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1 - Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Brief Overview

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Susan B. Martin
Affiliation:
Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King's College London
Sohail H. Hashmi
Affiliation:
Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts
Steven P. Lee
Affiliation:
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York
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Summary

The phrase “weapons of mass destruction” was first used in a communiqué issued by American President Harry Truman, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King on November 15, 1945. In a “Declaration on Atomic Bomb,” they proposed the establishment of a commission under the United Nations that would investigate ways of eliminating the destructive use of atomic energy while promoting its “widest use for industrial and humanitarian purposes.” They urged the commission to make four specific proposals, including a proposal “for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.”

According to Vannevar Bush, who claims to have authored the phrase, it was intended to cover biological as well as nuclear weapons. The phrase was repeated in a resolution of the UN General Assembly on January 24, 1946, which called for the elimination of all weapons “adaptable to mass destruction,” and a General Assembly resolution on December 14, 1946, referred to the elimination of “all other major weapons adaptable now or in the future to mass destruction.” In 1947 the UN Commission for Conventional Armaments addressed the definition of weapons of mass destruction in an effort to distinguish WMD from conventional weapons and thus define the scope of their mandate. The definition finally accepted in 1948 stated that weapons of mass destruction “included atomic explosive weapons, radioactive material weapons, lethal chemical and biological weapons, and any weapons developed in the future which have characteristics comparable in destructive effect to those of the atomic bomb or other weapons mentioned above.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Religious and Secular Perspectives
, pp. 16 - 42
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

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