History of Chemical Weapons

Chemical warfare involves the use of chemical agents (not living organisms) in order to kill or incapacitate an enemy. The use of chemical weapons in battle came to general notice in the First World War (1914-1918). Commercial chemicals were used against enemy troops. As these were commonly used substances, the likely effect on people was almost certainly known.

The method of delivery evolved as the war developed. The Germans initially opened cans of chlorine gas when the wind was blowing in the right direction for them. The huge gas cloud would then drift towards the Allied troops. In the next development, the French put phosgene into a standard shell and this became the common method of delivery. Although the Germans were doing most of the work on chemical weapons, the British and French used an awful lot of gas shells. In 1917, the Germans first used Mustard gas.

When details of the appalling suffering caused by these weapons became known, some governments began moves to ban them. In 1925, the League of Nations (an early forerunner of the present United Nations) met in Geneva. They agreed what is known as the Geneva Protocol. The full title is: “Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare”. The protocol was by no means perfect and did not actually ban the manufacture or threat to use chemical weapons nor say what would happen if any country broke the protocol. And some countries, including the United States, only agreed that they would not use such weapons first but reserved the right to use them in retaliation.

Although no chemical weapons were used in the Second World War (1939-1945), many countries on both sides had huge stockpiles of them. Fortunately they stayed locked away. Before the war, they had been used by Italy in what is now Ethiopia and by Japan in their war against China. After the war, the British, Russians and others took away stocks found in Germany and began production plants of their own.

The 1950s and 1960s saw continuing development of chemical weapons, including non-lethal weapons such as CS gas, developed and first used by the British, for use in riot control. Nerve gases were developed out of research on insecticides. During the Vietnam war, the United States used ‘Agent Orange’ to destroy the vegetation concealing the North Vietnamese; this contained the chemical dioxin as an impurity, which caused many deaths and deformities. Many stocks of chemical weapons were destroyed during the 1980s but there were also reports of their use in a number of countries. The most famous of these was the attack by Iraq on the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988.

After 12 years of negotiations, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was adopted in Geneva in 1992. This is a much tougher treaty than the one of 1925. It has been signed and is in force in 164 countries. To quote the United Nations:

“The CWC is the first disarmament agreement negotiated within a multilateral framework that provides for the elimination of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction under universally applied international control”.

The CWC does not cover the use of CS and similar gases when used for law enforcement.

In 1995 members of the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult attacked the Tokyo subway system releasing sarin, a deadly nerve agent. Twelve people were killed and around 6000 injured (although most of the injuries were psychological trauma victims). The sarin was carried onto subway trains and simultaneously released into the system. This was the most recent use of chemical weapons known. In 1998, the Japanese government found and destroyed the facilities used by Aum to produce the sarin.