INVISIBLE GAS OF DEATH

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19047, 26 June 1924, Page 9

INVISIBLE GAS OF DEATH

NEW HORROR RtADY FOR WAR NO SMELL POISONS THE AIR FOR TWO DAYS Scientists have discovered a deadly new poison-gas. It can easily be distributed by aeroplanes. It is invisible and has no smell. No one who breathes it will be aware that he is inhaling death, but within from six to twelve hours he will die in terrible agony. Professor C. Delisle Burns, of London University, said to a Daily Express representative recently:— “The gas is of such a nature that it sinks to the ground and will remain deadly in basements or tube subways for two days. Combatant nations at the end of the war knew of this gas, but they were unable to manufacture it in sufficient quantities to use it. Chemists have now solved the problem. LARGE SUPPLIES. “While the Washington Conference on disarmament was sitting, two hundred of the best young chemists in the United States were engaged at Edgewood Arsenal, near Washington in research on and manufacture of the gas. America now has immense supplies of jj-“Gas-masks will be the only protecttion, but you cannot train a civilian population to use gas-masks in a few minutes.” Major Victor Lefebure, a great authority on chemical warfare, said that at the end of the war there wore indications that the Germans were manufacturing in a crude form a more terrible gas than any then in nse, and that scientists have since then worked steadily towards perfecting this gas. “It will be possible,” added Major Lefebure, “for a nation which knows ths secret of a really deadly gas to put such a gas barrier round their country that for days no army could cross their territory. “About two tons of gas can be carried by one aeroplane, and such an amount would spread death over a quarter of a mile radius of the spot at which it was discharged.”