Word: warred
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...medical doctors, concluded that the use of chemical weapons "has been intensifying and has also become more frequent." Analysts speculate that Iran's pariah status may have engendered the silence. Neither Washington nor Moscow, they note, has been eager to impede Iraq's effort against Iran. Moreover, the war's seeming interminability has focused attention on the need for solutions, not more controversy. "In the interest of peace," concedes a U.N. staffer close to the cease-fire talks, "I doubt that we will hear much more about the issue...
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...
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...
...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...