Editing Weapon (section)

==== Interwar ====
This period of innovation in weapon design continued in the interwar period (between WWI and WWII) with the continuous evolution of weapon systems by all major industrial powers. The major armament firms were [[Schneider-Creusot]] (based in France), [[Škoda Works]] (Czechoslovakia), and [[Vickers]] (Great Britain). The 1920s were committed to [[disarmament]] and the outlawing of war and poison gas, but rearmament picked up rapidly in the 1930s. The munitions makers responded nimbly to the rapidly shifting strategic and economic landscape. The main purchasers of munitions from the big three companies were Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey{{snd}}and, to a lesser extent, Poland, Finland, the Baltic States, and the Soviet Union.<ref>Jonathan A. Grant, ''Between Depression and Disarmament: The International Armaments Business, 1919–1939'' (Cambridge UP,  2018). [https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53757 Online review]</ref>

===== Criminalizing poison gas =====
Realistic critics understood that war could not really be outlawed, but its worst excesses might be banned. [[Poison gas]] became the focus of a worldwide crusade in the 1920s. Poison gas did not win battles, and the generals did not want it. The 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. The "Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous, or Other Gases and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare", also known as the [[Geneva Protocol]], was issued in 1925 and was accepted as policy by all major countries. In 1937, poison gas was manufactured in large quantities but not used except against nations that lacked modern weapons or gas masks.<ref>{{cite book|author1=Eric Croddy|author2=James J. Wirtz|title=Weapons of Mass Destruction: An Encyclopedia of Worldwide Policy, Technology, and History|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZzlNgS70OHAC&pg=PA140|year=2005|publisher=ABC-CLIO|page=140|isbn=978-1-85109-490-5}}</ref><ref>Tim Cook,  "'Against God-Inspired Conscience': The Perception of Gas Warfare as a Weapon of Mass Destruction, 1915–1939." ''War & Society'' 18.1 (2000): 47–69.</ref>