10. The First Chemical Attack in History
At school, we’re taught that April 22 1915 is the day German forces launched the first gas attack in history. It’s certainly the first time gas was used in modern history, but the story of chemical weapons begins much, much earlier. In 2009, scientists uncovered evidence that the very first attack could have happened as long as 2,000 years ago.
The location was the small Roman garrison Dura-Europos in modern-day Syria. In AD 256, this outpost of the Empire came under siege from the powerful Sassanian Persian empire. During the carnage, the Romans began to dig tunnels under their own walls from which they could leap up and slaughter their enemies. The Persians discovered a group of 20 legionnaires in the process of digging one. Rather than charge in and attack them, they combined sulphur crystals and bitumen to make a toxic gas and pumped it into the tunnel.
The 20 Romans died an incredibly gruesome death, choking on the air around them. It is currently the first-known gas attack in human history. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.
9. The US and Agent Blue
Thousands of years after the Persians pioneered chemical warfare, the USA pioneered accidental chemical warfare. During the Vietnam War, over 20 million gallons of herbicides and defoliants were dropped on the country. Their purpose was to strip back the jungle and leave the Vietcong with nowhere to hide. Instead they wound up poisoning hundreds of thousands of civilians.
The most-infamous of all the chemicals dumped on Vietnam is Agent Orange, but it certainly wasn’t the nastiest. That ‘honor’ probably goes to Agent Blue. Like its more-famous cousin, Agent Blue contained stuff that was toxic to humans. In this case, that ‘stuff’ was arsenic and an inhibitor to folic acid. Folic acid is essential for pregnant women who want to give birth to normal, healthy babies. Where Agent Blue was sprayed, we’re now seeing the 3rd generation of children born with hideous deformities.
And these deformities truly are hideous. In one case documented in 2003, two girls had skin that was little more than a web of blisters. Their fingers would clump together and fall off. Their hands wore down to stumps. Others suffer extreme facial disfigurement. Although the US denies its chemicals are to blame, many believe there can be no other explanation. Shockingly, the death toll from these deformities could be as high as 500,000.
8. The UK Gasses its Own Soldiers
If you were a British soldier in the post-WWII era, you might just have been unlucky enough to be invited to Porton Down. A specialist research lab, Porton Down, was supposedly concerned with finding a cure for the common cold. In reality, its purpose was much darker. It was here that the UK’s Ministry of Defense gassed its own soldiers with Sarin.
Developed by the Nazis in the dying days of the war, Sarin is one of the nastiest concoctions in the world. Those who are exposed to a lethal dose die in agony, thrashing around as bloody foam spills from their mouths. Between 1945 and 1989, the MoD tested this gas on around 3,400 British soldiers.
Those who took part in the trials thought they were involved in safe medical research for minor ailments. Instead, many of them came almost unbearably close to dying. At least one soldier died as a result of the unlawful human experiments, and hundreds of others were badly sickened. It may not have been an attack in the classic sense, but the Porton Down experiments were as dangerous as any battlefield.
7. The Matsumoto Incident
matsumoto-gas
Although many in the West fear a terrorist chemical attack, only one group has ever managed to pull such a thing off. Meet Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese doomsday cult combining end times prophecy with Christianity and yoga. In 1994, they were one of the richest organizations on Earth. How did they spend this money? By pouring millions into producing WMDs they intended to use to bring about the apocalypse.
Their first stab at Armageddon came in 1994. Aum had just manufactured a weak strain of Sarin and decided to test it out. They drove a van at night through a quiet neighborhood in the town of Matsumoto, spraying Sarin into the air. Although most of it dispersed on the breeze, the test was far from harmless. Seven people died in agony in their sleep, while over 200 were seriously injured (an 8th victim died years later from her injuries).
Perhaps worst of all was the police reaction. Aum weren’t even suspected, and attention fell squarely on local chemist Yoshiyuki Kouno, whose wife was put in a coma by the attack. Police leaked his name to the papers, and Kouno became a public hate figure. It wasn’t until 1995 that his name was finally cleared, for depressing reasons you’re about to find out about…
6. The Tokyo Gas Attack
In early 1995, emboldened by their Matsumoto experiment, Aum pulled off the deadliest act of domestic terrorism modern Japan had ever seen. Five members of the cult boarded three Tokyo subway lines during rush hour carrying bags of Sarin. As the trains progressed into the city, they punctured their bags with pointed umbrella tips, releasing the gas.
The morning commute soon resembled the apocalypse Aum had been looking for. In such a crowded space, the Sarin spread with ease, filling carriages and wafting onto platforms. Thousands were sickened. The whole of Tokyo was paralyzed, with entrances to subways resembling battlefields. Hospitals overflowed and millions of dollars were lost. By the time the emergency was over, 13 people were dead and over 6,000 had been injured.
Incredibly, the attack was a failure. Aum had enough Sarin to kill 4.2million people. Thanks to mistakes made in puncturing the bags, delaying the release, only a fraction of that number died. Some of the attackers even managed to accidentally gas themselves. Nonetheless, the terrorist attack remains one of the most-dangerous on record. In terms of non-fatal casualties, only 9/11 had a higher injury rate.