Chemical weapons and the United Kingdom

The use of poison gas was suggested by Winston Churchill and others in Mesopotamia during the interwar period, and also considered in World War II, although it appears that they were not actually used in these conflicts.

Despite the rapid technical developments that occurred in the production of specialised agents, chemical weapons suffered from diminishing effectiveness as the war progressed because of the corresponding sophistication of the protective equipment and training adopted by both sides.

[6] After the war, the Royal Air Force dropped diphenylchloroarsine, an irritant agent designed to cause uncontrollable coughing, on Bolshevik troops in 1919,.

Douglas said that interdepartmental miscommunication within the contemporary British administration, including a secretarial letter erroneously stating gas had been used which was later withdrawn and corrected, was responsible for later academic confusion.

[9] It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

[10] Britain signed and ratified the Geneva Gas Protocol in 1930, which banned the use of toxic gases and bacteria in war but not the development and production of such weapons.

[14] General Brooke, in command of British anti-invasion preparations of World War II said that in the event of a German landing, he "had every intention of using sprayed mustard gas on the beaches" in an annotation in his diary.

[14] In April/June 1939 the Alyn Valley in Rhydymwyn was surveyed by the Department of Industrial Planning on behalf of the Ministry of Supply and ICI, which was tasked with managing this programme.

To enable Britain to retaliate quickly if Nazi Germany used chemical weapons, a number of Forward Filling Depots were built so that the mustard-gas stockpile should be dispersed and ready to use.

[19] In July 1944, fearing that rocket attacks on London would get even worse and that he would only use chemical weapons if it was "life or death for us" or would "shorten the war by a year",[20] Churchill wrote a secret memorandum asking his military chiefs to "think very seriously over this question of using poison gas."

He said: "it is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint," and that: I should be prepared to do anything [Churchill's emphasis] that would hit the enemy in a murderous place.

They argued that this would be to the Allies' disadvantage in France both for military reasons and because it might "seriously impair our relations with the civilian population when it became generally known that chemical warfare was first employed by us."

[23][24] Novelist Robert Harris and broadcaster Jeremy Paxman argue that as soon as another weapon of mass destruction – the atomic bomb – became available, and offered a chance to shorten the war, the Americans used it.

"[25] As the end of the war was sufficiently in sight, British poison gas production was terminated following a request from the Chiefs of Staff Committee in February 1945.

[26] In 1943, the British Ministry of Aircraft Production opened discussions with the South African government, and then with the colonial administration of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), in an attempt to find a suitable site to test the weapons under the codename FORENSIC.