Chemical Warfare Establishment

Had there been a chemical warfare establishment in 1915 when the first gas attacks were made we would have been fully prepared with gases and protective masks and the army would have been trained in their use. This would have saved thousands of gas cases. The war might have easily have been shortened by six months or a year, and untold misery... might have been saved.1... 

All armies learned several lessons from this non-gas war. The phrase ffad Britain and the United States been prepared for war in 1936, there would not have been a war was taken as a self-evident truth.72 Certainly it was recognised that chemical warfare establishments, notably at Porton Down in the United Kingdom and Edgewood Arsenal in the United States, needed to be permanent organisations that concentrated on training, research and development, and chemical warfare preparedness. This lesson, from a slightly different angle, is reflected in the words of K.C. Royall, the US Under Secretary for War The better job you do, the less likely it is you will have to put to actual use the products of your work. 73... 

A second Welsh chemical warfare establishment was at Rhy-dymwyn, near Mold in Clwyd. Here, the Ministry of Supply built a gas factory which was joined, in 1942., by an even more secret installation an isotope-separation plant, part of the British project to create an atom bomb. The atomic plant employed over one hundred people, supervised by twenty Oxford scientists from the Clarendon Laboratory. Employees from one site were not allowed into the other, but as workers at both had to carry gas masks it was assumed by the local inhabitants that they were all engaged on the same project this, it was rumoured, was a scheme to manufacture synthetic rubber. 

Frank, Sir Charles (1911-1998) was born in Durban, South Africa (knighted 1977). He obtained his degrees from the University of Oxford. During World War II he worked for the Chemical Warfare Establishment at Porton Down and then for the scientific intelligence group at the Air Ministry. He moved to work on physics at the University of Bristol in 1946 he retired from Bristol in 1976, but remained active and shared a partitioned office with CBC in 1985/1986. In addition to dislocations, his interests included crystal growth, liquid crystals, nuclear physics, and even polymers. 

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Mines had already assumed responsibility for conducting research on chemical warfare and had enlisted the assistance of many chemists throughout the country. The Bureau s program was well established when it was placed for administrative purposes under the NRC s committee on noxious gases. 

Fortunately for us, we have not seen any recent situations where there was massive use of chemical warfare agents outside of the Kurdish regions of Iraq. The noticeable exceptions to this are the sites left over from WWI, and some training sites used by the various military establishments in the US, and Eastern Europe. There may be many other sites, but Tm just not aware of them. 

The Chemical Corps originally established the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) in 1918, motivated by the horrors of gas warfare that they witnessed during WW I. In 1922, it created a Medical Research Division. Its mission was to defend against chemical agents. 

Human experimentation appears to have been an integral part of the history of the U.S. Army chemical warfare (CW) research efforts until its suspension in 1975. On June 28, 1918, the President directed the establishment of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS). 

Somewhat surprisingly, following the end of the First World War, the Allied governments almost immediately seemed to forget what they had learned during the war about being prepared for future chemical warfare. The first major concerns for the chemical warfare detachments of the Allied forces then were to ensure they survived demobilisation. In both Britain and the United States cases were presented for the need for a permanent chemical warfare research establishment. In 1920 A.A. Fries proclaimed ... 

It seems that a major constraint on the initiation of chemical warfare during the early part of the war was both a lack of the necessary material capability among the belligerents, and a general disinclination to acquire it. The cause of this apparent apathy can be found in the attitude towards chemical warfare in the military establishments on the eve of war. Certainly it is clear that in several of the nations who would... 

In 1933 the Japanese established The Army Chemical Warfare School at Narashino, 21 miles east of Tokyo. The 11-month course ran for 12 years and turned out over 3000 chemical warfare officers for the Japanese Imperial Army. There is little doubt that from 1937 onwards the Japanese made extensive use of poison gas in their war against the Chinese. 

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