Gary J. Bass,NYT
When it mattered most, the next war was too bad to suppose. In 1933, and the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany,an influential French author warned what might happen: A hundred planes each carrying a ton of asphyxiating shells would cover Paris with a gas sheet 20 meters high, all in an hour. To a French public preoccupied with aerial bombardment and chemical warfare, and much of the appeal of appeasing Nazi Germany was that the alternative was unthinkable. To justify selling out Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938,Neville Chamberlain played on similar fears among the British, emphasizing...
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