Chemical Weapons

Devices that use chemicals to inflict death or injury. Chemical weapons can be dispensed using bombs, artillery shells, aircraft sprayers, or missiles carrying hundreds of small bomblets that are spread over a large area when they are ejected from canisters. Chemical weapons have typically been used in large-scale warfare by organized armies. However, the prospect of the use of chemical weapons by terrorists against civilian populations raises new problems and fears.

The Use of Chemical Agents in Warfare

Like their biological counterparts, chemical weapons have a long history. Early historians documented the use of smoke and incendiary chemicals against cities during the Greek and Roman eras. The first large-scale use of modern chemical agents in warfare took place during World War I, when the German Army launched a surprise attack with chlorine gas against French troops in 1915. The effects were immediate and horrendous as thousands of troops choked in the deadly green cloud. The attack touched off an immediate round of measures and countermeasures, and soon the French and their British allies were using gases of their own against the Germans. Chemists manufactured weapons such as mustard gas (so named because of its faint odor), which burns and blisters any tissue exposed to it, and phosgene, a deadly choking gas. By the time the war ended in 1918, chemical warfare had caused more than 100,000 deaths.

Most military planners regarded chemical weapons with distaste because they did not mesh well with the traditional codes of arms and warfare. After World War I, the general revulsion felt by many leaders toward the use of chemical weapons was reflected in the Geneva Convention of 1925, signed by all the World War I combatants except Russia. This treaty banned the use of chemical or biological agents in warfare, but it did not ban the manufacture or possession of these weapons. Many nations continued to keep them stockpiled for possible use and to deter their use by others.

Italy used chemical weapons in Ethiopia during the mid-1930s, but these weapons were not used on a large scale in World War II, with the exception of the Nazis' use of poison gas at extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau to murder most of the Jewish population of occupied Europe. The Japanese also conducted experiments with chemical and biological weapons on prisoners of war. Most experts believe that it was only fear of massive retaliation in kind that kept these weapons from being used on a large scale in World War II.

Egypt used chemical weapons in Yemen during the 1960s, and Iraq used them against Kurdish dissident groups in its own territory and in the Iran-Iraq War during the early 1980s, but these weapons do not appear to have been used extensively in warfare or the suppression of dissidents since that time.

In 1993, most nations signed the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons (CWC). This represented a major advance because, unlike the 1925 Geneva Convention, the CWC requires nations to destroy their existing stockpiles under rigorous international control. The CWC signatories are now engaged in that process.

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