Word: poison
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...proliferation of poison gases, while chilling, is not surprising. "Chemical weapons are the poor man's weapon," explains Etienne Copel, formerly deputy chief of staff of the French air force. "They are cheap, simple to use -- and very effective." The sad fact is that any country with a pesticide factory is capable of making deadly gases. Iraq, for example, produced some of its chemical weapons at a pesticide plant at Samarra. "It's a relatively low-tech option," says Graham Pearson, director of Britain's defensive chemical-warfare program at Porton Down. "And Third World countries appear able to obtain...
Such activity violates the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which outlawed the use of all poison gases, but never forbade their production and stockpiling. More stringent precautions might have been advised, given the lengthy and sordid history of chemical warfare. Use of deadly fumes dates back to the Peloponnesian War, when tar pitch and sulfur were mixed to produce a suffocating gas. Twenty-three centuries later, chemical weaponry emerged as the ugly stepchild of the modern chemical industry. The great nations of Europe decided that such weapons were barbaric and outlawed them in the Hague Convention...
...peculiar language of the document was easily skirted by the Germans, who used poison gas to devastating effect in World War I. In April 1915, German soldiers surreptitiously installed 5,730 cylinders of liquid chlorine in the trenches along a four-mile section of no-man's-land near the Belgian town of Ypres. Using a heavy artillery barrage, the Germans were able to shatter the cylinders and release the lethal gas. In a single afternoon, 5,000 French troops were killed and an additional 10,000 were injured. The carnage in Flanders was commemorated in a poem by Wilfred...
...precisely that deterrent effect that has persuaded some countries to pursue the development of chemical weapons. France, for example, argues that without a chemical arsenal, the only response to attack by poison gas would be nuclear retaliation. During the 1987 U.N. chemical-disarmament talks, France proposed that each country be allowed a stockpile of up to 2,000 tons, which, while minimal, would be significant enough to discourage assaults. When the U.S. resumed the manufacture of chemical weapons last December for the first time since 1969, deterrence was the rationale. While agreeing that first use of chemical weapons should...
...deny that it possesses chemical weapons. When Lebanese reports circulated 15 months ago charging that Syria had deployed Soviet-made katyusha artillery rockets outfitted with chemical warheads against Palestinian refugee camps in southern Beirut, the Syrians rejected the accusation but did not refute the suggestion that their arsenals included poison warheads. In fact, Syrians claim that they are developing chemical weapons to counterbalance Israel's nuclear capability. Israelis do not dismiss Syria's fears. "They know very well that our reprisal will be horrible, and for the time being that deters them," General Amnon Shachak, chief of Israeli military intelligence...