Quote:
Originally Posted by Ursus Maior
Highly persistent chemical warfare agents are not really what a military usually looks for. If something sticks to surfaces for a long time, you endanger your own soldiers, either when reclaiming lost territory or passing through newly conquered. Using long persistence chemical agents is a lot like salting the land, except also contaminating buildings, wells etc. one might want to use.
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Early on (I'm talking WW1 to the mid-1920s), a mixture of persistence levels was sought for chemical weapons. The longer-lasting vesicants would be used for multi-day area denial for regions the using military didn't plan to traverse. Areas that were to be occupied would use short-duration gases like phosgene or Vitrite (70% cyanogen chloride + 30% arsenic trichloride).
Later, the Soviets were very interested in persistent chemical weapons as a way of denying their flanks during a push into enemy territory. In their view, it was more important to maintain speed and be able to ignore their flanks than it was to preserve infrastructure they didn't have time to occupy.