If you were to ask the average person on the street to tell you about chemical weapons, odds are you’ll hear far more in the way of legend, born out of popular culture, than you will anything resembling fact. For most people, the only information they have on chemical weapons comes from movies like The Rock, episodes of 24, or trashy spy thrillers. Worse still, because that level of background knowledge is so low, even those people who can speak with even a basic level of understanding can often be taken as credible, even as they rattle off incredibly misleading information.
I should know this. Before I started really working in the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) field, I wasn’t much better. When I first joined the U.S. Army as an artillery officer, my sum total of chemical defense training was a short period of instruction as a cadet at Fort Lewis. That very limited instruction reinforced the fact that chemical protective suits are awful to wear more than conveying any real functional knowledge about chemical agents and their effects.
Hellbound and Down 