Existing comment:
Legacy of World War I Gas Warfare
The terror of gas in combat led to a treaty against the use of "asphyxiating, poisonous or other gasses," known as the Geneva Protocol of 1925.
Despite the accords, the Army's Chemical Corps retained its laboratory facilities at the Edgewood Arsenal and developed better detectors, masks, and decontaminants with the expectation that chemical warfare would eventually be employed on the battlefield again.
Today, the Department of Defense's Chemical and Biological Defense Program provides a wide range of capabilities, including global biosurveillance and medical intelligence, medical countermeasures and interagency cooperation. While the primary mission is to prepare to respond to a chemical or biological attack and treat injured Warfighters, there are increasingly civilian applications for the DoD's chemical and biological defense programs. Humanitarian response missions, such as the outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa in 2014, benefit from the DoD's continued investment in chemical defense programs. |