Submission + - Remembering Mustard Gas
Hugh Pickens writes: "Deborah Blum, author of "The Poisoner’s Handbook," writes that last week the US Army announced that its excavation of an old chemical munitions dump – unfortunately located in one of Washington DC’s more elegant neighborhoods – had turned up remnants of two of the ugliest weapons developed in World War I — mustard gas and the arsenic-laced blistering agent Lewisite. Mustard gas contains concentrated sulfur which when mixed with other ingredients become a ferocious form of sulfuric acid. Technically known as a vesicant, or blistering agent, mustard gas burns on contact, through material, through leather, through skin, raising a thick layer of oozing yellow blisters, searing the eyes into crusted blindness. It was rarely instantly lethal but always excruciatingly painful. “I wish people who talk about going on with this war whatever the cost could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning,” wrote one nurse, telling of teenage boys strapped down to their beds, fighting for breath, their voices burned away to a hoarse whisper, praying to die. All in all, more than a million soldiers were injured by the poison gases used in World War I and almost ten percent of them – some 91,000 – died. Outlawed by the Geneva Protocol of 1925, mustard gas has been used as recently as 1988 in the war between Iraq and Iran, and although most of us have forgotten just how wicked these materials can be, the discovery of the chemical dump serves "as a valuable reminder," writes Blum, "that some chemical experiments should really be left, forever, in the past.""
