![]() Global leaders continue to condemn the use of chemical weapons. (Image credit: Everett Historical/Shutterstock) The specter of poison gas inspired an international agreement after WWI ended - the 1925 Geneva Protocol - which banned chemical and biological weapons during war.Īccording to the treaty, "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," and their prohibition "shall be universally accepted as a part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and the practice of nations."Īn American soldier demonstrates gas masks for a man and a horse during World War I, around 1917 to 1918. Respiration was extremely laboured and noisy with frequent efforts to expel copious amounts of tenacious yellowish green frothy fluid which threatened to drown them, and through which they inhaled and exhaled air into and out of their lungs with a gurgling noise," Capt. "Complexion here was an ashed blueish grey, the expression most anxious and distressed with the eye-balls staring, and the lids half closed. In another distressing report, preserved in the United Kingdom's National Archives, a British soldier in the Royal Army Medical Corps described survivors of a poison gas attack: ![]() A British observer at Ypres described French soldiers stumbling off the battlefield "blinded, coughing, chests heaving, faces an ugly purple color, lips speechless with agony," Fitzgerald reported in his study. Witness accounts of chemical attacks and their aftermath were horrific. The photo was taken in France, near the frontline trenches, in 1918. Army Corps of Engineers, to illustrate the effects of phosgene gas. They used phosgene gas, which causes breathing difficulties and heart failure, and mustard gas, which damages the respiratory tract and causes severe eye irritation and skin blistering, according to the CDC.Ī picture staged by the U.S. More chemical attacks followed, launched by the Germans and Allied forces. Fitzgerald, a researcher in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University in Virginia, wrote in a study published in April 2008 in the American Journal of Public Health. ![]() Minutes after the gas was released, 1,000 French and Algerian soldiers were dead, and nearly 4,000 more were injured, Gerard J. Chlorine gas is yellow-green and smells like bleach when it makes contact with moist body tissues, it produces an acid that can cause severe tissue damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That changed on April 22, 1915, when the German army released close to 170 metric tons of chlorine gas from nearly 6,000 cylinders buried in defensive trenches in Ypres, Belgium. But chemical attacks during wartime were usually very localized, with limited range.
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