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Chemical warfare is the use of non-explosive chemical agents (that are not themselves living organisms, that being biological warfare) to cause injury or death. The main types of agents used in chemical warfare are:
The use of defoliants such as Agent Orange is not considered part of chemical warfare for the intent of such chemicals is not to harm human beings but to destroy, partly or totally, specific forms of vegetation or all forms of vegetation. The toxic side effects of these chemicals on human beings are thus not covered by the various conventions and accords on chemical warfare.
As early as 1000 BCE the Chinese employed arsenical smoke in warfare. During the Peloponnesian War Spartans used noxious smoke against Athenian cities.
A New York school teacher, John Doughty, proposed the use of chlorine gas as a weapon in the American Civil War. Although it is widely speculated that the weapon was never used, poison gas claimed at least one causualty in the Civil War. John Sitzler, a drummer boy in the Union Army, was injured by chlorine gas. He died sometime after 1893 of lung damage from the gas. His wife, Emelia Pauline Langner Sitzler, was paid a United States Army pension as the widow of a casualty until her death.
The first major use of chemical warfare agents was during World War I, with the use of various agents including chlorine, mustard gas, and phosgene gas. They were not extensively used during World War II due to the fear of retaliation and because chemical weapons are of limited use in a mobile front in which their use would slow the advance of one's own troops. In addition chemical warfare requires supply from railroads which was available in the fixed fronts of World War I, but not the mobile fronts of World War II.
The Nazis used the chemical weapon Zyklon B, a derivative of hydrogen cyanide, to kill Jews and other victims in gas chambers in extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Majdanek: see Holocaust.
In 1944 the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, launched a chemical warfare assault on the Jewish community in Palestine; e-Husseini was the Islamic religious authority of the Palestinian Arabs, and allied with Adolf Hitler. Five parachutists were sent with a toxin to spread into the water system of the Jewish community. While the parachutists were caught, the amount of toxin they had was estimated sufficient to kill 25,000 people.
Chemical weapons were also extensively used by both sides during the Iran-Iraq War and are additionally believed to have been used by Iraq against Kurdish civilian populations. The Iraqi weapons were supplied by western governments hoping to contain the Iranian revolution.
The use of chemical weapons is generally abhorred in international law, and there are many rules to discourage or make difficult their acquisition and use. Of these the most important is the Chemical Weapons Convention.
A UN working group began work on chemical disarmament in 1980. On April 4, 1984 U.S. President Ronald Reagan called for an international ban on chemical weapons. U.S. President George H. W. Bush and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed a bilateral treaty on June 1, 1990 to end chemical weapon production and start destroying each of their nation's stockpiles. The multilateral Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was signed in 1993 and came into effect in 1997. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons declared that at the end of 2003, 8000 metric tons of chemical agent had been destroyed worldwide from a declared stockpile of 70,000 metric tons. For its part, by 2003, the United States had destroyed 23% of its total chemical arsenal, although doubts existed whether it could reach total elimination by the treaty deadline of 2012 due to technical difficulties and environmental regulations. India, South Korea, Russia are destroying chemical weapons stockpiles under the CWC and Libya dismantled its program under other means. The U.S. has declared that it believes that Russia is circumventing the treaty by developing novel chemical agents. In addition, the People's Republic of China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Serbia and Montenegro are suspected of possessing chemical weapons.
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