Chemical weapons deployment

The Alliance as a whole does not, and under the binary plan still would not, possess any offensive lethal chemical capability. Chemical weapons deployed by the US are not declared to NATO and remain under US national control. While the modernised stockpile might have improved the prospects of deterring Soviet attacks on US sectors of the front (although that, as we shall see, is debatable), it would be rash to assume that the deterrent effect applied equally to other Allied sectors unless there was a clear perception that the... 

Section 126 of the Department of Defense Authorization Act Fiscal Year 1988, signed 4 December 1987, states Chemical munitions of the United States stored in Europe on the date of enactment of this Act should not be removed from Europe unless such munitions are replaced contemporaneously with binary chemical munitions stationed on the soil of at least one European member nation of [NATO] . The Federal German authorities were adamant that the chemical weapons deployed there would be removed as promised. 

Paradoxical as it may seem, one can use chemical weapons to spare lives, rather than extinguish them. The world watched in fascination when the Russians, in November 2002, chose to deploy a relatively non-lethal chemical weapon in a Moscow theater. Inside were a few dozen Chechen rebels, armed with grenades and automatic weapons, holding hostage almost a thousand innocent Russian civilians. The terrorists were prepared to destroy everyone in the building if the Russians did not meet their demands. Fanatical and desperate, they were not afraid to die along with their victims. 

In a sense, then, the Iran-Iraq War reintroduced chemical warfare on a large scale shattering any belief that the use of such weapons had been successfully contained by international agreements. By deploying mustard gas and tabun the Iraqis broke a taboo and therefore made it easier for future combatants to find justification for chemical warfare. Nevertheless, despite Iraq s use of chemical weapons the war failed to reach a military conclusion and in August 1988, Iraq finally accepted a United Nations ceasefire plan and the war ended with little gained from the original objectives. 

The Butler Report, released in July 2004, strongly criticised the British government s report on Iraq s WMD. Lord Butler made it clear in the report that the claim that Iraq possessed chemical weapons ready for deployment depended on hearsay, at second-hand, from a source who turned out to be unreliable. The Butler committee concluded that they were struck by the relative thinness of the intelligence base... especially the inferential nature of much of it. 78 Downing Street saw exactly the same intelligence and yet came to the conclusion that it established beyond doubt that Iraq possessed real WMD.79 As Hans Blix observed a week before the Butler Report, the British government refused to think critically about the evidence, even when he reported that 500 searches had produced no evidence of WMD.80... 

The purpose of this book is to contribute to informed debate by providing an analysis of the development and deployment of chemical weapons from 700 bc to the present day. In Chapter 1 the groundwork for this, which follows a brief appraisal of historical prededents, is laid in a discussion of chemical warfare during the First World War, from which certain aspects are taken up and their development over subsequent years described. Chapter 2 examines the First World War in detail since it remains the most significant experience of the chemical threat. It contains some technical descriptions and a number of wider themes that have present-day relevance. One such theme is the nature of the whole... 

Some may argue that it was the existence of the Geneva Convention that prevented chemical weapon use in the Second Word War but the size of the stockpiles in various countries does not really support this argument. When one looks at the size of the US and USSR stockpiles declared under the Chemical Weapons Convention 1997, it becomes apparent that very large quantities were considered necessary to be militarily effective. There is such a significant logistic burden in deploying such stocks that any commander would like to be confident about the outcome. This may be another reason why chemicals were not used. 

During the Cold War era, both the United States and the Soviet Union had deployed a large quantity of chemical weapons in their overseas bases. See Robert E. Harkavy, Bases Abroad The Global Foreign Military Presence (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 282-284. 

Citizens in China have already demonstrated awareness of issues surrounding the abandoned chemical weapons on their territory. The CWC assigns responsibility for the disposal of abandoned weapons to the state that produced and originally deployed them. In the 1940s, Japanese forces abandoned a large number of chemical munitions in the northeast of China, the majority having been found in the Jilin and Heilong-... 

In the event of deployment of chemical weapons, emergency care providers will be at serious risk of exposure, and special respirators may be needed for additional protection. There are several types of respirators, each providing a different level of protection. 

The Matsumoto and Tokyo subway sarin attacks were wake-up calls to NBC terrorism. These incidents proved that terrorists could actually deploy chemical weapons and weapons of mass destruction. We have previously analyzed and reported on the Tokyo subway sarin attack from the viewpoint of clinical medicine (Okumura el al., 1996,1998a, 1999). Here, by including the findings of the court trials and information related to the attacks that has become available, we review the experiences and lessons learned from the Tokyo subway sarin attack in the hope that doing so will improve measures against chemical terrorism. 

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