Word: poisonous
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...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...
...have admitted owning chemical arsenals. But the superpowers are not the real threat. Specialists worry about countries like Libya, Burma, Cuba, Peru, Ethiopia and Viet Nam, some of which are believed to have employed chemical weapons in battle. Even terrorist groups and drug runners can get their hands on poison gases. Warns Elisa Harris, a visiting research fellow at Britain's Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies: "Other Third World countries can now look at Iraq and think, 'If I find a situation in which chemical warfare will help militarily, I might go ahead because obviously I might...
...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...