by the War Office to scientists to form a committee to study the application of chemistry to warfare, : both offensive and defensive, has shocked a great number of people, including some of the scientists. Personally I am glad that we are acting in the open in this matter, and not as are some other nations, in the dark, wrote Major-General Sir F. Ma,urice, in a recent issue of the London Daily News.

/The.effect of such a declaration must Be to make clearer what the powers and functions of the League of Nations really are. It will be found, I suggest, that the League is something quite .different from that which is approved by a great number of people and ridiculed by a great many more. The League acts by consent, not by compulsion. It cannot compel the abolition of poison-gas or the reduction of armies and navies.

The Council has -the question of the use of poison-gas under consideration, and finds itself considerably embarrassed in the matter., The potentialities of poison-gas are so terrible that the Council cannot, take, upon itself the responsibility of advising the members of the League to abrogate its use, unless and until it can protect them adequately. At present it cannot possibly do that.

fhe League cannot prevent a scientist from working out the formula for a gas far more deadly than any used in the Great Wary nor can it alter the fact that many, chemical industries, such, for example, as the dye industry, can be ; used for the rapid production of gas. The members of the League cannot pledge themselves not to manufacture and use poison-gas unless they are assured that it will not be used against them.

It is therefore highly improbable that such a pledge will be proposed to them, until the League includes all civilised nations possessing the resources enabling them to produce poison-gas.

At the present time the United States, not a member of the League, are understood to be experimenting with armour-piercing shells filled with a very deadly gas. This adds a new terror to naval warfare which other nations dare not neglect. Fiats issued by the League in these matters are of no value. It does not work in that way. It will merely bring contempt upon itself if it issues orders which it cannot enforce. Armies and navies are the result of a certain set of conditions. They are an effect, not a cause. It is useless to try to abolish tbe effect while leaving the cause untouched.

The principle upon which the League is working, rightly, I think, is to limit and eventually to abolish the causes of war by substituting the principle of co-operation between nations for the principle of competition. It provides for the settlement of disputes by. establishing an effective Court of International Justice. These methods may be slow, but they are, I believe, sure, and no one has yet suggested any practical alternative.

The powers of tbe League can only be strengthened and.its methods quickened by the force of public opinion in the countries of its members.

If this question of poison-gas stirs public opinion—and it -is a. very vital and urgent question, for scientists can to-day devise means for making a large city uninhabitable in a few hours, and for the wholesale and indiscriminate destruction of life—then the action of our War Office in calling attention to the matter, at a time when all our thoughts are with those who gave up <-i,„ ir i n -es in the Great War and we are asking ourselves what we have done to obtain that for which they died, wil] have been for good.

In an attempt to cure himself of tvhorcnJosiV. a Willesden ex-so!dier is living or} white slugs.