Chemical Weapons
Iran has experienced attack by chemical warfare (CW) on the battlefield and suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, both civilian and military, in such attacks during the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War. As a result, Iran has promulgated a very public stance against the use of chemical weapons, making numerous vitriolic comments against Iraq's use of such weapons in international forums. Iran is not known to have resorted to using chemical weapons in retaliation for Iraqi chemical weapons attacks during the Iran–Iraq War, though it would have been legally entitled to do so under the then-existing international treaties on the use of chemical weapons which only prohibited the first use of such weapons. Following its experiences during the Iran–Iraq War, Iran signed the Chemical Weapons Convention on 13 January 1993 and ratified it on 3 November 1997. In the official declaration submitted to OPCW Iranian government admitted that it had produced mustard gas in 1980s but that ceased the offensive program and destroyed the stockpiles of operational weapons after the end of war with Iraq.
A U.S. Central Intelligence Agency report dated January 2001 speculated that Iran had manufactured and stockpiled chemical weapons – including blister, blood, choking, and probably nerve agents, and the bombs and artillery shells to deliver them. It further claimed that during the first half of 2001, Iran continued to seek production technology, training, expertise, equipment, and chemicals from entities in Russia and China that could be used to help Iran reach its goal of having indigenous nerve agent production capability. However the certainty of this assessment declined and in 2007 the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency limited its public assessment to just noting that "Iran has a large and growing commercial chemical industry that could be used to support a chemical agent mobilization capability."
Iran is a signatory of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans chemical weapons, delivery systems, and production facilities. Iran has reiterated its commitment to the CWC and its full support for the work of the OPCW, in particular in view of the considerable suffering these weapons have caused to the Iranian people. Iran has not made any declaration of a weapons stockpile under the treaty.
Read more about this topic: Iran And Weapons Of Mass Destruction
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