This book will be of interest to historians of modern Germany, to historians of science and technology, and to business and economic historians. The authors relate scientific and technological change in the industry to evolving German political and economic circumstances, including two world wars, the rise and fall of National Socialism, the post-war division of Germany, and the emergence of a global economy. This volume explores the German chemical industry's scientific and technological dimension, its international connections, and its development after 1945. The German chemical industry has been a major site for the development and application of the science-based technologies that gave rise to these products, and has had an important role as exemplar, stimulus, and competitor in the international chemical industry. In the twentieth century, dyes, pharmaceuticals, photographic products, explosives, insecticides, fertilizers, synthetic rubber, fuels, and fibers, plastics, and other products have flowed out of the chemical industry and into the consumer economies, war machines, farms, and medical practices of industrial societies. military's rejection of battlefield chemical weapons. But conflict with those aligned against chemical warfare forced the CWS to fight for its institutional life-and ultimately led to the U.S. Their argument: poison gas represented an advanced and even humane tool in modern war, while its applications for pest control and crowd control made a chemical capacity relevant in peacetime. As the book shows, the advocates for chemical weapons within the CWS allied with supporters in the military, government, and private industry to lobby to add chemical warfare to the country's permanent arsenal. Taking the CWS's story from the trenches to peacetime, the book explores how the CWS's work on chemical warfare continued through the 1920s despite deep opposition to the weapons in both military and civilian circles. This book offers an institutional history of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS), the department tasked with improving the Army's ability to use and defend against chemical weapons during and after World War I. Borrowing ideas from shell shock, specialist units were set up closer to the front line and medical officers taught to identify crucial points in the course of illness to accelerate recovery times and forestall the accretion of psychosomatic symptoms. By 1917, progressive study of the physical and psychological effects of different types of toxin allowed physicians to design new management strategies. At first, army doctors practised defensive medicine, invaliding their patients for protracted periods to the UK or base hospitals. Soldiers were continually challenged on the battlefield by combinations of different types of agent designed to undermine their confidence in respirators, disorientate them, and erode their morale. The considerable investment in the development of new toxins and methods of delivery was designed to maintain the elements of surprise and uncertainty as these accentuated their psychological effect. Chemical weapons accounted for only 1 per cent of the 750,000 British troops killed in the First World War and yet caused disproportionate casualties (estimated at 180,100).
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