kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin-3.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Sarin	4/4	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T13:19:27.945210+00:00	kb-cron

1950s (early): NATO adopted sarin as a standard chemical weapon. 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. 1970: During Operation Tailwind, America may have deployed sarin against the Communist Pathet Lao, alongside American defectors to the Laotian Communists. 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 and it was planned to be used to kill inhabitants, through poisoning the water supply of Argentine capital Buenos Aires, in case Operation Soberanía took place. 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: Iraq used Sarin 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 November 28, 2019, 98% of the stockpiles have been destroyed. 1994: Matsumoto incident; the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo released an impure form of sarin in Matsumoto, Nagano, killing eight people and harming over 500. The Australian sheep station Banjawarn was a testing ground. 1995: Tokyo subway sarin attack; the Aum Shinrikyo cult released an impure form of sarin in the Tokyo Metro. Thirteen 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 2017: Khan Shaykhun chemical attack: The Syrian Air Force released sarin gas in rebel-held Idlib Province in Syria during an airstrike. April 2018: Victims of the Douma chemical attack in Syria reported to have symptoms consistent with exposure to sarin and other agents. On July 6, 2018, the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) of the OPCW published their interim report. The report stated that, "The results show that no organophosphorous [sarin] nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties". The chemical agent used in the attack was later identified as elemental chlorine. July 2023: The U.S. destroyed the last of its declared chemical weapons, a sarin nerve agent-filled M55 rocket, on July 7, 2023.

== See also == Chlorosarin Ethylsarin Thiosarin Gulf War syndrome

== References ==

== External links == Material Safety Data Sheet CIA memo: The Stability of Iraq's Chemical Weapons Stockpile CDC Sarin fact sheet CDC Sarin Emergency Response Card