Cold War Use Of Chemical Weapons Essay

The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 laid out the laws of war, and were amongst the first treaties to formally declare war crimes in secular international law. They briefly discussed the prohibition of chemical weapons but the law was soon broken just a few years later. World War I, also referred to as, “The Chemist’s War,” marked the first largescale use of chemical weapons. The Germans first used chlorine as a chemical weapon and released large amounts of it into the air to be carried by the wind towards their enemies. Subsequently, the use of chemicals in combat led to an arms race between Germany, Russia, USA, Britain and Austria-Hungary, in which each nation manufactured the harmful chemicals in large quantities. Over the course of the war, approximately 125,000 tons of gas

The Geneva Protocol prohibited the “Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare,” or in other words, bans the use of chemical or biological weapons. However, the protocol didn’t mention the production, trade or stockpiling of said weapons and they weren’t addressed for another 30 years. The Cold War period led to large manufacturing and stockpiling of these weapons, and over the course of the century, more than 20 nations were involved in the development of chemical weapons. However, after the end of World War II, chemical weapons have seldom been used in combat, although many were affected in the Iran-Iraq war as a result of chemical weapon use. In 1972, the “Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, production and stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction,” or more commonly referred to as the Biological Weapons Convention, was a follow up to the Geneva Protocol, and addressed its