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The Inter-War Years and the First Attempts at Proliferation Control. |
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Ancient Times to the 19th Century |
19th Century and World WarI |
World War II |
Post World II |
Disarmament and proliferation |
The Terrorists |
| In the aftermath of World War I, the Allies supplied some chemical weapons to the White Russian forces as they backed the anti-communist forces in the Russian Civil War. One of these was a dispenser for Adamsite, an agent that could penetrate the masks available at the time. The French used mustard gas in Algiers and the British are reported to have used phosgene and mustard gas against rebellious tribes in the North-West frontier region (an area straddling modern Afghanistan and Pakistan). |
| Chemical weapon disarmament was hotly discussed after World War I. The Treaty of Versailles (the surrender documents ending the war) included clauses prohibiting the Germans from developing chemical weapons and a number of arms treaties signed after the war included prohibitions on them. In the first of a number of major conferences on disarmament- the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments of 1921-22 - a subcommittee looking at chemical weapons decided that trying to limit them was impractical and recommended that no action should be taken to limit their use. The Conference rejected this recommendation and the final treaty included a broad prohibition against the use of"asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and all analogous liquids materials or devices." This form of words was incorporated into the Geneva Protocol of 1925 (Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare.) The protocol banned the use of chemical and biological weapons, but not research into them, their manufacture or stockpiling. In addition, the United States reserved the right of retaliation in kind and also took fifty years to ratify the protocol. |
| Interestingly enough, the Polish delegation moved to have bacteriological (biological) weapons included in the Protocol, even though there had been no demonstrated case of the use or even development of biological weapons at that time. A vial taken from a German officer (Baron Otto Karl von Rosen) in Norway during World War I was found, over 80 years later, to contain viable anthrax spores in a thin glass vial. It is believed that he was a member of a large effort to spread the disease amongst the reindeer herds of Lapland to prevent their use as pack or draught animals in the movement of equipment to Imperial Russia. Similarly, attempts appear to have been made to spread anthrax and glanders amongst the livestock of the Allied forces in France. This was only understood many years later. The work of Pasteur and Koch and other early microbiologists had established the germ theory of disease in the 19th Century, but nobody seemed to have turned it to military applications, even though more than one military expedition had been brought to a halt by typhus. However, The end of the First World War coincided with a demonstration of the devastating potential of biological weapons when the global influenza pandemic of 1918-19 killed more people in nine months than had died in the battlefields in four years. |
| It now appears that the Soviet Union had embarked on a biological weapons program in the 1920's and maintained it in defiance of treaties and disclosures from defectors for 75 years. The scale and extent of the modern Russian biological and chemical weapons programs is astonishing. The Soviet Union was not alone. Britain had not deactivated its Chemical Defence Research Centre at Porton Down, which still functions today. Italy, France, and Japan also set up research programs in the 1920's. Having the luxury of having to rebuild its armed forces more or less from scratch, the Soviet Union took a dispassionate look at the lessons of the First World War. Along with the Germans, they decided that the best defense was a good offense, that is, to carry the fight to the enemy rather than to absorb punishment. They decided that chemical weapons belonged in an offensive doctrine. |
| Despite the Geneva Protocol, chemical and biological weapons did not disappear and interest in them spread to many countries. The United States did not enter into the Convention for almost 50 years. The Soviet Union did sign the Convention and appeared to abide by it as there were no reports of Soviet troops using chemical weapons during this period. In the troubled days of the 1930's, there were a number of portentous developments as World War II approached. Preparations were made for conventional warfare, but chemical and biological warfare were in the minds of many. In addition to the British and French use of chemical weapons, the most visible was the use of mustard gas by the Italians during their campaign in Abyssinia (Ethiopia). The failure of the then League of Nations to respond to such Italian actions as Mussolini attempted to rebuild the Roman Empire could be seen as one of the roots of the Second World War. |
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Ancient Times to the 19th Century |
19th Century and World WarI |
World War II |
Post World II |
Disarmament and proliferation |
The Terrorists |
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