Experiencing the Consequences of Armed Conflict

The war in Ukraine against Russian aggressors and the Israeli invasion of Gaza in response to the unprovoked attacks by Hamas on Jewish civilians have provided an education on the public health toll of modern warfare as well as its impacts on the environment—including both precious resources and critical infrastructure.

The environmental consequences of these wars are potentially large. Russian president Vladmir Putin has threatened the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and his military has targeted civilian neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, water systems, and power plants. These last include nuclear energy facilities, risking dangerous releases—see the excellent article on this topic by Erika Weinthal of Duke University and ELI Senior Attorney Carl Bruch in the April 2023 ELR.

The front lines in Ukraine have featured a lot of high-tech warfare but in the end look more like World War I—with the Russians entrenched and wrapped with barbed wire and land mines—and large gains in territory are similarly rare. When peace is restored, these areas will be largely off-limits for generations. Similarly, it will take a major rebuilding effort to restore civilian life in Gaza.

“Which raises a question which has been asked since wars began thousands of years ago,” writes blogger Lucian Truscott IV, a former Army officer educated at West Point who became a journalist. In the context of Putin’s war, he asks, “What does the ‘winner’ intend to do with a place they have completely destroyed in the process of ‘winning’?” The same question could be asked about the future of the rubble that used to be apartments, shops, and businesses in much of Gaza.

For more than a century, I and my forebears whom I was privileged to know and learn from have been exposed to war in many ugly contexts outside of actual combat. Many Americans alive today have even worse stories to tell about their families’ sacrifices, particularly war veterans. Their consensus no doubt is that war is humanity’s greatest failure.

Here is what my family has seen. The picture on this page was taken by my grandfather to be, John Dujack, a World War I navy veteran who was serving as a cook on the Winona, an American freighter. The photo shows the first night of the Great Fire of Smyrna, which burned for four days in September 1922 in this eastern Mediterranean port. The fire and the concurrent rampage wiped out its Orthodox Christian communities, composed mostly of Greeks and Armenians, that had been living there since ancient times.

According to historian James Marketos, writing in The Blight of Asia, accounts differ but the fire and attendant events resulted in the deaths of up to 100,000 people, leaving the rest homeless. In Marketos’s estimation, it was the young century’s most visible act of ethnic cleansing, witnessed by a huge multinational fleet of warships and merchant vessels at anchor in the harbor. These included two American destroyers, one visible in the photo. Most of the foreign warships did little to help beyond rescuing their own nationals.

Trapped on the quay between the raging inferno and the sea were tens of thousands of civilians, including my grandmother to be, Noemi Terzian. Noemi had escaped the mass killings of Armenians during World War I and was attending college in Smyrna, until that night part of Greece. Fluent in English, she forged a note from the British admiral that got her passage on a row boat to the Winona.

Instead of a load of figs and tobacco bound for New York, the freighter took hundreds of refugees across the Aegean Sea to Athens. How she and John met that awful night and two years later reunited and were married at the U.S. consulate in Alexandria, Egypt, they never quite said. But as indicated by what they did tell us, and by my grandfather’s photo caption in his scrapbook, they were vocal about who caused the fire—Turkish nationalists, led by the figure known to history as Ataturk, who renamed the city Izmir and rebuilt on the ashes.

By marrying John, Noemi became immune to the immigration act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1924, with its strict national quotas and ban on Asians, and the two settled in New York, where my father was born two years later.

My maternal grandparents and my mother also were refugees from the horrors of genocide. Walter Wassermann was a Ph.D. chemist and owner of a vinegar distillery in Munich that, because he was Jewish, was taken over by the Nazis under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. A few months later, he took his wife, son, and children—including my mother to be—on a ski trip to Switzerland, where upon arrival they booked passage to New York. They were four of precisely 27,000 Germans the U.S. State Department allowed to immigrate that year under the restrictive 1924 legislation, according to data in Smithsonian magazine. Almost all of my Jewish family, the ones who stayed behind, would be killed in the Nazi death camps.

The ensuing conflict, World War II, involved the U.S. citizenry in a war as never before. Millions of men served as draftees in the armed forces, plus numerous female volunteers were engaged as nurses and auxiliaries. Factories were turned over to making tanks and planes, with women contributing to the labor force. Rationing was required for sugar, gasoline, rubber, cigarettes, and stockings. City centers had large pens for citizens to recycle metals needed for the war effort. Patriots bought war bonds to fund the U.S. military. Noemi joined the Army Signal Corps, working in its division devoted to cryptoanalysis. Walter served as an air-raid warden for his apartment building. In 1944, my father was drafted into the Army but escaped service overseas.

My father met my mother when he became a civilian again. The two were married in 1950. This was early in an era of brushfire wars involving U.S. troops, the most important being Korea and Vietnam, both fought with draftees and producing tens of thousands of dead U.S. service members. I too faced the draft during Vietnam but got lucky and drew a high lottery number. That war brought to public focus the environmental consequences of armed conflict. These famously included the dire effects on nature and humans of carcinogenic and mutagenic Agent Orange, a defoliant used to deny the enemy forest cover.

In the 1950s, my father briefly ended up working in the defense industry, where he was tasked with using the circular “Bomb Damage Effect Computer” pictured on this page. The idea was for war planners to calculate how many nuclear bombs, of various calibers, and exploded at various altitudes, would be needed to wipe out the Soviet Union’s built environment under various battle scenarios. He told me that they then calculated “megadeaths per megadollar,” a kind of cost-benefit analysis. It is no wonder that my generation grew up in constant fear of annihilation.

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 affected the schoolchildren of my New Jersey suburb—suddenly we had air raid drills. The nuclear threat only accelerated over the years, although the powers negotiated a limited test ban treaty forbidding atmospheric bursts—till then radioactive fallout fell on residents downwind of the tests.

The stress to citizens of mutually assured destruction—MAD—reached a peak in the Reagan administration, which ramped up both strategic and tactical nuclear missiles in response to perceived Soviet advances in rocket technology and deployment of frontline weapons in central Europe. Scientists began to worry about “nuclear winter,” a global cooling for several years following even a limited missile exchange, as dust particles from the explosions block sunlight and cause widespread hunger from crop failures.

Environmental factors have also figured in the conflicts the United States has fought since then. We went to war against Iraq in 1991, following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, yet President George H.W. Bush missed an opportunity to link the battle over oil resources to domestic consumption. Unlike in World War II, with its public campaigns against wasteful driving, he instead showed his lack of concern by motoring around in his racing boat while American troops—all volunteers now—fought to liberate oil fields. Iraq famously torched the wells during its retreat, but it never faced real consequences for war crimes or violations of international environmental laws.

President George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 under the pretext of seizing weapons of mass destruction, which of course are an environmental threat in their own right, had they existed. There was little public involvement. There was no draft. The costs of the war were made “off budget,” thus not contributing to the federal deficits. Instead of selling war bonds, as in World War II, or otherwise getting the citizens to pitch in, the younger Bush cut taxes even as military expenses skyrocketed.

Many Americans will still have stories to tell of the horrors of armed conflict in the last century, from their own experience or as told to them by their elders, family, and friends. And even solely within the memory of those alive today, war has resulted in tens of millions of deaths, tens of millions of refugees, and untold environmental destruction. The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are only the latest stories about the impact of war on public health and vital resources.

Notice & Comment is the editor’s column and represents his views.