At the outbreak of World War I , the Germans began actively to develop chemical weapons. In October , the Germans placed some small tear-gas canisters in shells that were fired at Neuve Chapelle, France, but Allied troops were not exposed. In January , the Germans fired shells loaded with xylyl bromide, a more lethal gas, at Russian troops at Bolimov on the eastern front.
Because of the wintry cold, most of the gas froze, but the Russians nonetheless reported more than 1, killed as a result of the new weapon.
On April 22, , the Germans launched their first and only offensive of the year. The Germans targeted four miles of the front with the wind-blown poison gas and decimated two divisions of French and Algerian colonial troops. The Allied line was breached, but the Germans, perhaps as shocked as the Allies by the devastating effects of the poison gas, failed to take full advantage, and the Allies held most of their positions.
A second gas attack, against a Canadian division, on April 24, pushed the Allies further back, and by May they had retreated to the town of Ypres. The introduction of poison gas, however, would have great significance in World War I. Immediately after the German gas attack at Ypres, France and Britain began developing their own chemical weapons and gas masks. With the Germans taking the lead, an extensive number of projectiles filled with deadly substances polluted the trenches of World War I.
Mustard gas, introduced by the Germans in , blistered the skin, eyes, and lungs, and killed thousands. In reality, defenses against poison gas usually kept pace with offensive developments, and both sides employed sophisticated gas masks and protective clothing that essentially negated the strategic importance of chemical weapons. Future president Harry S. Truman was the captain of a U.
In all, more than , tons of chemical weapons agents were used in World War I, some , troops were injured, and almost 30, died, including 2, Americans. In the years following World War I, Britain, France, and Spain used chemical weapons in various colonial struggles, despite mounting international criticism of chemical warfare. In , the Geneva Protocol of banned the use of chemical weapons in war but did not outlaw their development or stockpiling. Most major powers built up substantial chemical weapons reserves.
In the s, Italy employed chemical weapons against Ethiopia, and Japan used them against China. In World War II , chemical warfare did not occur, primarily because all the major belligerents possessed both chemical weapons and the defenses—such as gas masks, protective clothing, and detectors—that rendered them ineffectual. In addition, in a war characterized by lightning-fast military movement, strategists opposed the use of anything that would delay operations.
It is perhaps no surprise that according to historian Ute Deichmann, years later Hermann and his wife declined an invitation to attend a scientific memorial for Haber.
The father-son relationship never recovered. Haber obeyed, but the two simply could not get along. He deeply identified as a German and used his skills and intelligence to benefit his country in war and in peace.
His Nobel Prize gave him fame, and he took pride in his status as a war hero. Yet by the end of his life his country saw him as little more than a dispensable Jew, even though Haber had converted to Christianity as a young man. In Hitler ordered Jews removed from positions in the civil service. After trying but failing to help many of his Jewish colleagues, Haber stepped down from his founding position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry.
He spent the last year of his life wandering around Europe heartbroken—both literally and figuratively. He died in Basel, in , of a heart attack. The German soldier with the worrisome tale was captured by Allied forces in Tunisia on May 11, Yet British intelligence officials doubted the truth of the report and did nothing—a blunder that could have had lethal repercussions for the Allies in World War II. The Nazis also had reconfigured the Dyhernfurth forced-labor camp in present-day Poland to produce thousands of metric tons of tabun.
Although many senior military officers encouraged Hitler to deploy their powerful new chemical weapon, he waffled, likely for two reasons. First, as a victim of gas poisoning during World War I, Hitler recoiled from using chemical poisons on troops—though he had no qualms about deploying poisons on concentration-camp prisoners.
Second, German military intelligence was unsure whether the Allies had also discovered nerve agents since some of the foundational research had been done in England. Any Allied retaliation on German civilians could have been catastrophic. President Franklin D. Yet the Germans overestimated Allied capabilities: the Allies had no nerve poisons at their disposal. The Germans had only acquired the new family of chemical weapons by serendipity.
He was aiming to create an insecticide that would allow Germany to increase its food production. But after Schrader nearly poisoned himself and his lab mates with mere drops of his newly synthesized insecticide, the company realized that tabun was better suited to military applications and forwarded the discovery to German military researchers.
Schrader experienced eye irritation, pupils constricted to pinpoints that dimmed the surrounding world, a runny nose, and shortness of breath. Luckily for him he avoided the next stage of nerve-agent poisoning: intense sweating, stomach cramping, muscle twitching, a loss of consciousness, and asphyxiation.
By a team of German military scientists developing tabun had also designed another nerve agent called sarin that was six times more potent than tabun. The German Nobel laureate Richard Kuhn was called on to help discern why the new poisons were so deadly. He soon discovered that these nerve agents interfere with a critical enzyme, cholinesterase. In the process Kuhn also discovered a third nerve agent: soman. Dyhernfurth prisoners also were forced to travel alongside train shipments of the nerve agents—effectively used as human canaries to detect leaks of the poison gas.
At the end of the war, after two-and-a-half years of production, the factory at Dyhernfurth had produced almost 12, metric tons of tabun. Some 10, tons were loaded into bombs for the Luftwaffe, and another 2, tons were encased in artillery shells.
In February , as the Russians marched toward Berlin, the Nazis quickly abandoned the Dyhernfurth factory. Hundreds of forced laborers were transferred by foot and in open wagons to another concentration camp, Mauthausen.
Two-thirds of them died from exposure to freezing temperatures. The Gestapo tracked down the survivors at Mauthausen and killed them to get rid of witnesses. Desperate to prevent the Red Army from capturing nerve-agent know-how, the Luftwaffe tried and failed to destroy the Dyhernfurth factory from the air. British and U. They hunted down German scientists familiar with nerve-agent production and used their know-how to create and stockpile these new weapons. Thus began a chemical arms race that for decades would parallel the nuclear arms race.
I believe it to be rather unlikely that any man in his right mind would have volunteered for such an experiment. On May 6, , Ronald Maddison, a year-old British soldier, agreed to participate in a medical experiment at the Porton Down military research facility. The promised compensation was tempting: a three-day pass and 15 shillings, which Maddison wanted to use to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend.
But Porton Down officials did not disclose that they intended to use him as a human guinea pig to study the effects of the deadly nerve agent sarin. Within half an hour Maddison was drenched in sweat and had lost his hearing; he then fell unconscious. At this point scientists injected him with atropine, a treatment for nerve agents, and took him to the hospital; but Maddison soon stopped breathing and was pronounced dead.
Officials at the highest levels rushed to cover up the death. Must not be published. Also problematic was the fact that many States that ratified the Protocol reserved the right to use prohibited weapons against States that were not party to the Protocol or as retaliation in kind if chemical weapons were used against them.
Poison gasses were used during World War II in Nazi concentration camps and in Asia, although chemical weapons were not used on European battlefields.
The Cold War period saw significant development, manufacture and stockpiling of chemical weapons. By the s and 80s, an estimated 25 States were developing chemical weapons capabilities. But since the end of World War II, chemical weapons have reportedly been used in only a few cases, notably by Iraq in the s against the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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.
In order to prepare for the entry-into-force of the CWC, a Preparatory Commission of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons OPCW was established with the responsibility to prepare detailed operation procedures and to put into place the necessary infrastructure for the permanent implementing agency provided for in the Convention.
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