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Not an answer but I think it's interesting to note that even in WW2, a 'total war', both sides held back some of their most deadly weapons.
The British and Americans had mass-manufactured anthrax and poison gas ready for use by their bombers, while the Germans had just invented nerve gas (sarin amongst other things). Neither ended up using them. Japan deployed bioweapons against China killing hundreds of thousands and considered using them against the US, before concluding that escalating the war at that late stage would not be advantageous.
One of the combat experiences about WWI is that the effect of chemical weapons in the battlefield environment were awful, but not decisive. With both sides prepared for the possibility, it raised the upper bound on human suffering without making your chance of victory any more certain. Chemical weapons were always fickle allies; they were very sensitive to changes in weather, they did unpredictable things, and ultimately if you were trying to use them to achieve some breakthrough you were inundating the areas you hoped to yourself capture.
There were various uses of chemical weapons against populations who could not fight back by the Germans and Japanese (moreso the latter), which was in many respects their "ideal" use case. But given the ability of both sides to be able to both manufacture large amounts of chemical weapons and deploy them against enemy civilian populations, and their marginal battlefield use, ultimately neither side saw them as practical.
But contingency planning and a German air raid led to the accidental discovery of chemotherapy, so that was cool.
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But we did use nukes. The difference being both sides had chemical weapons.
We also made heavy use of fire bombs in Germany and Japan, and I find it hard to believe only the Allied forces had that capability. From what I have read about the effects they sound as terrifying as chemical weapons but for some reason the ethics of using them are never discussed, especially in comparison to chemical and nuclear weapons. What is the difference? There was the lingering memory of The Great War where chemical weapons were deployed and condemned, so that certainly contributed. Fire has also been a component of war since mankind first sought to wage it, so perhaps packaging it in bombs did not seem like much of an escalation (though these were napalm bombs, which have uniquely nasty properties). From a strategic perspective, chemical weapons do not destroy materiel, and ostensibly the goal of strategic bombing is to destroy your opponents industry. Fire bombs do not share that issue, and American strategists liked them in Japan especially because of how effective they were at destroying (mostly wooden) Japanese structures - never mind the fact that they tested the bombs on a replica of a Japanese family home.
The development of the fire bombing campaign against Japan was a very late shift in the war; it started in February 1945 but really only got truly going in May. There were a number of unique circumstances that essentially only then made very low-level night bombing attacks viable, with B-29s literally stripped of all their defenses crammed to the gills with incendiaries.
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Well, believe it, because in practical terms, only they did at that scale. The germans attempted something similar with the Blitz in London, but it came nowhere near the heights of the Allied bombings late in the war. Partly due to doctrine, partly due to better technology, partly due to the fact that by then the Luftwaffe was on the defensive and badly worn down. In greater part because the long war had hardened feelings and the Blitz/Pearl Harbor had Britain and the US spoiling for revenge.
It is my contention that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo would not have been done or at least repeated if the Axis powers were witholding a similar threat. Germany bombed London when the Brits had no prayer of bombing Germany. Then, a couple years later, the Brits bombed Germany when they were unable to respond in kind. A few V2 rockets were all the germans could manage by then.
Not a technological barrier then but a tactical one. Agree on all counts.
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