World War I and the mordant history of weapons of mass destruction

The phrase “weapons of mass destruction” has a recent ring. We might imagine it was coined in the George W. Bush era to refer to Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent nuclear arsenal, or in the 1960s, when the United States and the Soviet Union first deployed long-range nuclear missiles. British historian Diana Preston’s thorough research teaches us otherwise: The archbishop of Canterbury coined the phrase in 1937, she reports, to characterize the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, while the weapons of mass destruction themselves originated during World War I.

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