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For Americans serving in the First World War, the advent of chemical weapons made a deep impression. For chemists and soldiers, the experience of meeting—and then making—variants of “poison gas” bred both fear and determination. The wartime creation and post-war struggles of the Chemical Warfare Service reveal the deep divisions these tensions caused, both during the war and through the 1920s, when the United States extensively debated, but failed to ratify, the Geneva Protocol. By the close of the 1920s, the popular optimism that greeted postwar science and invention was clouded by visions of science as a source of new and terrible weapons. In the case of chemical weapons, professional resolve to prepare for future wars competed with a desire to protect the ideals that science represented. In ways that now seem familiar, the profession of chemistry, the chemical industry and the military became powerful allies. This paper examines a subject neglected by historians, and considers how political and professional factors combined to frustrate and delay the early ratification of the Geneva Convention by the United States. As we shall see, our knowledge of these circumstances is far from complete, and will remain so until we have a deeper understanding of the history of America’s complex relationship with this toxic legacy.

The paper describes medical and psychological aspects of gas warfare 1915–1918. It is shown that exact knowledge such as lethal dosages and the type and extent of injuries had been observed in cases of accident long before the outbreak of war. Nevertheless, detailed toxicological research was carried out in the toxicological department of Fritz Haber’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem. War itself offered the opportunity for deadly field experiments. The soldiers suffered not only from physical injuries (chest pain, breathlessness, coughing, bloody sputum, multiple organ failure) but also from fear and traumatization. Given the enormous fear caused by the idea of a supposed poisoning even without symptoms, distinguishing the real and actual from the simulated in such cases must have been problematic and caused a permanent threat of being accused of malingering or even simulating. From there it was only a small step to psychic and political stigmatization as “” (pension fraudsters) or being mentally ill in the late Weimar Republic and especially under National Socialism. Whereas the nation was forever grateful to the war-wounded and disabled veterans, the stigmatized were seen as being mentally ill, were sterilized, and sometimes even murdered.

In 1944 and 1945 scientists and physicians in the Allied military intelligence gathered evidence on the criminal human experiments with chemical weapons conducted on inmates of the Nazi concentration camps in Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, and Neuengamme during World War II. Some of the experiments were judged during the Nuremberg Medical Trial (Case I) and French military tribunals at Metz and Lyon after liberation. Based on this evidence and on further archival sources, this paper will examine the preconditions and settings of these experiments, the perpetrators involved, and what is known about their purpose and outcome. Furthermore, the paper will raise the question if and how the experiments in the concentration camps were linked to other experiments conducted in Nazi Germany for the Wehrmacht at military research establishments such as the Gas Protection Laboratory (Heeresgasschutzlaboratorium) in Spandau, the Militärärztliche Akademie, the Heeresversuchsstelle Raubkammer, or by universities. The paper will focus on experiments with chemical agents in German concentration camps and analyze how rivalry and division of labor between the military and the SS in human experimentation with chemical agents went hand in hand.

This essay examines Japan’s Chemical Warfare (CW) policy in World War II as revealed in interrogations of high-ranking military officers conducted by United States military intelligence after the war. Based upon these interrogations and an examination of recorded incidents of chemical weapons use, it may be concluded that Japanese CW policy permitted use of chemical weapons in China where the enemy did not possess the capacity to retaliate in kind, but largely prohibited their use in the Pacific against the Allies, whom they feared could respond in kind with overwhelming force. Thus, the threat of retaliation in kind served as a successful deterrent to CW employment in the Pacific Theater. For its part, the US refrained from using poison gas largely due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s moral abhorrence of chemical weapons, but also because it was not in a position logistically to engage in CW on a large scale until late in the conflict, at which time the use of nuclear weapons made the issue moot.

The 1925 Geneva Protocol, which bans the wartime use of chemical and also biological weapons, was an emphatic reaction to the use of chemical weapons in World War I, but legal institutions that would sanction violations of the treaty have evolved only with difficulty. An important example of a legal failure to support the protocol occurred at the 1946–1948 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), just when it might be expected that Imperial Japan would be charged for its chemical and biological warfare (CBW) waged against China from the late 1930s into World War II. In 1937, the Chinese officially presented its first complaints to the League of Nations about Japan’s battlefield use of chemical weapons (mustard gas, phosgene and tear gases) against defenseless Chinese troops and civilians. In addition, in early 1941 and after, China accused Japan of launching plague attacks against key Chinese cities, killing hundreds and terrorizing thousands. None of these accusations, although supported by evidence, brought about serious international recriminations for Japan. Once World War II ended, China expected to revive these charges at the IMTFE in Tokyo. Instead, under the influence of a few key figures in US military intelligence, the trial’s International Prosecution Section (IPS) deleted the Chinese charges and for decades Japan’s infraction were lost to history. Analysis of this legal failure points to the obstacles posed by growing Cold War antagonisms between the United States and the Soviet Union, which prompted a general American retreat from prosecuting Japan, its new democratic ally in East Asia, as well as the internal processes at the IPS that favored more blatant incidents of Japanese wartime aggression—such as the well-documented 1937 “Rape of Nanjing” and abuses of Allied prisoners of war. After the silence imposed at the IMTFE, chemical and biological weapons proliferated with few restraints until the Cold War ended in 1992. At the same time, the international framework for war crimes prosecution greatly changed with greater attention put on crimes against civilians. Yet, lacking precedent, international readiness to legally sanction violations of the Geneva Protocol—as with the 2013 and 2017 murders of Syrian civilians with nerve gas—remains nearly as ambiguous as it was in 1946.

