An archbishop coined weapons of mass destruction years before the atom bomb
The phrase weapons of mass destruction first appears on record in 1937, spoken by Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, as he reflected on the bombing of Guernica and the wars in Spain and China. Nuclear weapons did not yet exist; he meant aerial bombing with ordinary explosives.
Today the term covers biological, chemical, radiological and nuclear weapons, or anything able to kill or harm vast numbers of people or wreck buildings, landscapes or the biosphere. Its meaning has shifted and been contested, often carrying more political weight than technical precision. When Lang spoke, chemical weapons had already been used widely in World War I, and the 1925 Geneva Protocol had banned their use, though not their stockpiling. Italy nonetheless used mustard agent in Ethiopia in 1935 and 1936.
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the phrase narrowed toward non-conventional arms. The language expert William Safire noted a parallel Russian expression and credited James Goodby of the Brookings Institution with finding an early English use in a communique from a meeting of Harry Truman, Clement Attlee and Mackenzie King on 15 November 1945. Bernard Baruch used the exact words at the United Nations in 1946, and the General Assembly's very first resolution, adopted in London that January, called for eliminating such weapons from national arsenals.
J. Robert Oppenheimer used it in a 1947 lecture to the State Department on controlling atomic energy, and it appeared in the introduction to NSC 68, an influential 1950 US policy paper. In a speech at Rice University on 12 September 1962, John F. Kennedy contrasted such arms with tools of knowledge and understanding, saying space deserved the latter.
During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union ran the largest nuclear, chemical and biological programmes ever, building tens of thousands of thermonuclear weapons. Both briefly tested radiological weapons, yet no country is known ever to have built them in quantity or deployed them. The 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention set out to limit or eliminate these arms.
Source: Weapon of mass destruction
