Strasbourg Agreement (1675)

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The Strasbourg Agreement of 27 August 1675 is the first international agreement banning the use of chemical weapons. The treaty was signed between France and the Holy Roman Empire, and was created in response to the use of poisoned bullets. [1] The use of this weaponry was preceded by Leonardo da Vinci's invention of arsenic and sulfur-packed shells that can be fired against ships. [2] These weapons had been used by Christoph Bernhard von Galen, Bishop of Munster, in the Siege of Groningen (1672) - thus provoking the Strasbourg Agreement between the belligerents of the Franco-Dutch War.

The Hague Convention of 1899 also contained a provision that rejected the use of projectiles capable of diffusing asphyxiating or deleterious gases. [3] The next major agreement on chemical weapons did not occur until the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Today, the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons is different from the use of poison as a method of warfare and is particularly noted by the International Committee of the Red Cross as existing independent of each other. [4]

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chemical warfare</span> Using poison gas or other toxins in war

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The use of toxic chemicals as weapons dates back thousands of years, but the first large-scale use of chemical weapons was during World War I. They were primarily used to demoralize, injure, and kill entrenched defenders, against whom the indiscriminate and generally very slow-moving or static nature of gas clouds would be most effective. The types of weapons employed ranged from disabling chemicals, such as tear gas, to lethal agents like phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas. This chemical warfare was a major component of the first global war and first total war of the 20th century. The killing capacity of gas was limited, with about 90,000 fatalities from a total of 1.3 million casualties caused by gas attacks. Gas was unlike most other weapons of the period because it was possible to develop countermeasures, such as gas masks. In the later stages of the war, as the use of gas increased, its overall effectiveness diminished. The widespread use of these agents of chemical warfare, and wartime advances in the composition of high explosives, gave rise to an occasionally expressed view of World War I as "the chemist's war" and also the era where weapons of mass destruction were created.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907</span> Treaties on the laws of war

The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 are a series of international treaties and declarations negotiated at two international peace conferences at The Hague in the Netherlands. Along with the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions were among the first formal statements of the laws of war and war crimes in the body of secular international law. A third conference was planned for 1914 and later rescheduled for 1915, but it did not take place because of the start of World War I.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">United Kingdom and weapons of mass destruction</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Egypt and weapons of mass destruction</span> Aspect of Egypts military history

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Chemical weapons have been a part of warfare in most societies for centuries. However, their usage has been extremely controversial since the 20th century.

References

  1. Rottman, Gordon L. (2013-10-20). The Book of Gun Trivia: Essential Firepower Facts. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN   9781782006206.
  2. Coleman, K. (2005). A History of Chemical Warfare . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. pp.  7. ISBN   9781403934598.
  3. Erlanger, Steven (2013-09-06). "A Weapon Seen as Too Horrible, Even in War". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-08-23.
  4. Casey-Maslen, Stuart (2014). The War Report: Armed Conflict in 2013. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 306. ISBN   9780198724681.