Chemical Warfare, From Rome to
Syria. A Time Line.
A look at the historical precedents for Syria's most recent alleged
chemical attack. It turns out that chemical warfare is thousands of years
old.
Sharon Jacobs
National Geographic News
Published August 22, 2013
Syrian opposition forces claim a nerve gas attack has
killed hundreds , possibly thousands , of people just days after a
team of UN chemical weapons inspectors arrived in the country to
investigate earlier reports of chemical weapons use.
Photo and video footage uploaded to the Internet shows what appear to
be lined-up dead bodies, including those of children, bearing no visible
wounds. The footage also appears to show victims convulsing, foaming
at the mouth, and displaying shrunken pupils—all possible signs of
exposure to chemical agents. There has been no independent
confirmation that the photos and video are accurate, and experts
differ on what kinds chemicals they suspect were used.
The Syrian government is widely suspected of having stores of deadly
sarin gas, but “you would expect to see first responders going down”
from secondary exposure to sarin, Gwyn Winfield, editorial director of
the global security journal CBRNe World , told The Guardian.
The French government is pressing for a forceful response if chemical
weapons use is confirmed, and Israel says its intelligence supports
witnesses’ claims that the recent attack was chemical—putting U.S.
President Obama, who last August called chemical weapons a “red
line” for intervention in Syria, in a difficult spot.
If a chemical weapon has indeed been employed in Syria, it wouldn't be
the first time such an arsenal has been used. Below is a time line of
major developments in the history of chemical and biological weapons:
circa A.D. 256 –Fire in the Hole
The oldest archaeological evidence of chemical
warfare was found in Syria (though the area was
controlled by Rome in the third century). According
to University of Leicester archaeologist Simon
James, burnt bitumen and sulfur—which create toxic
compounds when added to fire—killed about 20
Roman soldiers, whose bodies were found piled in a
tunnel in the city of Dara-Europos, still holding their
weapons.
At the time, explains James , an army from the
Sasanian Persian Empire was attacking the Romancontrolled city, digging tunnels underneath its walls.
Roman forces also started tunneling in order to
counter the invaders—but the Sasanians had
chemistry on their side. "I think the Sasanians
placed braziers and bellows in their gallery," says
James, "and when the Romans broke through,
added the chemicals and pumped choking clouds
into the Roman tunnel."
1346 –A Plague on Their Houses
The Crimean city of Caffa, in what is now Ukraine,
was under siege by a Tartar force when a
mysterious plague overtook the invading fighters
and swiftly cut down their numbers. At that point the
ailing but resourceful Tartars decided to use their
dead as artillery .
As notary Gabriel de' Mussi recorded several years
later, the Tartars "ordered corpses to be placed in
catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that
the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside."
The tack was all too effective. According
to University of California, Davis professor Mark
Wheelis, these catapulted corpses likely spread the
Black Death to Caffa.
1763 –A Pox on the New World
During the French and Indian Wars, British General
Jeffrey Amherst (namesake of the Massachusetts
college) famously wondered in a letter , "Could it not
be contrived to send smallpox among those
disaffected tribes of Indians?" It's widely believed
that the British attempted to use the disease as a
weapon by giving smallpox patients' blankets to
Native Americans.
Smallpox did devastate Native American populations
around this time, though whether British blankets
were responsible for an outbreak will likely never be
proven. But centuries later, an outsize fear of
weaponized smallpox remains.
1915 –Better Killing Through
Chemistry
World War I became known as "the chemists' war,"
for the deadly gases it introduced to combat. At the
Second Battle of Ypres, the German army released
thousands of cylinders of yellow-green chlorine gas
across the battlefield—the first major use of a
chemical weapon in modern warfare. (Small
amounts of tear gas had been used earlier by the
French and Germans as an irritant.)
The gas, a choking agent that causes fluid to build
up in victims' lungs, killed hundreds of French
soldiers—at least; accounts vary—but didn't give the
Germans an immediate advantage. It's been
suggested that they themselves were so shocked by
chlorine's effects that they failed to make an
advance.
As gas attacks proliferated on both sides, soldiers
learned to use cotton pads soaked in urine as a
neutralizing mask. But mustard gas, another
chemical agent used by both sides, was harder to
escape and caused painful blisters to erupt on any
exposed skin.
1925 –Enough Is Enough
In response to an estimated 100,000 casualties from
gas attacks in World War I, the League of Nations
drafted a document prohibiting chemical and
biological warfare. The writers of the Geneva
Protocol claimed that "the use in war of
asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all
analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been
justly condemned by the general opinion of the
civilized world." More than 30 nations signed the
Geneva Protocol in 1925; today there are more than
100 signatories.
The United States, however, despite having pushed
for a prohibition against chemical and biological
weapons, did not sign until 1975—partially due to
domestic opposition and worries that the protocol
didn't go far enough.
1943 –A Catastrophic Scale
Napalm—a sticky, gasoline-like substance that can
melt the skin off its victims—was developed in 1943
by Harvard chemist Louis Fieser and his team.
Though it became infamous during the Vietnam
War, napalm—which Fieser had found to be an
effective weed killer—had a devastating impact
during World War II, when a single U.S. firebomb
raid in Tokyo killed an estimated 100,000 people.
That's a comparable figure to the atomic bomb
casualties at Hiroshima, and more deadly than the
Nagasaki blast.
Yet a stranger napalm application never came to
fruition: the napalm bat-bomb . Project X-Ray, as it
was called, was a U.S. plan to release explosive
bats—flying mammals strapped to napalm-laced
time bombs—in Japanese cities, in hopes that the
animals would find wooden houses to roost in and
blow up. After several successful trial runs, the batbomb project was canceled when the officer in
charge realized the arsenal wouldn't be ready for
deployment until 1945.
1960s –Fatal to Flora and Fauna
Developed but not tested in the 1940s, the chemical
weapon Agent Orange was meant to target plants,
not people. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army
sprayed local landscapes with this herbicide to
destroy the opposition's food and cover—not
realizing the health dangers it would pose to
Vietnamese civilians and U.S. soldiers alike. Dioxin,
the toxic ingredient in Agent Orange, can remain in
the human body for over a decade, according to the
Aspen Institute .
Half a century after the Vietnam War, those exposed
to Agent Orange continue to suffer from its effects.
In fact, the National Academy of Sciences has found
potential links between Agent Orange and some
cases of cancer, diabetes, and Parkinson's disease
in U.S. veterans, as well as certain birth defects in
children of veterans.
1980s –Agents of Doom
Nerve agents are the most lethal and quickest-acting
category of chemical weapons. A single drop of
sarin or the deadlier VX (the "V" in its code name
indicates the "V-series," or venomous agents) can
kill a person in minutes. Iraq became the first
country to employ nerve agents on the battlefield
when it released them as airborne chemicals, along
with mustard gas, during the Iran-Iraq War. (Most
nerve agents can also be administered in liquid
form. They're tasteless in drinking water.)
Though a party to the Geneva Protocol, Iraq began
employing chemical weapons against Iran as early
as 1983. By 1988, reports had surfaced of nerve
agents being used against Kurdish Iraqis in the
north; one detailed the Iraqi government killing up to
5,000 Kurds in a single chemical attack at Halabja,
possibly including deadly sarin and VX.
Today, these two nerve agents are among the
chemical weapons in Syria's suspected arsenal.
1992 –A Premature Obituary
The World Health Organization declared smallpox
eradicated in 1979. After that, only the U.S. and the
U.S.S.R. were authorized to keep reserves of the
variola virus, which causes smallpox.
Thirteen years later, Soviet defector Ken Alibek
claimed the U.S.S.R. had been stockpiling variola for
use as a biological weapon. It's unknown whether
other countries were ever able to obtain variola
samples from Soviet scientists, but Russia and the
United States continue to hold onto hundreds of
samples each, purportedly in case they ever need
to develop a vaccine again.
Though the Russian government has never admitted
to weaponizing smallpox, "we know that the Soviet
Union's biological weapons program was doing
experimentation with genetic modification," says
Alan Zelicoff, director of Saint Louis University's
Institute for Biosecurity.
Russia did eventually admit that a 1979 germ
accident had actually been an outbreak of
weaponized anthrax, a form of bacteria that is also a
potent biological threat.
2001 –A Is for Anthrax, B Is for
Bioterror
Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks,
letters containing spores of the bacterium B.
anthracis were mailed to media and public figures in
the U.S. Five people died from contact with the
anthrax—the country's first bioterrorism fatalities. In
the following years, U.S. spending on biodefense
rose exponentially, reaching more than $4 billion a
year.
The anthrax attacks are generally believed to have
been the work of one rogue government employee,
Bruce Ivins. Ivins—who committed suicide in 2008
while under investigation for the attacks—was never
charged.
Today, fear that biological and chemical weapons
will fall into the hands of terrorist groups that are
unconnected with state governments—and are
unafraid to risk massive international devastation—
still looms large