In the early 1950's, the U.S. began producing Sarin for use in artillery shells and rockets. For a time, it partnered with Shell, the gas company, to manufacture and stockpile the weapons at the Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado.
(Those weapons include the "Honest John" warhead shown above, containing dozens of bomblets that each contained about a pound of Sarin.)
"Shell produced dichlor for the Army," according to an official military historical account. "The Army used dichlor in an intermediate process in the manufacture of GB nerve agent."
The first country in the Middle East to obtain and use chemical weapons was Egypt, which used phosgene and mustard gas in the mid-1960s during its intervention in Yemen's civil war. There is no indication Egypt has ever destroyed any of its chemical agents or weapons. The US-backed Mubarak regime continued its chemical weapons research and development program until its ouster in a popular uprising two years ago, and the program is believed to have continued subsequently.
Israel is widely believed to have produced and stockpiled an extensive range of chemical weapons and is engaged in ongoing research and development of additional chemical weaponry. (Israel is also believed to maintain a sophisticated biological weapons program, which is widely thought to include anthrax and more advanced weaponized agents and other toxins, as well as a sizable nuclear weapons arsenal with sophisticated delivery systems.) For more than 45 years, the Syrians have witnessed successive US administrations provide massive amounts of armaments to a neighboring country with a vastly superior military capability which has invaded, occupied, and colonized Syria's Golan province in the southwest. In 2007, the United States successfully pressured Israel to reject peace overtures from the Syrian government in which the Syrians offered to recognize Israel and agree to strict security guarantees in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied Syrian territory.
When Syria lost its main ally, Egypt, to Israel in a 1979 peace deal, the Alawite-controlled government in Damascus set out to regain its military edge by establishing a secret chemical weapons program that required the involvement of Western companies -- whether they knew it or not.
Wednesday's report by Syrian opposition groups that the Syrian military had used chemical weapons to kill 1,300 civilians outside Damascus, coupled with comparatively less horrific episodes earlier this year, indicates that the Assad regime has a large stockpile of deadly chemical weapons. Now, as the world reels in revulsion, the question presents itself: How, exactly, did that come about?
The story starts after the Yom Kippur War, when Syria realized it needed to strengthen its military capabilities, especially after losing its alliance with Egypt in the 1979 peace agreement. Syria came up with a plan called strategic parity, which sought to develop defensive and offensive capabilities to counter Israel’s nuclear weapons program, according to a research publication by Danny Shoham, a chemical and biological expert at the Begin-al-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Bar-Ilan University in Israel. The irony, of course, is that the Syrian government chose to use its chemical weapons not against its intended enemy, Israel, but against its own people.
One of the ways the Syrian government was able to keep its chemical weapons program undetected for so long was through the establishment of its Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC), ostensibly a civilian agency, set up in 1969. This science research agency acted as a front for a secret chemical weapons program in conjunction with the military, according to Shoham.
The United States of America supported the program.
Violence cannot end until we learn from the mistakes and seek peace with all nations and people!!!
Until then, we will continue to experience the result of injustice and violence within the social
Milieu!!
Navy Ship massacre
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