快猫短视频

CHEMISTS in Poland have found a way to destroy lewisite, one of the nastiest
chemical weapons of the 20th century. Lewisite has a burning, choking effect
like a fast-acting version of mustard gas, and is dangerous to incinerate
because it contains arsenic. This either escapes up the chimney or makes the ash
too toxic to dump. But scientists in Wroclaw have found a way to harmlessly
break down lewisite.

Poland discovered nine tonnes of adamsite, a vomit-inducing riot gas related
to lewisite, in a warehouse near Lodz in 1945. The containers had labels written
in German. Under the Chemical Weapons Convention, the manufacturing country must
reclaim and destroy abandoned weapons. But Germany denied ownership, and Poland
couldn鈥檛 prove it, says Krzysztof Paturej, Poland鈥檚 representative at the
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague. 鈥淪o we
decided to find a way to destroy it.鈥�

They did it by reacting the adamsite with hydrogen from phosphorous
acid鈥攁 kind of reaction which no one had tried before. While other methods
create toxic arsenic salts, says Stanislaw Witek of the Wroclaw University of
Technology, this leaves pure arsenic, most of which can be recovered and used to
make glass.

鈥淭he same process will work with lewisite, which is a much bigger problem,鈥�
says Paturej. There are old weapons containing lewisite in the US, France,
Belgium, Germany, Italy and South-East Asia. Russia has 6771 tonnes of the
chemical, while more than a million old Japanese weapons left in China could
contain lewisite
(快猫短视频, 27 May, p5).