POISON GAS IN WAR.

Manawatu Herald, Volume L, Issue 3903, 5 February 1929, Page 2

POISON GAS IN WAR.

HORRORS VISUALISED. London, February 2. “Unless you arouse the nation to the needs of organisation it might be faced with the sleep of death,” declared Lord Halsbury, when presiding at Major Dr. Humphreys’s lecture at the Royal Sanitary Society’s Institute on the horrors of poison gas in the next warfare. Major Humphreys visualised every house fitted 'with a gas-proof room, masked detachments and the flushing of the streets to destroy liquid poisons, before they could disseminate gases, he said. It would also be necessary to decontaminate the clothing and also organise motor transport for the evacuation of danger zones, on each of which one bomb concentrated with liquefied mustard gas would devastate a square mile of territory. Lord Halsbury painted a lurid picture in his speech on the effects of a gas attack on London, which be is personally convinced is coming. Lord Halsbury, who is as-sistant-inspector of high explosives in the Ministry of Munitions, was engaged in the war’s closing months in planning a long-distance bombardment of Germany. He urged Londoners to get into a panic now about gas, instead of waiting until an attack was made. Dr. Hans Lion, head of the German chemical warfare department, had said: “We are going to he the first nation in chemical warfare. That nation will have the best weapon ever forged and the ..most complete Empire in the world.” Lord Halsbury recalled that during an attack on a tenmile front in France 350 tons of phosgene gas were used. The 'gas was canalised up two valleys, producing a fatal effect on two villages twenty-one miles away the same night. The gas could be dropped by i thirty-five aircraft to-day with, similar results in the Thames Valley. He envisaged attack after attack on London, at two-hour intervals, continued possibly for two or three days. As a chemist he was sure that a, gas already had been discovered ! worse than anything used in the last war. It was useless to rely on gasmasks, since a mask effective for one gas was ineffective for another.