Chemical weapon

Template:TOC-right A chemical weapon is a chemical, with a delivery system that can deliver the agent in militarily significant concentrations, the primary effect of which is to injure or kill through poisoning. While explosives and incendiaries are indeed chemical compounds, since their major military effect is through blast or heat, they are not considered chemical weapons.

The production and use of chemical weapons is internationally banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention. Historically, the most extensive use of lethal chemical weapons was in the First World War, although they were used sporadically in counterinsurgency, or in the Second World War Japanese campaign against China. The gassing of the Kurdish people by Saddam Hussein is another well known example.

History

While there were proposals, for example, for the use of chemical weapons in the American Civil War, the first large-scale use was in World War I.

World War I

See World War I, poison gas

Interwar

After years of agitation by women's groups in Europe and the U.S. (led by Jane Addams). the 1925 Geneva protocol banned poison gas as an illegal weapon of mass destruction. Nevertheless in the pacifistic decade of the 1920s, dire predictions struck fear worldwide that the next war would see long-range bombers gassing millions of civilians in the large cities. Technologically that was quite impossible (it would take hundreds of thousands of bomber sorties to gas New York City or London), but the fears presaged the nightmares in the 1960s about nuclear weapons that were all too true. Apart from chemists who insisted that gas was far more humane than high explosives, the military did not want chemical warfare. It therefore acquiesced in the international consensus reached in the 1920s that poison gas was an illegal and immoral weapon of mass destruction. Nations pledged never to use it first--but they nevertheless prepared masks and their own stocks of poison in case they needed to retaliate. Since 1918 gas has occasionally been used in remote areas against civilians or soldiers with no protection. Since 1918, no nation has used poison gas against a foe that had masks or gas of its own. During World War II the Nazis experimented with killings using carbon monoxide, but switched to a special purpose poison called Zyklon B, the poison gas used to murder millions of Jews in the Holocaust.

World War II

Japanese forces used chemical and biological weapons in China, and Italy used chemical weapons against Ethiopia.

Winston Churchill's history of WWII shows he intended to use mustard gas against the beaches if the Germans invaded. The United States Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that chemical weapons be used against the Japanese garrison of Iwo Jima before the invasion, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally denied the request.

Outside China, the worst exposure was an accident. The U.S. had sent mustard gas bombs to Europe, to be used only in retaliation for a German attack. They were still on the ammunition ship SS John Harvey, moored in the harbor of Bari, Italy. On December 2, 1944, German bombers made a night attack on what Germany simply regarded as a concentration of Allied supplies and shipping. Medical personnel were unaware that the smoke and surface oil slick contained mustard; they not only did not treat for mustard poisoning, but, concerned about hypothermia, wrapped victims, still contaminated in oil, with blankets, increasing the exposure. There were at least 59 military deaths, and almost certainly some in civilian areas affected by the smoke.

Vietnam

The U.S. made fairly routine use of the "riot control agent" CS in clearing enemy tunnels and bunkers. While CS is considered a nonlethal agent, the safety in a confined space is not fully understood.

There was widespread use of a defoliant mixture called Agent Orange. While the actual defoliants were in regular agricultural use and not especially toxic, a number of batches contained a then-undetectable quantity of extremely toxic dioxn.

Types

Choking gases

• Chlorine
• Phosgene

Blood gases

• Hydrogen cyanide
• Cyanogen chloride

Vesicants

• Sulfur mustard
• Nitrogen mustard

Nerve agents

• Binaries

G-agents

• Tabun (GA)
• Sarin (GB)
• Soman (GD)

Significance in terrorism

• Aum shinryo