Word: mustards
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...horrors perpetrated during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, none have been more insidious than the routine use of mustard gas by the Iraqis against their Iranian foes. Despite a 63-year-old international protocol that forbids the use of chemical weapons, the Iraqis have relied increasingly over the past four years on mustard gas, and possibly cyanide gas and nerve agents as well, to combat Iranian forces. Chemical weapons, dubbed "that hellish poison" by Winston Churchill, weighed heavily in Iran's abrupt decision last month to abandon the fight against Iraq and pursue a cease-fire...
...report that graphically documented the use of gas in Iraqi attacks earlier this summer. Even those reports of human suffering paled beside the horrific descriptions of Iraq's most brutal assault, the bombing last March of the village of Halabja in northern Iraq, then held by Iran, with mustard gas, cyanide and a nerve gas. When the deadly yellow and white clouds settled, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bloated Kurdish bodies littered the streets. Despite the incontrovertible evidence of a chemical onslaught, Iraq did not admit to the use of poison gas until July...
German chemists subsequently introduced the far deadlier mustard gas to the battlefield. By the end of the war, both sides had fired about 124,000 tons of chemicals, killing 91,000 soldiers and wounding 1.2 million more. But strategists were still divided about the effectiveness of gas. Advocates of chemical warfare produced statistics showing that gas caused far more casualties per round than explosives; opponents produced conflicting evidence that it took a higher tonnage of chemicals to control a given area. Some claimed that gas was a "humane weapon" because the incidence of fatal casualties was only...
...least one young German corporal who was temporarily blinded by a retaliatory blast of British mustard gas never forgot the experience. "My eyes," wrote Adolf Hitler, "had turned into glowing coals; it had grown dark around me." Hitler's memory, coupled with larger fears of retaliation, may help explain why the Nazis never unleashed their newly developed nerve gases on the battlefield in World War II, though they were applied in the gas chambers of the concentration camps...
...weapons. According to the experts, Iraqi forces fired poison-gas shells at Iranian troops before retaking the Majnoun Islands in June. The first symptoms in those affected were described as "burning in the eyes and various parts of the body." Last week Iranian officials claimed that Iraqi planes dropped mustard-gas bombs on towns and villages in northwestern Iran, injuring some 1,700 people. Iraq denied the allegations...