Background on Chemical Warfare
Chemistry
For those who require chemical data, there are pages that give access to a collection of review articles on chemical agents:
- Chemistry of Lethal Chemical Warfare (CW) Agents includes review articles on the "major" chemical warfare agents: GA, GB, GD, H, L, and VX.
- Chemistry of Other Military Chemical Compounds includes reviews on riot control agents, herbicides, and flame and smoke-producing chemicals
Toxicity and Effects of Lethal Chemical Warfare Agents provides summary information and some leading references on the effects of nerve agents and vesicants.
Chemical Weapons and Countermeasures
Powerful chemical agents are a necessary but not sufficient condition for a chemical warfare capability. The chemical agent must be delivered in order to threaten someone, and the threat can be countered.
- Chemical Dissemination covers some of the basics of how chemical weapons work to spread chemical warfare agents.
- Lethal Chemical Agent Countermeasures reviews some of the measures taken to defend against chemical attack.
Chemical weapons are a topic of intense interest to all; many people are interested in more than just the chemical behavior and toxicity of these compounds, or how these substances can be disseminated or countered.
- History of Chemical Warfare includes selected essays on the development of chemical warfare.
- Ocean Dumping of Chemical Weapons includes some essays with information on the disposal of chemical munitions at sea from the 1940s to the 1970s.
- Chemical Warfare Convention Definitions and Schedules provides selected definitions and the schedules of chemical compounds that are regulated under the Chemical Warfare Convention.
Certain information is included primarily as an aid to researchers, both professional and amateur.
- Searching for Information on Chemical Warfare (CW) Agents provides some useful information for searching the chemical literature.
- Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for Chemical Agents has some links to the MSDSs published by the US Army Chemical and Biological defense Command.
- Links to Other Chemical Warfare Agent Sites of Interest provides a means to access some of the more significant World Wide Web sites that deal with chemical warfare issues.
- A Bibliography is provided for those who would like a concise list of references used to compile the information on this portion of the site.
This site attempts to organize information on some of the chemical compounds that have been manufactured for use as chemical warfare (CW) agents. Our goal is to provide detailed scholarship on the chemistry of CW agents that is required to understand their demilitarization and their behavior in the environment. We have included enough other information to provide a necessary background for this effort. We have decided, however, to post no information about the manufacture of these compounds. We do this even though we recognize that this information is unclassified and freely available, and that some reactions used for preparation of CW agents are widely known. We made this decision because we do not wish to give any assistance, no matter how minor, to those who would attempt to manufacture these materials.
To anyone who manages to figure out how these compounds are made and is contemplating trying to make one of them, a few words of warning:
- These compounds are dangerous. If you actually succeed in making one of them and you do not possess and use the proper protective equipment, it will probably be the last thing you do.
- The proper protective equipment goes way beyond what you are familiar with from your college chemistry laboratory. For example, most Ph.D. chemists have neither seen nor used the type of protective gear the U.S. military requires for work with nerve agents.
- Each of the manufacturing schemes for current agents requires at least one (and generally several) compound on the Schedule of Chemicals from the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling, and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction. The Convention requires that all sites which produce, process, or consume significant amounts of scheduled chemicals be declared to the government and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
- Public Law 105-277, which implements the Convention in the United States, makes it unlawful for any person (except for a Federal agency or a duly authorized person) knowingly to develop, acquire, transfer, stockpile, possess, or use any chemical weapon.
