This article is very informative, if you'll take the time to read it:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html .
If my history is correct, among the first Europeans to come into conflict with the natives of the North American continent, were the English. One of their most effective ways of killing the indigenous peoples was the use of trading blankets infected with small pox virus, to which the natives had no protection... In a letter dated in 1763 to the English Colonel Bouquet, Lord Amherst wrote, "Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them". But in fairness, that was a far different time.
I'm sure
fletcher.5, we Yanks will try to remember that the next time you've a bad day at Dunkirk...
Oh, by the way, didn't ya'll use poison gasses in WW I? The French in June 1918, and the British in September same year? The Germans introduced it at the Battle of Ypre's in 1915, I believe... So much for the first to use WMD, no? Or was that different, somehow, than Saddam Hussein's use on his own people?
How many U.K. soldiers would have been among the one million anticipated casualties in an invasion of the Japanese homeland?
finally, why does a simple explanation of differences between the U.S. and
the rest of the world always come down to this kind of an exchange? Oh, well...