Throughout history there has been continued use of chemicals in warfare. Ancient armies burned painted wood to create smoke screens or to force enemies from hiding places. Two thousand years before Christ, Indian soldiers used smoke screens, incendiary weapons, and toxic fumes in battle. The Spartans used sulfur dioxide against their rivals, the Athenians, during the Peloponnesian War in 429 b.c. by burning pitch and sulfur on wood to create poisonous sulfur smoke near an enemy city. The Byzantine's were able to destroy enemy ships by using Greek fire, a chemical mixture that burst into flames when it came into contact with water. During the Middle Ages, a group of Christians saved Belgrade from advancing Turks by dipping rags in poison, lighting them, and fanning the fumes at the enemy. Chemical warfare was put to greater use during World War I. When England set up a naval blockade that prevented Germany from importing nitrates to use in manufacturing explosives, Germany turned to its chemical industry. Fritz Haber, a chemist who had devised a way to make nitrogen into ammonia for use as fertilizers or explosives, was appointed the head of Germany's chemical warfare service. The naval blockade convinced many Germans that they had to turn to chemicals to continue the war. Haber devised a way to use chlorine, released from cylinders, to form a gas cloud that would blow onto the Allied front lines. The German army introduced this weapon on April 22, 1915, by releasing 160 tons of liquid chlorine from nearly 6,000 pressurized cylinders over Ypres, Belgium. The Allied soldiers were totally unprepared, and the casualties were horrendous: 5,000 dead and 10,000 injured. Both sides worked on developing better delivery systems, which included artillery shells. Haber created another chemical called phosgene, an asphyxiating gas that had delayed effects on those who inhaled it, and later created mustard gas, an agent that produces severe blisters on all body surfaces. In addition, mustard gas remained on the ground and equipment where it could cause casualties long after the original attack. Unlike chlorine and phosgene, mustard gas was so vicious that there was no way to effectively defend against it. During World War II newer and more powerful chemicals were created for use on battlefields.
In Germany, Dr. Gerhardt Schrader, a chemist, was developing ways to destroy insects when by accident he came upon a compound that proved highly toxic to mammals. It was called tabun, the first of the nerve gases. When tabun was inhaled or absorbed through the skin, it affected the human nervous system. This substance was very effective; it killed its victim in minutes, while phosgene and mustard gas took hours. Soon Schrader developed a second nerve agent, sarin. Because the Germans had erroneously assumed that the Allies had access to such weapons, the military never did use it during the war. The Japanese, however, had assembled a huge arsenal of both chemical and biological weapons between 1930 and 1945, and these were used in Manchuria. After World War II, the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union included the development of deadlier chemical weapons. The United States developed and used Agent Orange, a defoliant, in the Vietnam War in hopes of depriving the enemy of hiding places in forests and jungles. Both Iran and Iraq built up chemical weapons arsenals in the 1980s. These weapons of mass destruction are presumably held as a check to the nuclear threat of Israel and the United States. Iraq used its chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurdish minority in the 1980s, and threatened chemical attack during the Persian Gulf War. Other small nations, including Libya and Syria, are known to have chemical weapons arsenals. The growing reliance on chemical weapons in the 1990s may be because they are cheaper and easier to procure than nuclear weapons.
In Japan in 1995 a religious cult released the chemical agent sarin in the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve people and injuring another 3,000. This was the most damaging terrorist use of chemical weapons to date, inspiring fear worldwide that other splinter groups might make similar attacks. Beginning in 1997, the Domestic Preparedness Program of the United States Defense Department began spending millions of dollars to stage mock chemical attack exercises in more than a hundred U.S. cities, to prepare emergency workers for chemical or biological attack. Many terrorism experts worldwide agree that the knowledge and materials to build chemical weapons is becoming easier to obtain, legitimizing fears that more chemical attacks may take place in the future.
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