Newly released official papers show that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government considered rebuilding Britain's chemical weapons arsenal in the face of a Soviet threat in the early 1980s.
The formerly secret documents show that Thatcher's defence chiefs were worried that Britain had no response to a possible Soviet chemical attack except to retaliate with nuclear weapons.
At the time, the Ministry of Defence believed the Soviet Union had more than 300,000 tonnes of nerve agents along with other chemical weapons.
Britain by then had voluntarily given up its chemical weapons supplies, and the United States - a fellow NATO member and close ally - had aging supplies that amounted to only one-tenth of the Soviet arsenal.
In the papers, Thatcher states that it might be considered "negligent" of the government not to develop a credible response to a Soviet chemical attack short of using nuclear weaponry. She also suggests urging the Americans to modernise their chemical arsenal.
The lack of a chemical capacity was called a "major gap" in NATO's military capacity by Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine in a secret 1984 document. He said the threat of a nuclear response lacked credibility.
Other documents indicate the British studied building "chemical shelters" in homes to protect civilians from Soviet attack but could not come up with a workable design.
Chemical weapons were legal at the time. Britain has since joined the Chemical Weapons Convention barring them. It went into force in 1997, and Britain has worked to persuade other countries to renounce chemical stockpiles.
The secret cabinet files have been made public by the National Archives under a 30-year rule regulating the release of government documents.
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