"I said don't tear me up." — part two

From: Modern Mechanix

"[...] Almost a lone voice at the time was that of Winston Churchill who recorded his opinion in May 1919 while he was the War Secretary that: ‘I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. ... It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected’. [...]
     In January 1953 the Colonial Secretary, now Oliver Lyttleton, authorised the army to use a ‘new tear gas’, known as BBC, in Malaya. ‘This gas’, he said, ‘the only effect of which was lachrymatory, would be used in the jungle to divert bandits into other routes or to deny portions of the jungle to them. It was possible that, when it became known that this gas was being used in Malaya, there would be criticism from some quarters’. The Cabinet, chaired by the Foreign Secretary, now Anthony Eden, gave its approval but Lyttleton had been misinformed about BBC (also known as CA for short), or to give it its proper name, Bromobenzyl-cyanide. It was not a ‘new tear gas’ because it had been used by the French as Camite during World War I. Under the terms of the Geneva Gas Protocol the use of BBC was permissible because the British army was engaged in fighting ‘bandits’ who were members of the Malayan National Liberation Army, the military wing of the Malayan Communist Party. It was a therefore a ‘police action’ and not a ‘war’ (to remove any doubts it would come to be called the ‘Malayan Emergency’) but it still represented a major change in attitude for the army to be allowed to go beyond the use of a lachrymatory agent for crowd control and to employ it as a stand-alone ‘area denial’ weapon.
     At the time there were two main lachrymatory agents employed by police forces and their exploitation illustrates the difference in attitudes to tear gas on the other side of the Atlantic. The first, and the one most probably used in Northern Rhodesia, Bombay and shipped to Palestine by the War Office to replace the obsolete KSK grenades, was Chloroacetophenone, known as CN for short. It was discovered by German scientists in the 1870s and further developed by the US after World War I. It caused severe irritation to the eyes, nasal passages and throat. It also induced involuntarily closure of the eyes and a feeling of helplessness and panic and during the 1920s CN became virtually standard equipment in US urban police departments.
     The second was Diphenylaminechlorarsine, known as Adamsite or DM for short. Although this was also first discovered in Germany, it was developed independently in the US by Dr. Roger Adams (after whom it was named) in 1918. In small doses its effects were similar to CN but in higher concentrations it caused nausea and uncontrollable vomiting.

Its effects could last for up to twenty-four hours and one of its earliest uses was after President Hoover ordered the removal of the so-called ‘Bonus Army’ from Washington, D.C. on 28 July 1932. An infantry regiment and a cavalry regiment commanded by Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur (with Major Dwight D. Eisenhower as one of his aides), supported by tanks commanded by Major George Patton, used DM and rifles fitted with bayonets to break up a huge protest camp created by World War I veterans (accompanied by their wives and children) who were demanding payment of a war bonus they believed they had been promised.

     After World War II another lachrymatory agent, 0-chlorobenzylidene Malononitrile, known as CS for short, gradually replaced most of the others. It had first been synthesized in 1928 by two US chemists, Ben Corson and Roger Stroughton, whose initials identify the compound. It was developed further by the Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE) at Porton Down in England where it was found that CS reacted with moisture on the skin and in the eyes causing effects similar to CN, but that the dose of CS which might lead to subsequent death was at least twelve hundred times greater than that which produced symptoms so intolerable as to force a person to leave an exposed area. SK, KSK, BBC (CA), DM and CN all had a much lower safety factor and the first use of CS by the British army in the Empire was in 1958 in the Crown Colony of Cyprus. [...]
     There is one further lachrymatory agent that should be mentioned. Didenoxazepine, known as CR for short, was only ever manufactured in the UK at the Chemical Defence Establishment at Nancekuke in Cornwall between 1962 and 1977. On the closure of Nancekuke the remaining stocks of CR were transferred to Porton Down and in response to a question asked in the House of Commons in December 1994 it was disclosed by the Chief Executive of Porton Down, Graham Pearson, that: ‘The studies on CR gas in relation to the skin and eye sensitivity tests ... concluded that CR was found to have certain advantages over CS in specific situations. Its potency was found to be approximately ten times greater than that of CS and its toxicity is low in comparison with the other irritants’. In response to another question in December 1998 the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Defence, John Spellar, said that: ‘We have no records of CR having been used operationally by the Armed Forces. ... CR was authorised to be held in readiness for use in Northern Ireland in October 1973. Its possible use has also been authorised on a small number of occasions where the armed forces have responded to a request for assistance for law enforcement purposes from the civil power’. It is still reserved for use by military Special Forces and is not available to the police."
— Mike Waldren, Police Firearms Officers Association
Read more...

Protester reacts to tear gas in Cairo, Egypt (from: The Telegraph)

"While tear gas and pepper spray are banned from use in war by an international treaty, domestic use is legal and nearly ubiquitous in the United States. The advantages of these 'non-lethal' technologies, police say, include fewer deaths and serious injuries to officers and suspects, a more benign image for departments and less litigation. Currently, more than 90 percent of the country's police departments issue pepper spray to their officers, according to the Justice Department, and many departments store tear gas for use in crowd control or riot situations.
     Despite widespread use, none of the agents sold for police purposes is monitored, tested or regulated by any government agency for consistency, purity, toxicity or even efficacy. Dr. Howard Hu, a Harvard University epidemiologist, says that the extent of ill effects from these chemicals is unknowable since there have been no rigorous, independent follow-up studies on exposed populations. Little has changed since 1989, when Hu wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 'There is an ongoing need for investigation into the full toxicological potential of tear gas chemicals and renewed debate on whether their use can be condoned under any circumstances.'
     Because they are treated as weapons, police-grade products 'fall between regulatory cracks,' says Raymond Downs, program manager in science and technology at the National Institute for Justice. 'Police are at the mercy of manufacturers,' Downs adds, in that they have to rely solely on makers' claims for the safety of the chemical weapons themselves and for the wide variety of solvents and propellants routinely added to turn the active ingredients into aerosols."
— Terry Allen, Common Dreams
Read more...
See earlier article about tears here...