page_title: Sarin
section_title: Use as a weapon
hierarchical_section_title: Sarin / History / Use as a weapon
caption_attribution_description: 191. Photocopy of photograph, U.S. Army, ca. 1943 (original print located at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Commerce City, Colorado). DEMONSTRATION CLUSTER BOMB, SHOWING BOMBLETS. HAER COLO,1-COMCI,1-191 Photo is of a M190 Honest John chemical warhead section containing demonstration M134 GB (Sarin) bomblets.
context_page_description: Sarin is an extremely toxic synthetic organophosphorus compound. A colourless, odourless liquid, it is used as a chemical weapon due to its extreme potency as a nerve agent. Exposure is lethal even at very low concentrations, where death can occur within one-to-ten minutes after direct inhalation of a lethal dose, due to suffocation from lung muscle paralysis, unless antidotes are quickly administered. People who absorb a non-lethal dose, but do not receive immediate medical treatment, may suffer permanent neurological damage.
  Sarin is generally considered a weapon of mass destruction. Production and stockpiling of sarin was outlawed as of April 1997 by the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, and it is classified as a Schedule 1 substance.
context_section_description: In mid-1939, the formula for the agent was passed to the chemical warfare section of the German Army Weapons Office, which ordered that it be brought into mass production for wartime use. Pilot plants were built, and a high-production facility was under construction (but was not finished) by the end of World War II. Estimates for total sarin production by Nazi Germany range from 500 kg to 10 tons. Though sarin, tabun and soman were incorporated into artillery shells, Germany did not use nerve agents against Allied targets.
  1950s (early): NATO adopted sarin as a standard chemical weapon, and both the USSR and the United States produced sarin for military purposes.
  1953: 20-year-old Ronald Maddison, a Royal Air Force engineer from Consett, County Durham, died in human testing of sarin at the Porton Down chemical warfare testing facility in Wiltshire, England. Ten days after his death an inquest was held in secret which returned a verdict of misadventure. In 2004, the inquest was reopened and, after a 64-day inquest hearing, the jury ruled that Maddison had been unlawfully killed by the "application of a nerve agent in a non-therapeutic experiment".
  1957: Regular production of sarin chemical weapons ceased in the United States, though existing stocks of bulk sarin were re-distilled until 1970.
  1976: Chile's intelligence service, DINA, assigned biochemist Eugenio Berríos to develop Sarin gas within its program Proyecto Andrea, to be used as a weapon against its opponents. One of DINA's goals was to package it in spray cans for easy use, which, according to testimony by former DINA agent Michael Townley, was one of the planned procedures in the 1976 assassination of Orlando Letelier. Berríos later testified that it was used in a number of assassinations.
  March 1988: Halabja chemical attack; Over two days in March, the ethnic Kurdish city of Halabja in northern Iraq (population 70,000) was bombarded by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Air Force jets with chemical bombs including sarin. An estimated 5,000 people died, almost all civilians.
  April 1988: Sarin was used four times against Iranian soldiers at the end of the Iran–Iraq War, helping Iraqi forces to retake control of the al-Faw Peninsula during the Second Battle of al-Faw.
  1993: The United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention was signed by 162 member countries, banning the production and stockpiling of many chemical weapons, including sarin. It went into effect on April 29, 1997, and called for the complete destruction of all specified stockpiles of chemical weapons by April 2007. When the convention entered force, the parties declared worldwide stockpiles of 15,047 tonnes of sarin. As of December 2015, 89% of the stockpiles had been destroyed.
  1994: Matsumoto incident; the Japanese religious sect Aum Shinrikyo released an impure form of sarin in Matsumoto, Nagano, killing eight people and harming over 200. The Australian sheep station Banjawarn was a testing ground.
  1995: Tokyo subway sarin attack; the Aum Shinrikyo sect released an impure form of sarin in the Tokyo Metro. Twelve people died, and over 6,200 people received injuries.
  2002: Pro-Chechen militant Ibn al-Khattab may have been assassinated with sarin by the Russian government.
  May 2004: Iraqi insurgents detonated a 155 mm shell containing binary precursors for sarin near a U.S. convoy in Iraq. The shell was designed to mix the chemicals as it spun during flight. The detonated shell released only a small amount of sarin gas, either because the explosion failed to mix the binary agents properly or because the chemicals inside the shell had degraded with age. Two United States soldiers were treated after displaying the early symptoms of exposure to sarin.
  March 2013: Khan al-Assal chemical attack; Sarin was used in an attack on a town west of Aleppo city in Syria, killing 28 and wounding 124.
  August 2013: Ghouta chemical attack; Sarin was used in multiple simultaneous attacks in the Ghouta region of the Rif Dimashq Governorate of Syria during the Syrian Civil War. Varying sources gave a death toll of 322 to 1,729.
  April 2
caption: U.S. Honest John missile warhead cutaway, showing M134 Sarin bomblets (c. 1960)
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