Chemical Weapons Stockpiling and Use During World War II
There was was a massive stockpiling of chemical weapons during World War II. This also goes in hand with the development of new breeds of chemical weapons. Vast amounts of chemical weapons were stockpiled by both the Japanese and German armies. This stockpile consisted of eight thousand tons of chemical agents by the Japanese, seventy-eight thousand tons by the Germans.
These stockpiles consisted of new chemical weapons such as sarin, soman and nitrogen mustard. Most deadly was sarin gas. This gas was developed by noble prize winner of chemistry of 1938, Dr. Richard Kuhn. Sarin gas is an organic phosphate compound. This compound is very similar to the insecticide zyklon b, which was used by the German army in the Jewish concentration camps to kill massive amounts of innocent Jews simultaneously in a confined area. The number of those killed by zyklon b is estimated to be over one million.
These new chemicals were being transformed into more deadly weapons. The invention of rockets allowed a chemical warhead to be fixed on the rocket and launched up to five miles away before exploding its deadly cargo. With the birth of the aircraft it also made possible the chemical bomb. This could disperse massive amounts of chemical gas on a single target area.