"Isolated as they are within a distinctly outcast category, CB weapons have acquired an array of moral and legal proscriptions that is unique among present-day armaments. This, however, is something with which most novel weapon technologies of the past have had to contend. Users of the crossbow, for example, in twelfth century Europe risked excommunication by the Church, and gunpowder went through a long period of moral opprobrium before becoming assimilated. People eventually became accustomed to these developments, and the weapons became conventional. Incendiary weapons provide a further example: witness the obloquy that fastened upon the recorded users of Greek fire in medieval Europe, or P.G.T. Beauregarde's expressions of moral outrage during the American Civil War, or the special attention given to flamethrowers in the League of Nations disarmament deliberations, and then the increasing conventionalization of napalm and other incendiaries during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Korean war and Vietnam."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
J.P. Perry Robinson, “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”, Volume XXXI #5, (May 1975), pp.18-19.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Weapon
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