The use of poisons that could be considered chemical weapons (CW) dates to antiquity. During the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), for example, the Spartans used arsenic smoke. A millennium later at the siege of Constantinople (637 AD), the Byzantine Greeks employed "Greek Fire" - a mixture of petroleum, pitch sulfur and resins. The first modern use of CW, however, occurred during the First World War. At the second battle of Ypres in April 1915, the German army released hundreds of tons of chlorine gas. Thousands of Allied troops were killed or wounded in the gas cloud attacks, including nearly 7,000 Canadians (1,000 dead and 5,975 injured). The British war poet Wilfred Owen described the horror of seeing a fellow soldier guttering, choking, drowning, as if under a green sea of chlorine gas. Throughout the war, both the Allied and the Central Powers developed toxic chemical warfare agents and the means to deliver them. They also refined their tactical doctrines to take into account the new reality of chemical warfare. By 1918, the World War I battlefield was saturated with a variety of persistent and non-persistent chemicals, which caused casualties among troops and increased the danger and difficulty of military operations. By the end of the First World War, approximately 125,000 tons of toxic chemicals had been used, causing more than 1.3 million casualties, including more than 100,000 deaths. To this day, live rounds of World War I chemical munitions remain buried beneath the battlefields of Europe. While the consequences of the use of gas during the war - images of wounded and blinded men waiting in long lines to be given medical assistance - created in the general public a visceral loathing of chemical weapons, the development and use of CW continued throughout the twentieth century. Italian troops employed chemical weapons during their invasion of Ethiopia (1935-1936) while Japan used CW during its war with China (1937-1945). During the Second World War, both the Allied countries (including Canada) and Axis powers developed a significant inventory of chemical weapons; the lack of effective large-scale delivery systems played a part in the decision of both sides not to use them (another powerful constraint was the fear of retaliation). Egypt used chemical weapons in North Yemen (1963-1967) and both Iraq and Iran employed CW during the Gulf War (1983-1988). It wasnt until 29 April 1997, after long and difficult negotiations, that the International Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force. By banning these weapons, the Convention heralded the beginning of the work to destroy the stockpiles that had been amassed. April 29 is Remembrance Day to pay tribute to the victims of chemical warfare. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)( [ Ссылка ] ) is the implementing body of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The OPCW is given the mandate to achieve the object and purpose of the Convention, to ensure the implementation of its provisions, including those for international verification of compliance with it, and to provide a forum for consultation and cooperation among States Parties. This clip is from the 1950s episode, the Unseen Weapon, from the The Big Picture documentary television program which ran on the American Broadcasting Company from 1953 to 1959. The program consisted of documentary films produced by the United States Army Signal Corps Army Pictorial Service.
