Above all, do no harm

been made and well

distributed].

Haldane based this conclusion on two arguments. He first listed the chemical agents used in the war and branded most of them as not dangerous for having only transient effects (making the assumption mat temporarily insensate soldiers would be passed by or humanely captured rather than slaughtered). The few chemicals that could induce more permanent harm--mustard gas, in particular--are both hard to control and relatively easy to avoid, with proper equipment. Secondly, he called upon his own frequent experience with poison gases and stated a strong preference for these agents over his equally personal contact with bullets:

Besides being wounded, I have been buried

alive, and on several occasions in peacetime

I have been asphyxiated to the point of

unconsciousness. The pain and discomfort

arising from the other experiences were

utterly negligent compared with those

produced by a good septic shell wound.

Haldane therefore concluded that gas, for being both effective as a weapon and reasonably humane in causing few deaths relative to the number of temporary incapacitations, should be validated and further developed as a primary military tactic:

I certainly share their [pacifists'] objection

to war, but I doubt whether by objecting to

it we are likely to avoid it in

future, however lofty our motives

or disinterested our conduct ....

If we are to have more wars, I

prefer that my country should be

on the winning side .... If it is

right for me to fight my enemy

with a sword, it is right for me to

fight him with mustard gas; if the

one is wrong, so is the other.

I do not flinch before this last statement from the realm of ultimate Realpolitik. The primary and obvious objection to Haldane's thesis in Callinicus--not only as raised by me in the abstract in 1998 but also as advanced by Haldane's numerous critics in 1925--holds that, whatever the impact of poison gas in its infancy in World War I (and I do not challenge Haldane's assessment), unrestrained use of this technology may lead to levels of effectiveness and numbers of deaths undreamed of in earlier warfare. Better the devil we know best than a devil seen only as an ineffective baby just introduced into our midst. If we can squelch this baby now, by moral restraint and international agreement, let's do so before he grows into a large and unstoppable adult potentially far more potent than any devil we know already.

(I should offer the proviso that, in making this general argument for moral restraint, I am speaking only of evident devils, or destructive technologies with no primary role in realms usually designated as human betterment: healing the sick, increasing agricultural yields, and so on. I am not talking about the more difficult, and common, problem of new technologies-cloning comes to mind as the current topic of greatest interest--with powerfully benevolent intended uses but also some pretty scary potential misuses in the wrong hands, or in the decent hands of people who have not pondered the unintended consequences of good deeds. Such technologies may be regulated, but surely should not be banned.)