Chemical warfare
[36] As of 13 December 2024, since the full scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian military claimed that over 2,000 of its soldiers have been hospitalised due to Russian gas attacks and 3 have died.
The droplet size used for persistent delivery goes up to 1 mm increasing the falling speed and therefore about 80% of the deployed agent reaches the ground, resulting in heavy contamination.
A shortage of shells limited the first use against the Russians at the Battle of Bolimów on January 31, 1915; the liquid failed to vaporize in the cold weather, and again the experiment went unnoticed by the Allies.
The first effective use were when the German forces at the Second Battle of Ypres simply opened cylinders of chlorine and allowed the wind to carry the gas across enemy lines.
Shortly after this "open canister" dissemination, French forces developed a technique for delivery of phosgene in a non-explosive artillery shell.
Each shell had a small gas payload and an area would have to be subjected to saturation bombardment to produce a cloud to match cylinder delivery.
Despite the limitations of central bursters, most nations use this method in the early stages of chemical weapon development, in part because standard munitions can be adapted to carry the agents.
There are other drawbacks as well; ideal deployment requires precise knowledge of aerodynamics and fluid dynamics, and because the agent must usually be dispersed within the boundary layer (less than 60–90 m or 200–300 ft above the ground), it puts pilots at risk.
For example, by modifying the properties of the liquid, its breakup when subjected to aerodynamic stress can be controlled and an idealized particle distribution achieved, even at supersonic speed.
Additionally, advances in fluid dynamics, computer modeling, and weather forecasting allow an ideal direction, speed, and altitude to be calculated, such that warfare agent of a predetermined particle size can predictably and reliably hit a target.
Ideal protection begins with nonproliferation treaties such as the CWC, and detecting, very early, the signatures of someone building a chemical weapons capability.
If all the preventive measures fail and there is a clear and present danger, then there is a need for detection of chemical attacks,[44] collective protection,[45][46][47] and decontamination.
Since industrial accidents can cause dangerous chemical releases (e.g., the Bhopal disaster), these activities are things that civilian, as well as military, organizations must be prepared to carry out.
Civilian authorities dealing with an attack or a toxic chemical accident will invoke the Incident Command System, or local equivalent, to coordinate defensive measures.
[47] There are many instances of the use of chemical weapons in battles documented in Greek and Roman historical texts; the earliest example was the deliberate poisoning of Kirrha's water supply with hellebore in the First Sacred War, Greece, about 590 BC.
In 1997, future US Vice President Dick Cheney opposed the signing ratification of a treaty banning the use of chemical weapons, a recently unearthed letter shows.
In a letter dated April 8, 1997, then Halliburton-CEO Cheney told Sen. Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that it would be a mistake for America to join the convention.
In the following years, Albania, Libya, Russia, the United States, and India declared over 71,000 metric tons of chemical weapon stockpiles, and destroyed a third of them.
Under the terms of the agreement, the United States and Russia agreed to eliminate the rest of their supplies of chemical weapons by 2012, but ended up taking far longer to do so as shown in the previous and following section of this article.
Canadian funds are also being used for the operation of a Green Cross Public Outreach Office, to keep the civilian population informed on the progress made in chemical weapons destruction activities.
[63] As August 2013, 76 percent (30,500 tons) were destroyed,[64] and Russia leaves the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program, which partially funded chemical weapons destruction.
[68] The U.S. began stockpile reductions in the 1980s with the removal of outdated munitions and destroying its entire stock of 3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate (BZ or Agent 15) at the beginning of 1988.
In 1986 President Ronald Reagan made an agreement with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to remove the U.S. stockpile of chemical weapons from Germany.
[67] In the 1990 agreement, the U.S. and Soviet Union agreed to begin destroying their chemical weapons stockpiles before 1993 and to reduce them to no more than 5,000 agent tons each by the end of 2002.
The U.S. ratification allowed the U.S. to participate in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the organization based in The Hague that oversees implementation of the CWC.
[74] In 2019, the U.S. began to eliminate its chemical-weapon stockpile at the last of the nine U.S. chemical weapons storage facilities: the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky.
[76] The U.S. has maintained a "calculated ambiguity" policy that warns potential adversaries that a chemical or biological attack against the U.S. or its allies will prompt a "overwhelming and devastating" response.
[77] Although herbicidal warfare use chemical substances, its main purpose is to disrupt agricultural food production and/or to destroy plants which provide cover or concealment to the enemy.
[80][81][82] During the war, the U.S. fought the North Vietnamese and their allies in Laos and Cambodia, dropping large quantities of Agent Orange in each of those countries.
The U.S. has stated that Agent Orange was not widely used and therefore hasn't offered assistance to affected Cambodians or Laotians, and limits benefits American veterans and CIA personnel who were stationed there.
