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the United States at the urging of Captain Mahan who argued that not enough was known about the potential use of gas as a weapon to ban it and thus to place restrictions on the “genius” of U.S. citizens “in inventing and producing new weapons of war” was not justified. Besides, he said, being asphyxiated by gas could be no worse than four or five hundred sailors choking on seawater with only the remotest chance of rescue after their ships had been torpedoed by a submarine.
    The proposal to ban projectiles or explosives launched from the air also proved contentious. As early as the seventeenth century an Italian Jesuit, Francesco Lana de Terzi, had imagined a diabolical air machine that would fly over helpless civilian populations, lobbing flaming and explosive weapons upon their heads. A century later, in his book The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia , the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson asked: “What would be the security of the good, if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, nor mountains, nor sea, could afford security. A flight of northern savages might hover in the wind, and light with irrepressible violence upon the capital of a fruitful region.”
    The first major breakthrough in making such flying machines reality came in 1783 when a fashionable crowd in France watched a manned hot air balloon, built by the Montgolfier brothers and powered by a wood fire, take off and fly some five miles. Among the spectators was Benjamin Franklin who, when a French officer derided the balloon as a mere toy, amusing but useless, replied, “Of what use is a new-born baby?” The same year, another Frenchman, Jacques Charles, piloted the world’s first manned hydrogen-filled balloon which traveled over twenty miles in two hours. A few years later, during the Napoleonic Wars, people in southern England scanned the skies, alarmed by rumors of giant balloons crossing the Channel to deposit French soldiers, guns, and even horses on British soil.
    That never happened, but balloons found uses in warfare. During the American Civil War, a Union army Balloon Corps used tethered balloons for observation. A young German officer, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, took his first flight in a balloon in 1863, courtesy of the Union army. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) the French used balloons to convey people and mail out of a besieged Paris. By the time of the Hague Conference a more sophisticated “lighter than air” flying machine—the powered airship—was under development, pioneered by von Zeppelin who would give his name to it. By 1874 he had already decided that his craft “must have the dimensions of a big ship. The gas-chambers so calculated as to carry the machine . . . Elevation will then be obtained by starting the engine.”
    Von Zeppelin regarded war “as the main study of [his] life” and had pleaded with the German army to help fund his research into “dirigible balloons” as “a very important instrument in modern warfare” but had no success until 1896 when the endorsement of the Union of German Engineers persuaded the authorities to finance his building of a prototype on the shores of Lake Constance. On July 2, 1900—barely nine months after the end of the Hague Conference—the “mad count,” as the locals called him, would reveal his gargantuan creation to the world.
    Though delegates at the first Hague Conference were mostly skeptical about airships—and the even more embryonic airplanes—many were reluctant to restrict their countries’ options by agreeing to a ban on launching projectiles from the skies. Captain William Crozier, the U.S. Army’s representative, on Mahan’s advice objected to a prohibition unlimited by time, arguing that such weapons were untried and that the further development of dirigible airships or aircraft might make them valuable in warfare and in the long run shorten conflicts and spare