Sarin is a lethal nerve gas which has been classified as a weapon of mass destruction causing asphyxia – which may occur one minute after exposure. The name is derived from the initial letters of Schrader, Ambros, Rüdiger and Linde, four German scientists who discovered it accidentally in their research for a stronger pesticide in the 1930s. According to legislation in force in Nazi Germany, all research relating to inventions with potential military importance had to be reported. From that point on, it became strictly classified and was developed as a weapon, which the Germans ultimately never deployed.
In English it appears for the first time in a table published in 1951 in an academic journal Acta physiologica Scandinavica Supplementum as isopropoxy-methyl-phosphoryl-flouride (sarin). This same table also introduces to the English language soman and tabun – two other nerve gases that the Germans produced in the Second World War but did not use.
About this time, NATO adopted sarin as a chemical weapon and it was produced for military purposes until 1956. The Chemical Weapons Convention of the United Nations stipulated destruction of all chemical weapons by April 2007. This included sarin.
However, sarin is one of the weapons of mass destruction and has been deployed this millennium in both Iraq and Syria.
