William M. Creasy Quotes
I do not contend that driving people crazy even for a few hours is a pleasant prospect. But warfare is never pleasant... would you rather be temporarily deranged... by a chemical agent, or burned alive...?
The General was experimenting with LSD and other substances that would cause major mental effects to be used as a weapon. This was before the ban on chemical warfare.
William M. Creasy, Army General & chief officer of the Army Chemical Corps, This Week, May 1959
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He was the most decorated soldier in WWII with 21 medals.
The threat was to use nuclear weapons on Iraq if Saddam Hussein fired any missiles at Israel armed with Chemical Weapons which Iraq had at the time. Saddam fired some missiles but all had conventional explosives which did little damage. However, Israel was not even involved in the Gulf War. The threat obviously worked.
Chemicals were actually tried on American Soldiers who had no opportunity to give “informed consent” as we require it ethically today. Many were mentally disabled in the short term and there is no record of whether or not there were any long term effects. He had identified over 60 chemical agents that would disable humans mentally / psychology
Almost every use of war weapons of mass destruction in history have been justified with the rationale that the total casualties would be reduced. It sometimes has been such as with the use of the atomic bomb in WWII but usually it has not. The same argument was made incidentally by Dr. Gattling, the inventor of the machine gun. In WWI far more men were killed by machine gun fire than poison gas.
This information was proven false after the invasion of Iraq. The British were persuaded it was true because the US intelligence had reached the same conclusions. And the Americans were much more confident that Saddam was actively producing WMDs because British intelligence said so. In reality, both intelligence agencies relied on the same set of false information to reach this conclusion. There was no Iraq nuclear program and no chemical or biological weapons production either. The major British-American reason for initiating the Iraq war was without foundation. It is still debated whether it was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush administration and the American neo conservatives or just bad intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic.
He was the Secretary of State in the War Office at the time. The Royal Air Force had suggested an experiment---gassing “recalcitrant Arabs” from the air. This predated Sadaam Hussein's gassing of Hussein's gassing of his own people by over 70 years.
The First World War had recently ended with the mass of horrible casualties that resulted from the use of poison gas. Permanently debilitated veterans were trying to rebuild a life all over England. Many Englishmen wanted to ban English use of poison gas. Churchill objected as the Middle East was a cauldron of various forms of terrorism then in areas that the British were “responsible for” under the Peace Treaty. He argued that there was little difference be gas and shells, but that did not persuade many others. Churchill was outvoted and overruled and the British have never used poison gas since although they had a large supply and were prepared to use it in WWII if the Germans did. This quotation was a blot on Churchill’s reputation. One issue was whether or not it was human to use poison gas. Churchill was willing to say no where white Christians were concerned but was perfectly willing to use them on the “uncivilized”.
