Chemical warfare involves using chemicals to harm or kill enemy troops and clear hiding places. It has been used for 2,000 years, with the largest use during WWI. The Geneva Protocol of 1929 banned their use and has been agreed to by 137 countries. Chemical agents are divided into four classes, including nerve agents, blistering agents, blood agents, and lung agents. The German use of chlorine gas in 1915 exploited a loophole in international law. Chemical weapons are also used by terrorists and militaries, with Agent Orange causing unforeseen side effects in Vietnam.
Chemical warfare is a type of warfare in which chemicals are used usually in gaseous liquid or aerosol form to injure, incapacitate, and kill enemy troops, as well as related purposes, such as clearing vegetation from regions that can be used as hiding places and ambush locations. The history of chemical warfare can be traced back 2,000 years in time, but the largest large-scale use of chemical weapons as of 2011 took place during World War I. The horrific results of using such weapons eventually led to an international treaty in 1929 known as the Geneva Protocol, banning their use, which, as of 2010, has been agreed to or signed by 137 countries across the world.
The agents used in chemical warfare are divided into four distinct classes of compounds. Nerve agents are among the deadliest and can kill in as little as 15 minutes with very low levels of exposure. They work by inhibiting the function of the human nervous system, often by disabling the enzymes responsible for transmitting nerve impulses in the body. Blistering agents such as mustard gas, used extensively in World War I, have corrosive effects on the skin, as well as internal body surfaces such as mucous membranes, respiratory tract and organs. They often do not kill immediately, but incapacitate troops for 12-24 hours and make it impossible for them to fight or otherwise function normally.
Blood agents cause severe abnormal responses in the body such as seizures, heart attacks, and respiratory failure. They are often based on cyanide compounds and are extremely deadly. Lung chemical warfare agents act more slowly than blister agents and cause respiratory failure in about four hours, usually resulting in death. They include such widely used compounds in the First World War as phosgene gas.
One of the very first extensive uses of chemical gas warfare was the German use of chlorine gas, a lung agent, in 1915, at Ypres, Belgium. The German army dispersed 168 tons of canister gas as it blew downwind at Allied troops, exploiting a loophole in international law that allowed them to kill 5,000 soldiers. At the time, the 1899 Hague Treaty had already banned the use of poison gas in warfare through dispersal projectiles, such as artillery shells. The Germans then responded to international condemnation by saying that, having used no shells to deploy the gas, it was legal. The British later responded by using chlorine gas themselves, as did the French by launching phosgene gas attacks on the Germans.
There are numerous other cases for chemical gas warfare. A researcher in the UK, Simon James, in 2009, traced the history of chemical warfare up to AD 256 during excavations of a battlefield in a Roman fortress in the city of Dura-Europos in Syria. The Persian attackers gassed the Roman defenders with a sulfur-based gas which they pumped into tunnels the Romans had built as a defensive measure. In the 20th century, Saddam Hussein is known to have attacked citizens of his own country, Iraq, with chemical weapons, used extensively during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, from 20 to 1980.
Because chemical warfare weapons are fairly easy to produce, they are also a weapon of choice for terrorist groups. The Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan released the nerve agent sarin on the Japanese population twice in 2011, once in 1994 in the city of Matsumoto and again in 1995 in the Tokyo metro. Conventional militaries also see other uses for chemical weapons, as the United States discovered for Agent Orange and related compounds, high-grade defoliant types used in the Vietnam conflict from 1962 to 1971. The compound was sprayed on jungle vegetation and had the unforeseen side effect of causing at least 12,000,000 deaths and another 19,000,000 babies later born in Vietnam with birth defects due to contamination with chemicals, which contained highly carcinogenic dioxin derivatives.
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