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Generally speaking, on the lethality scale the chemical agents used by terrorists generally fall between the more deadly biological agents and conventional weapons such as firearms, placing them at the lower end of the scale for WMDs as a whole. The estimation has been made that under idealized conditions, 32 million grams of hydrocyanic acid, three million grams of mustard gas, or 800,000 grams of nerve gas would be required to produce heavy casualties over a radius of one square mile. In comparison, five thousand grams of fissionable nuclear material would accomplish the same, as would 80 grams of Type A botulism toxin and only eight grams of anthrax spores (Kupperman & Trent, 1979, p.57).

Similarly, it has been estimated that it would take one hundred grams of nerve agent (or almost 40 pounds of potassium cyanide) to have an effect on a water supply equivalent to just one gram of typhoid culture. Put another way, to incapacitate or kill a person drinking less than half a cup of untreated water from a five million-liter reservoir would require no less than ten tons of potassium cyanide, compared to just one pound of of Salmonella typhi. Of course, some chemical agents are considerably more lethal than others.

For most of the twentieth century, chemical weapons had only been manufactured and used for tactical purposes, such as in attempts to break World War I stalemates to their use by Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War (1982-87). The Geneva Protocol, signed in 1925, prohibited the use of chemical weapons, although two of its signatories (Italy and Japan) used these weapons in the period between the World Wars. They were typically employed against unprotected targets rather than equally well-armed nations. The 1995 Aum Shinrikyo attacks on Tokyo’s subway system, in which thousands of people were killed or injured from Sarin gas inhalation, changed the perception of CWAs as tactical weapons.

 

NERVE AGENTS

BLISTER AGENTS

BLOOD AGENTS

CHOKING AGENTS

INCAPACITATION/RIOT CONTROL AGENTS

INDUSTRIAL CHEMICALS

HOMEMADE CHEMICALS

The chemical weapons that may potentially be used by terrorists fall into the following categories:

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