This chapter begins by listing the quantities and sites of chemical agent production during both world wars and outlining the relative importance of these new weapons. Using the example of the production sites of World War II, the setting in which the construction and operation of these factories took place will be described, as well as the structure of the facilities. It will be shown that it was not only Fritz Haber’s former colleagues who made important contributions to the research of chemical warfare agents and their production, but that an important role was also played by students of his successor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. In order to be employed militarily, chemical warfare agents must be put into grenades, bombs, mines, warheads, and spray tanks. This took place at seven filling plants, five of the army and two in air munitions facilities. Gaseous and particularly dangerous modern warfare agents were filled in the chemical factories where they were produced. This article is based on extensive research in the context of the investigation, ongoing since 1979, into former armaments sites, the methodology of which will be briefly outlined. It will be shown that the effects of chemical warfare agents—their production and deployment at the frontline—continue to pose a risk 100 years later. In consideration of general public health, the disposal of these agents of must be prioritized. Also in Germany, these agents have been exploded, burned, and buried, and the residues pose environmental risks. Some of the demolition sites of these agents are still unknown today.

Anti-plant chemical warfare (CW), the use of chemicals to clear vegetation or destroy food crops as a method of warfare, was conducted on a large scale in the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike the anti-personnel CW of World War I, which continued until the Armistice, anti-plant CW in Vietnam was terminated while the war was still underway. Already subject to increasing controversy, its limitation and subsequent termination was precipitated by the appearance in late 1969 of a government-sponsored study suggesting that 2,4,5-T, a component of Agent Orange, the herbicide most heavily used for defoliation, might be teratogenic to humans. In consequence, its use in Vietnam was restricted and then prohibited altogether. Although another herbicide, Agent White, remained briefly in use, all large-area defoliation had ceased by May 1970, leaving crop destruction as the remaining form of large-area herbicide operations in Vietnam. After a review of the program requested by the U.S. Ambassador and the Commanding General in Saigon, the ambassador telegraphed Washington in early December 1970 their decision that chemical crop destruction should be phased out. Although secret, the content of the telegram became known to the press and was published a week later, followed shortly thereafter by President Richard Nixon’s announcement that there would be “an orderly yet rapid phaseout of herbicide operations in Vietnam.”

On March 16, 1988 the Iraqi Army of Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime attacked the Kurdish town of Halabja with poison gas, killing an estimated 5,000 people within a few minutes. In today’s autonomous region of Kurdistan-Iraq, the “martyrs’ town of Halabja” has become a symbol for the suffering of Iraqi Kurdish people under the Baath regime and a key element of Kurdish national identity. At the same time, the people of Halabja continue to suffer from the long-term psychological, health, and environmental consequences of the poison gas attack. The present account is based on the author’s longstanding research and practical work among survivors of violence in Kurdistan-Iraq. It outlines the background and impact of the chemical attack on Halabja and provides an insight into the survivors’ situation—from the immediate aftermath of the attack to this day; it details the constant struggle of the victims with the long-term psychological effects of the attack as well as their struggle for justice and recognition of their experience.

Chemical weapons are banned under customary international law, the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The CWC today has achieved near universal adherence; a small number of states, however, remain outside its realm. Syria—until 2013 one of them—was long presumed to possess chemical weapons and in 2012 effectively admitted so. The Syrian civil war always carried the risk that one side or another would use these weapons. Reports to this end began to appear in 2012. In March 2013, following separate requests by Syria and several Western States, the UN Secretary-General began to investigate these allegations. Whilst the investigation team was in Damascus, a large-scale sarin attack was launched on Ghouta, killing hundreds of people. This incident and its subsequent confirmation by the UN team set in motion a series of unprecedented events leading to the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile under strict international control, supported by financial and in-kind assistance by more than 20 countries. But this multilateral effort did not end the use of toxic chemicals in Syria, and OPCW fact-finding missions have since confirmed several cases of chlorine attacks. Also, ISIS/Daesh reportedly has used chemical weapons including chlorine and mustard gas in Syria and Iraq. The paper concludes that it will be important to identify the perpetrators of these attacks and bring them to justice in order to protect the international norm against poison gas.

The first major use of chemical weapons in warfare was on April 22, 1915, when Germany attacked Allied forces along the Ypres Salient in Belgium in World War I. Since that historic attack a century ago, dozens of countries have researched, developed, tested, and deployed still more deadly chemical weapons. These inhumane and indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction were again used in 1924 by Spain against Morocco, by Italy against Libya and Ethiopia in the 1920s and 1930s, and by Japan against China in World War II (Robinson ). More recently they were deployed by Iraq against Iran and Iraq’s Kurdish population in the 1980s, and from 2012 to the present in the Syrian civil war. The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in 2016 includes 192 countries, 98% of the world’s population, with only four countries—Egypt, Israel, North Korea, and South Sudan—still missing. And of the 72,525 metric tons of chemical agents declared to date in eight possessor states, over 66,000 metric tons—92%—have been safely destroyed in the last 25 years. This is a historic achievement in global disarmament and peace-building and needs to continue until we rid the world of all chemical weapons, prevent their re-emergence, and promote peaceful uses of chemistry.