Chemical weapons certainly affected those who fought in forests and trenches, both physically and mentally, dramatically undermining their confidence and fighting spirit, but also terrorized the civilian population to the point where the gas mask (essential in the battle field) became a symbol that embodies the legacy of violence and mass destruction that was World War I ( Grazel, 2014 Jünger, 1998). The "Great War" marked the beginning of a new era of military history, not only because of the use of trenches, machine guns, the production and the use of tanks, the use of artillery of an unprecedented scale or the introduction of military aviation and submarines, but also for the massive and systemic industrial scale use of chemical weapons for the first time in history ( Paige, 2009).
This prohibition was also included in the Fourth Hague Convention on October 18, 1907, which prohibited the use of toxins or toxic weapons. Subsequently, on July 29, 1899, the Second Hague Declaration was signed, leading to the first international ban on the use of projectiles whose sole purpose was to spread asphyxiating or deleterious gases.
This prohibited the use of poison or poison weapons, and the use of projectile weapons or materials that cause unnecessary suffering. Two hundred years later, in 1874, given the concern about chemical weapons, the Brussels Convention was signed, on the law and customs of war. The effects that the chemical weapons had in the battlefields prompted Germany and France to sign the Strasbourg Agreement on Augthe first documented international agreement that prohibited the use of "perfidious and odious" toxic devices ( Smart, 1996). During the Franco-Dutch War they began to use explosive and incendiary devices containing belladonna alkaloids, among other toxic compounds. It was only in the XVI century when the use of toxic properties of some chemical substances for military purposes was documented. Such is the case, for example, of flamethrowers used in the year 424 BC during the Peloponnesian War, or the Greek fire developed in the year 668 BC ( Partington, 1990). While previous reports of chemical substances being used in combat are recognized, generally they were used for their flammable, rather than their toxic properties. The oldest reported case of a chemical substance being used as a weapon due to its toxic properties occurred in the year 256 BC, during the siege of the Persian city Dura Europos (modern Syria), where they used a mixture of tar and sulfur to produce sulfur oxides and thus take control of the city ( Patel, 2010).
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