The Times Magazine 45by the Syrian regime in 2013, Assad’s forces
have used gas in dozens of incidents, ushering
in an era of chemical warfare which, combined
with the lessons of Covid-19, de Bretton-
Gordon predicts will have consequences
that ripple across the future of warfare.
“Chemical and biological weapons will be
the scourge for generations,” he asserts. “The
genie is out of the bottle. These are f***ing
good weapons. They are easy, they are cheap,
they have the potential to bring the world to
its knees. This isn’t the First World War any
more. The capability of what exists now is far
worse: really, really dangerous.”
Indeed, in Syria the impact of gas attacks
and the attendant fear they inspire has altered
the path of the war.
When on August 21, 2013, in the worst
of many chemical attacks, Assad used sarin
nerve gas against two rebel-held suburbs
of Damascus, killing perhaps more than
1,500 people, it earned him strategic reward.
Assad’s fortunes were at their nadir at
the time: Damascus was partially cut off; the
surrounding rebel areas had proved resilient
to counterattack and the regime showed signs
of collapse. By firing nerve gas in rockets
at the Ghouta suburbs, Assad achieved an
astonishing result: smashing the rebels’
morale, terrorising their support base and
calling the bluff of President Obama, who
a year and one day prior to the attack had
warned Syria that the use of chemical
weapons would mark a “red line” in his
calculus for US intervention.
Britain and the US balked at responding
to the Ghouta attack, and although the
regime subsequently agreed to destroy its
chemical weapon stocks under international
supervision, it held on to some munitions and
chemical attacks continued.
De Bretton-Gordon regards the Ghouta
attack as a fulcrum moment in the war
that secured Assad’s survival, bonded him
to Russian support and opened the gates to
further proliferation.
“If we had removed Assad then we would
be in a very different position,” he insists. “Our
failure to do that gave him the green light to
use chemical weapons whenever he really
needs to. Now everyone in the world knows
about the power of chemical weapons. Once
they were a little-known thing. Now we’ve
had them used in bloody Salisbury.”He never planned to become a chemical
weapons expert. It just happened.
Commissioned into the Royal Tank
Regiment at the tail end of the Cold War,
he gained specialised knowledge in the world
of chemical and biological weaponry while
serving for two years as the commander of
the British Army’s Joint Chemical, Biological,
Radiological and Nuclear Regiment.
As the name suggests, the regiment is
tasked to locate and identify chemical and
biological weapon use. De Bretton-Gordon
became grimly familiar with the theoretical
killing properties of agents and pathogens
such as VX nerve gas, anthrax and sarin.Although he had always wished to
command a tank regiment, when the army sent
him to the Royal Military College of Science
at Shrivenham to complete a chem-bio science
diploma before taking up his CBRN post, he
found chemical warfare darkly fascinating.
“Chemical weapons are a morbidly
brilliant weapon if you have no moral
scruples,” he observes.
Citing the killing capabilities of new-
generation nerve gases that could kill entire
cities, he cautions that biological weapons can
do even worse, remarking that while the meek
reel from the impact of Covid, the bad have
sat up in interest.
“Not even a nuclear bomb can have
the impact of a biological weapon,” he
warns. “I am not suggesting that Covid
was manufactured, but its impact won’t go
unnoticed by every dictator, despot, rogue state
and terrorist with an eye to how best to attack
us and impose themselves on the world.”Man has used chemicals to kill for thousands
of years, but it was the scale of chemical
horrors in the 20th century that penetrated
modern consciousness. Tit for tat gas attacks
in the First World War caused 1.4 million
casualties among soldiers. During the
Holocaust, the Nazis gassed more than one
million Jews using hydrogen cyanide. Next,
during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, Saddam
Hussein regularly used chemical weapons
against Iranian units and the Kurds, gassing
the Kurdish city of Halabja just days before
the war ended in 1988, killing more than
5,000 civilians in a single day.
In response to the growing chemical
threat, the Chemical Weapons Convention
came into force in 1997 with the threefold
aim of destroying existing chemical weapon
stocks, preventing their further production
and prohibiting their use: tasks supposedly
administered by the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
Yet the chemical menace strode into the
21st century courtesy of President Assad,
and at various points in the past seven years
chemical attacks in Syria have eroded US
credibility, sealed Damascus’s alliance with
Moscow – and killed around 2,000 people.
As de Bretton-Gordon points out, chemical
weapons have also contributed to saving the
Assad regime.
“Assad was about to fall in August 2013.
Then he bombed Ghouta with sarin in a last
throw of the dice, and seven years later he’s
still in power because of it.”Few wanted to believe the first reports of
gas being used in Syria. With the example of
Iraq fresh in the UK’s mind, where the 2003
invasion had been launched on the back of
spurious WMD claims, it was natural thatChildren wounded in
a chlorine gas attack
in Douma, April 2018