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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (44715)	9/17/2002 8:18:49 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Good morning, jttmab. I did not think we were talking about Sears, I thought we were talking about Iraq, and the allegation that the US government furnished it with WMD. Then we wandered rather far afield. If you want to talk about the ethics of Sears continuing to furnish Diehard batteries to torturers with the knowledge that the batteries will be used to torture people, fine. I agree with you that this would be unethical. Have you ever studied the history of the development of poison gas? It's rather interesting, to me, at least. The groundbreaking work was done by a German, Fritz Haber, during World War I. He learned how to fix NH3 out of the air. I believe his original intention was to make nitrogen fertilizer, but it could just as easily be used to make explosives (necessary for gunpowder - former source guano, of which Germany had little.) He then developed chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas. When his wife, Clara, learned that he intended it to be used against the allied soldiers in the trenches, she begged him to stop, and when he wouldn't she committed suicide. It seems clear to me that Haber's own wife thought what he was doing was wrong, but that did not stop him. (He later got the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1918) and had a glorious career as a chemist, but in 1933, he was forced to resign because he was Jewish and died a broken man in England in 1934.) Using poison gas is a violation of the 1925 Geneva Convention, but shooting people with machine guns is not. Go figure. When talking about war, what ethical framework shall we use? Is it your contention that there is no ethical way to wage war? Or is there such a thing as an ethical war? Is that what you want to talk about?