How chemical weapons, widely shunned, won’t go away

WHEN HAVE THEY BEEN USED SINCE?

Chemical attacks by the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in 1988; a sarin attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult killed 13 people on the Tokyo subway in 1995.

North Korea is suspected of involvement in the 2017 murder in Malaysia of Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, using the nerve agent VX.

The latest treaty to outlaw chemical attacks, the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, has been ratified by 192 nations, with holdouts including North Korea, Egypt and South Sudan; Israel has signed but not ratified. But even countries that accepted the treaty have come under scrutiny. 

WHICH COUNTRIES ARE THOSE?

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime repeatedly used chemical weapons in that country’s civil war, even after it agreed to surrender such munitions following a 2013 sarin gas attack that killed hundreds in a Damascus suburb.

Russia has been tied to the deadly Novichok nerve agent used in the 2018 poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain, the first reported use of chemical weapons in Europe since the Nazis used poison gas in concentration camps in World War II.

And after Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was hospitalised in Berlin in 2020, Germany said tests showed “unequivocally” that he was poisoned using Novichok. Russia denies involvement in both cases.