One hundred years of chemical weapons
The Battle of Ypres and Large Scale Chemical Weapons Use: A Century of Remembrance
On 21 April 2015, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) will hold a commemorative meeting in Ypres. A declaration – “The Ieper Declaration” – will be issued at the meeting, recalling the tragic history of chemical warfare and reaffirming their CWC commitment to universal chemical disarmament. DIIS senior researcher Cindy Vestergaard is attending the memorial.
Background
On 22 April 1915 the full effects of chemical warfare on the battlefront came as the Germans released 160 tons of chlorine gas at the Battle of Ypres in Flanders, rendering the Algerian, British, Canadian and French troops incapacitated and dying in the trenches. From then on, all sides in World War I employed gas warfare across Europe. By the end, twenty different types of chemical agents had been weaponised and used resulting in 1,300,000 casualties, including over 90,000 fatalities. From a level of zero in the first decade of the 1900s, a total of 190,000 tonnes of chemical weapons would be developed during the Great War by seven countries (Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, UK and US) with Spain becoming the eighth possessor during the 1920s.
Despite the adoption of the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting their use, chemical weapons (CW) would go on to become the only weapon of mass destruction repeatedly used in conflict: by Italy (a party to the Protocol) in Libya in 1930 and again in Ethiopia in 1935–1936, and Japan (a signatory) against China in 1937–1945. But it was not until the late 1960s, when Egypt (a full state party) was carrying through its CW campaign in Yemen and the United States (a signatory) was employing herbicidal warfare in Vietnam that negotiations in Geneva addressed a treaty banning not only the use, but also the possession of chemical weapons. After more than two decades of talks and repeated CW use in the Middle East (by Iraq), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the world’s first—and only—verifiable disarmament treaty, was opened for signature in 1993.
Confirmed allegations in 2013 of CW use in Syria broke what had become the longest reprieve (of twenty-five years) from CW use in conflict. The centennial is thus marked by the absence of ‘never again’ as gruesome accounts of asphyxiation by today’s victims remind of the same ‘guttering, choking, drowning’ described in Wilfred’s Owen’s 1917 poem Dulce et Decorum est. A century later, 190 states have banned the use, transfer, stockpiling, production and possession of chemical weapons with eighty-five percent of the world’s total declared chemical weapons destroyed. This near universality of the CWC underpins an unprecedented global consensus against a weapon of war. The successful removal of Syria’s chemical weapons by the joint UN-OPCW mission last year is a testament to the treaty’s will and resilience. A hundred years on, chemical weapons cannot yet be thrown into history’s archives, but the objective of today’s chemical diplomacy is devoted to securing a global chemical peace.
OPCW’s dedicated site on the 100thcommemoration
‘When Chemical Weapons became Weapons of War”,article by Sarah Everts,Chemical & Engineering News