Zitat:Buried Soldiers May Be Victims of Ancient Chemical Weapon

Almost 2,000 years ago, 19 Roman soldiers rushed into a cramped underground tunnel, prepared to defend the Roman-held Syrian city of Dura-Europos from an army of Persians digging to undermine the city's mudbrick walls. But instead of Persian soldiers, the Romans met with a wall of noxious black smoke that turned to acid in their lungs. Their crystal-pommeled swords were no match for this weapon; the Romans choked and died in moments, many with their last pay of coins still slung in purses on their belts.

Zitat:Iran blasts US, allies on WMD arsenal
Tue Jun 28, 2011 11:39PM

Iran has blasted the US and its allies for continued production of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), vowing its own commitment to the global fight against chemical weapons.

Iran's Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi denounced the US for possessing the world's largest stockpile of chemical arms, despite being a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that requires signatories to abolish their arsenal of such weapons by April 29, 2012, said a Foreign Ministry press release on Tuesday.
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Zitat:The two countries with the largest stockpiles, the Russian Federation and United States of America, have met their intermediate destruction deadlines set by the Convention and are accelerating their activities. The Russian Federation has destroyed nearly 48 percent of its stockpiles to date and the United States just over 75 percent; however, both countries have confirmed that they will not complete destruction of their weapons before the 29 April 2012 deadline.

Zitat:During the past year, the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America, all of which have been granted extensions for completing the destruction of their Category 1 chemical weapons, continued to fulfil their reporting obligations in a timely fashion and in accordance with paragraph 28 of Part IV(A) of the Verification Annex to the Convention. The Secretariat was able to
reconcile the data that it had collected during on-site inspections with the information provided by the possessor States.

Zitat:The United States of America is steadily continuing to complete the destruction of its chemical warfare agents. It has, as at the end of October, eliminated 22,526 MTs of Category 1 chemical weapons, equivalent to 81.12% of its declared stockpile. Four CWDFs (Chemical Weapons Disposal Facility, Amn von mir ) have completed operations, namely Aberdeen, Johnston Atoll, Newport, and Pine Bluff Binary, while the incineration facility at Pine Bluff processed the last one-ton container on 12 November, and is currently conducting closure activities. The Secretariat will, in fact, this week cease its verification activities at Pine Bluff. Three other destruction facilities—at Anniston, Tooele, and Umatilla—are in the final stages
of their mustard-agent campaigns. Current projections by the United States of America indicate that those facilities will complete operations by April 2012.