MOSCOW (RIA Novosti military commentator Viktor Litovkin) - The chlorine gas attack at Ypres, Belgium, launched by Germany against the British and French troops on April 22, 1915, changed the world.
The attack lasted only five minutes, but the allied forces were not ready for it and lost about 15,000 men and officers, including 5,000 dead. The attack opened the weapons of mass destruction era.
On July 12, 1917, the Germans again used this weapon against the allied troops outside Ypres, turning the mustard agent into colorless vapor with a strong garlic- or mustard-like smell. It was later called yperite after the Belgian town where it was first used. Later in the year, the British started using special gas mortars. From 1915 to 1918, the warring sides used over 125,000 tons of toxic agents, which claimed about a million lives.
On June 17, 1925, the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare was signed in Geneva. It was the first international document that prohibited chemical and bacteriological weapons, but this did not ended the history of chemical warfare agents. Fascist Italy used them against Abyssinia in 1935-1936, and Japan used them against China during WWII. The Nazis used gases to kill people in concentration camps.
Hitler planned to use 720,000 chemical artillery shells against besieged Leningrad and was stopped only by the fear of retribution. He knew that the Soviet Union had toxic agents too.
Chemical weapons were used after WWII, including by the U.S. troops in Vietnam in the mid-1970s, when over 72 million liters of Agent Orange were spread over the jungle. The U.S. used that agent and herbicides to poison over 20,000 square kilometers of forests and 2,000 sq km of farmland there.
Saddam Hussein used toxic agents against the Kurdish population of Iraq and against Iran. It was because of these weapons that the U.S. and its allies decided to invade sovereign Iraq and overthrow its regime, though the Pentagon experts have not found chemical warfare agents in the country.
The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction was adopted in 1993.
The countries that have the biggest stocks of these weapons - the U.S. (32,000 metric tons) and Russia (40,000 metric tons) - have not destroyed all of their chemical warfare agents, but are doing their best to do so. The reasons for procrastination are different in Moscow and Washington. The U.S. cannot decide on the safest way to destroy these weapons, though it has burned 25% of its arsenals on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific.
Russia's problem is a lack of funds and unjustified procrastination with the promised international, including American, assistance. But a factory built for destroying yperite and lewisite stocks is working quite well in Gorny outside Saratov. It has destroyed about 1,000 of the 1,160 tons of the agent.
Factories to destroy chemical weapons are being built at other arsenals, including in Pochep (Bryansk region), Leonidovka (Penza region), Maradykovsky (Kirov region), Kizner (Udmurtia), Shchuchye (Kurgan region), and Kambarka (Udmurtia).
Viktor Kholstov, the deputy head of the Federal Agency for Industry, which is responsible for the destruction of chemical weapons in Russia, is convinced that Russia will fulfil its obligations under the Convention by the new deadline coordinated with the international agencies, April 2012.
