“It’s a powerful image”, Jonathan Forman, an American chemist, says, talking about Gassed, a painting by John Singer Sargent. It depicts a line of soldiers walking past the front during the First World War, each with his hand on the soldier in front, blinded by mustard gas.
A reproduction of the painting hangs near the entrance of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague, where Forman works as a science policy advisor. “It’s even more shocking to realise that weapons like that were still being used in Syria in August 2013”, he says. “By the way, that was sarin.”
Forman visited Campus The Hague on Tuesday to talk about his organisation. “The OPCW is the executive agency associated with the Chemical Weapons Convention, a disarmament treaty that came into effect in 1997.
“It is a full prohibition on the possession, use or distribution of chemical weapons, signed by a hundred and ninety nations. The last country to sign was Syria, just recently.
“Six nations are not party to the treaty: North Korea, Angola, Egypt and South Sudan haven’t signed it; Israel and Myanmar have signed but haven’t ratified it. However, that doesn’t mean that they don’t subscribe to the principles of the treaty or that they have chemical weapons. I would imagine that a new country like South Sudan has other priorities at the moment.”
Roughly speaking, there are two sorts of chemical weapons. “Mustard gas causes blisters on the skin and affects the lungs and the eyes. Nerve gasses like sarin or VX disrupt the signal from the nerves to the muscles and can cause a fatal paralysis.”
The chemicals necessary for the manufacture of the gasses, the precursors, need to be destroyed as well as the gasses and the missiles that transport them. “But some precursors are very common, so it’s up to us to watch carefully whether a country buys certain chemicals and whether it uses them for nonviolent purposes.”
Forman does not expect that the countries that have signed the treaty have a secret stash of poison gas.
“Despite monitoring and inspection, it’s still possible to cheat. Nevertheless, in the seventeen years since the treaty was signed, we’ve never been requested to do a ‘challenge’ inspection. No country has said ‘I don’t trust that state, I want a new inspection’.”
The commonest way to destroy chemical weapons is by hydrolysis. “You allow the chemical to react with water and other reaction agents so that they lose their toxic effect, then you burn the mush that’s left.”
They are dealing with the Syrian arsenal right now, although recently missed deadlines have been reported.
“The schedule for Syria is quite tight and we didn’t meet the deadlines. We’re working on a push: making sure that the Syrian government gets a move on with it.
“There’s a war on, so it’s all a bit more complicated. Some of the chemicals are transported to the Syrian port of Latakia and then transferred to the American cargo ship Cape Ray which carries the equipment to turn the chemicals into mush. The ship then sails to international waters and starts the process. The remaining mess is transported to several places in Europe where it ends up in incinerators. Rather a lot of bother. But 29 per cent of the stuff has already been destroyed.”