Weapon

• 1. Introduction

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  A weapon is any implement or device used to deter, threaten, inflict physical damage, harm, or kill. That definition is broad on purpose. A rock or a bottle can serve, even though they were never built for the job. Yet across human history, people have designed objects expressly for it, from the simple club and sword to firearms, tanks, missiles, and biological agents. Something repurposed or enhanced into a tool of war gets its own term: weaponized, as in a weaponized virus or a weaponized laser. Weapons exist to give one side a tactical, strategic, material, or mental advantage over an enemy. So how did humanity travel from sharpened sticks to the threat of destroying the Earth a hundred times over? Why have generals sometimes hated their own most fearsome tools? And what happens to a weapon long after the war that built it has ended?

• 2. An Arms Race In Stone

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  Chimpanzees have been observed using objects as weapons, which has fueled speculation that early hominids did the same as far back as five million years ago. Physical evidence cannot confirm it, because wooden clubs, spears, and unshaped stones leave an ambiguous record. The earliest unambiguous weapons are the Schöningen spears, eight wooden throwing spears dating back more than 300,000 years. At Nataruk in Turkana, Kenya, human skeletons dating to 10,000 years ago carry possible traumatic injuries to the head, neck, ribs, knees, and hands. Some bones hold embedded obsidian projectiles that might have come from arrows and clubs, suggesting conflict between two hunter-gatherer groups. That interpretation of warfare at Nataruk has been challenged because of conflicting evidence. Weapons are a kind of tool used to dominate and subdue autonomous agents, including animals, which let early cultures expand their reach. But enemies adapt by learning, and that mutual adaptation triggers a continuous cycle of competitive improvement in technology, skill, and cognition. The name for that cycle is the arms race, and it would run for the rest of human history.

• 3. Bronze, Horses, And Gunpowder

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  Metal tools began with copper during the Copper Age, around 3,300 BC, followed by the Bronze Age and the Bronze Age sword. The first defensive structures and fortifications appeared in the Bronze Age too, a sign of rising fear, and the battering ram answered them, in use by 2500 BC. Ironworking arrived around 1300 BC in Greece, but early Iron Age swords were not actually superior to their bronze predecessors. The real shift came from the domestication of the horse and the spread of spoked wheels by about 2000 BC, which produced the light, horse-drawn chariot. Spoke-wheeled chariot use peaked around 1300 BC, then declined, and ceased to be militarily relevant by the 4th century BC. Cavalry followed once horses could carry a human, extending the range and speed of attacks. Alexander's conquest spread the spear and shield through the Middle East and Western Asia, and Greek weapons traveled with the culture. At sea, warships such as the trireme were in use by the 7th century BC, and advanced warships helped Rome defeat Carthage in the First Punic War. Centuries later, gunpowder arrived from Asia and changed everything. Cannon replaced the trebuchet as the dominant siege weapon, and the Ottomans used cannon to tear through the fortifications at Constantinople.

• 4. The Energy Revolution

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  Firearms are different in kind from everything that came before. They release energy from combustible propellants such as gunpowder, not from a counterweight or a spring. That energy comes out very fast and can be repeated without much effort, so even the early arquebus outmatched human-powered weapons. The European Renaissance began the use of firearms in western warfare, bringing guns and rockets to the battlefield. Through the 16th to 19th centuries, ignition mechanisms improved and ammunition handling and propellant changed in revolutionary ways. During the American Civil War, the machine gun and the ironclad warship appeared, weapons still recognizable and useful today. Warship propulsion shifted in the 19th century from sail to fossil-fuel steam engines. From the mid-18th century French-Indian war in North America to the early 20th century, sometimes called the Age of Rifles, human-powered weapons faded as primary arms. Howitzers could destroy masonry fortresses, a single invention that caused a revolution in military affairs and set tactics still in use today.

• 5. Industrial Escalation

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  Technological escalation defined industrial age warfare, with each innovation rapidly matched by replication or by a fresh counter-innovation. World War I brought fully industrialized warfare and weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons, and new designs appeared quickly to meet wartime needs. Aircraft entered warfare on a wide scale, and naval warfare gained the aircraft carrier. Motor vehicles promised commanders independence from horses and a return to maneuver warfare. These changes were evolutionary, yet they defined weapon development for the rest of the century. Between the two world wars, all the major industrial powers kept refining their weapon systems. The major armament firms were Schneider-Creusot in France, Škoda Works in Czechoslovakia, and Vickers in Great Britain. The 1920s leaned toward disarmament and outlawing war and poison gas, but rearmament accelerated in the 1930s. The biggest buyers from the three firms were Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey, and to a lesser extent Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, and the Soviet Union.

• 6. The Gas Nobody Wanted

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  Poison gas became the focus of a worldwide crusade in the 1920s, and the striking part is who opposed it. The gas did not win battles, the generals did not want it, and soldiers hated it far more intensely than bullets or explosive shells. By 1918, chemical shells made up 35 percent of French ammunition supplies, 25 percent of British, and 20 percent of American stock. Realistic critics accepted that war could not truly be outlawed, but believed its worst excesses might be banned. The Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous, or Other Gases and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, known as the Geneva Protocol, was issued in 1925 and accepted as policy by all major countries. By 1937, poison gas was being manufactured in large quantities, but it was not used except against nations that lacked modern weapons or gas masks.

• 7. Living With The Bomb

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  World War II was perhaps the most frantic period of weapon development in human history. Between 1939 and 1945, huge numbers of new designs were fielded and every existing technology was improved. The most powerful invention of the period was the nuclear bomb, though jet aircraft, radar, and long-range rockets also reshaped the world and were overshadowed by nuclear weapons. After the war, the United States and the Soviet Union entered a nuclear arms race, each side and its allies trying to out-develop the other. Once their combined capability could ensure the destruction of the Earth a hundredfold, a new tactic became necessary. With the realization of mutual assured destruction, known as MAD, all-out nuclear war was no longer a survivable scenario. Funding shifted back toward conventional arms for limited wars rather than total war. Strategy itself began to cross borders. As outlined in Baizidi's theory on deterrence, the internationalization of deterrence transfers arms and military capabilities to aligned states and non-state actors to amplify strategic reach. Missile sharing arrangements, forward-defense networks, and alliance-building turned deterrence from a national doctrine into a regional and even global concept.

• 8. After The War Ends

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  Every year, landmines kill 15,000 to 20,000 people and severely maim countless more, and clearing them from past conflict zones is a difficult process. A weapon's life does not end when fighting stops. Ocean dumping of unused bombs, ordnance, landmines, and chemical weapons has long been common practice for many nations, and it has created lasting hazards. Unexploded ordnance, the bombs, land mines, and naval mines that failed to detonate when employed, can stay dangerous for years or decades. Nuclear terrorism became a serious concern after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the prospect of loose nukes; that particular risk may have receded, but similar situations could arise again. The arms industry that produces all of this is global, spanning research, engineering, production, and servicing of military material. According to the research institute SIPRI, the arms sales of the world's 100 largest private arms-producing and military services companies totaled $420 billion in 2018. The same imagination that built these tools also dreams up new ones, and science fiction keeps inventing exotic arms, from the phaser of Star Trek to the lightsaber and blaster of Star Wars, some of which have already crossed from fiction into reality.