“It’s a real mystery,” said Raymond A. Zilinskas, director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. “There’re a lot more questions than answers.”
During the war, the deadly agents could have dealt a major blow to the Allies, who had no knowledge of the lethal arms. According to the Army’s textbook on the medical effects of chemical weapons, German attacks with sarin and tabun, another nerve agent, “would have been devastating and might have altered the outcome of that conflict.”…
“He thought there would be retaliation — if not in kind,” said David H. Moore, a toxicologist and former official at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. “That’s the common explanation.”
Dr. Zilinskas of the Middlebury Institute said detailed historical studies suggested at least two other possibilities. The first was that the German military faced huge difficulties in deploying and using secret chemical weapons that had undergone little field testing, especially in battlefield conditions.
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