I HELD LIQUID THAT COULD KILL A MILLION

CHEMICAL weapons are the most vile weapons man has ever inflicted upon himself. They are undoubtedly extremely deadly, and they kill people in the most horrific ways possible.

I got a sense of just how powerful t hey were during t r ai ni ng as commander of the Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear ( CBRN) Regiment. On one occasion in a laboratory, I was manipulating a mixture that was the viscosity and colour of light honey. It didn’t look dangerous at all, and I felt quite confident as I stirred it with a glass rod.

‘In your hands you are holding the nerve agent VX,’ a scientist told us. ‘It is 50,000 times more potent than chlorine and many times more potent than sarin.’

I knew a bit about sarin, a deadly nerve agent developed by the Germans in the 1930s. But ever the smart aleck, I asked the scientist how deadly were the few centimetres I held in my hand.

‘If you were to correctly distribute what you are holding,’ he warned, ‘you could kill one million people.’

I quickly put the mixture down, my hands shaking. How could such a small amount of mixture kill so many people? It made the mind boggle and I realised why dictators such as Saddam Hussein craved such weapons.

No wonder that one lecturer had once used a phrase I will never forget: ‘As you can see, these are morbidly brilliant weapons.’

‘ Brilliant’ was hardly the word that came to mind, but he was right.

From gas there is no escape. It can be released from out of harm’s way, spreading like an invisible secret agent, slipping into nooks and crannies, maiming and murdering anyone in its path, even if they try to hide.

As effective weapons, they certainly are ‘ brilliant’, but they’re also downright evil. They kill indiscriminately, suffocating noncombatants who have no protection or even any warning that they are under attack.