ASSIGNMENT HELP | Within your paper, you must address if any of the uses of WMD may be considered acts of terrorism.

Unit I Article Review

Instructions

During World War I, nearly 40% of all casualties were caused by machine-gun fire. Some historians describe the effect of the machine gun as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD). Paul Farhi in a Washington Post article “The Soothing Sound of Fighting Words,” cited a quote by historian Paul Fussell on the subject: “A machine gun, properly fired, is a weapon of mass destruction. We’re pretending that only awful and sinister people own weapons of mass destruction. We own them, too. We just call them something else.”

History has proven that a weapon in the hands of a well-trained sniper can cause numerous deaths and casualties. Fully automatic firearms or semiautomatic firearms can indeed inflict mass destruction, but are not classified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as WMD. Numerous forms of WMD were used throughout WWII even though no country resorted to chemical warfare, with the exception of tear gas. Such WMD ranged from grenades, mines, artillery, and bombs to the use of atomic bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Access the CSU Online Library, and locate two scholarly journal articles on the use of WMD during World War II. Write a two-page paper summarizing the use, implications, and repercussions (i.e., side effects, sociological effects, or political effects) of the WMD. Ensure your reference entries and in-text citations follow APA formatting guidelines and are free of errors.

Within your paper, you must address if any of the uses of WMD may be considered acts of terrorism. Remember that terrorism is an act against any nonmilitary target that is meant to evoke political change. Additionally, you must address what actions could have been taken by either side in WWII to develop counteraction strategies that would have prevented the attack or would have minimized the impact of the attack. In your conclusion, please provide a summary of your findings, and include an analysis of the impact of the specific WMD introduced in your paper along with how that WMD compares to probable future terrorist attacks.

ANSWER

During WWII, several weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were deployed by the warring factions against each other. WMD included nuclear and biological weapons such as anthrax and Typhus. A notable use of nuclear weapons during the war was the detonation of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States. The result was devastating as it left about 210,000 civilians dead in the two atomic blasts (Feis, 2015).

Similarly, during the war, Japan used plague, anthrax, and other diseases as biological weapons against China while other countries also experimented with and developed biological weapons programs. Japan attacked the Chinese city of Changteh 1941 resulting in about 10,000 casualties of biological weapons. Besides, it is believed that almost 10,000 prisoners died from being infected with biological agents during the Japan program. Among the prisoners were British, Australian, Mongolian, Korean, American, Chinese, and Soviet war prisoners. They were inoculated with agents causing gas gangrene, dysentery, cholera, plague, or meningococcal infection. Japan also experimented with tetrodotoxin which a very lethal fungal toxin (Szinicz, 2005).

Consequences of WMD during World War II

The atomic bombs by the U.S. on Nagasaki and Hiroshima led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The bombs also razed and burnt buildings and other property. Livestock, farm crops, and wildlife were also devastated by the bombings.  The long-term effects of the bombings included high incidences of diseases such as leukemia, thyroid, breast, and lung cancer among the survivors. The number of miscarriages among pregnant women also increased and high infant mortality rates were reported. Surviving children were diagnosed with intellectual disabilities, impaired growth, and increased risk to develop different | PLACE YOUR ORDER NOW AT writtask.com | effects reported by survivors of the bombings included recalling the incidence and feeling upset, experiences of a high sense of immobility and unresponsiveness, and feeling guilt and discouragement and feelings of dizziness, unconsciousness, headache, and nausea (Feis, 2015).

Biological weapons of mass destruction used during World War II led to thousands of deaths among the civilians | PLACE YOUR ORDER NOW AT writtask.com | agents in the weapons also infected animals, crops, and wildlife. It resulted in large numbers of deaths in a short amount of time and controlling it became difficult (Szinicz, 2005).

Politically, the dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities is believed to have resulted in the end of WWII. The use of the bombs against Japan has been argued to be the reason why Japan surrendered and this brought an end | PLACE YOUR ORDER NOW AT writtask.com | use of biological weapons during the war also enabled counties to establish deterrence against invasion by enemy | PLACE YOUR ORDER NOW AT writtask.com | its biological weapon program after it emerged that the weapons had devastating impacts on them and the enemies | PLACE YOUR ORDER NOW AT writtask.com | countries such as Germany were forced to stop their biological weapon programs due to its potential adverse effects when deployed.

Use of WMD as acts of terrorism Several instances of the use of weapons of mass destruction during World War II may be considered acts of terrorism. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing…