Australian infantry wearing respirators at Ypres in 1917, Australian War Memorial (public domain image)

(13) CHEMICAL WARFARE

“You’re poison running through my veins”

That’s right. Chemical warfare is basically just poison. Well, even more so than the song by Alice Cooper.

Nerve agents, blister agents or vesicants, blood agents or asphyxiants, and choking or pulmonary agents

Yes, chemical warfare uses different types of poison, generally categorized by their effects on the human body, by different means of delivery, but still poison nonetheless.

“Chemical warfare (CW) involves using the toxic properties of chemical substances as weapons”.

It is distinct from radiological warfare or the radioactive effects and fallout of nuclear warfare. While it can include the “use of non-living toxic products produced by living organisms (toxins such as botulinum toxin, ricin, and saxitoxin)”, the “offensive use of living organisms” as weapons is also another type of warfare (in the very next special mention entry).

The use of poisons in warfare or as weapons goes all the way back to ancient history – and indeed prehistory, if the use of poisons by contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes is any guide. (The example that always comes to mind are the poison dart frogs named for their use as a source of poison for darts or arrows by native American tribes in Central and South America).

However, it was modern industrialization that provided the basis in production and delivery for chemical warfare on a substantial rather than sporadic scale – with the use of poison gas in First World War as the archetype and apogee of chemical warfare (unless you count the H0l0caust which remains the deadliest use of poison gas), such that it is only fitting chemical warfare follows after trench and tunnel warfare.

Apogee, that is, because our visceral horror in reaction to chemical warfare is arguably exceeded only by that of the next entry, or the existential horror of nuclear war. Hence, the taboo against it (similar to the taboo against those other two forms of warfare) as well as the prohibition of it by international law, with the former helping to uphold the latter despite intermittent chemical warfare since WW1.