While several countries - North Korea, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria- are refusing to join the convention banning chemical weapons, other nations like the USA and Russia have pressed for a deadline extension until 2012 to commit themselves to destroy all chemical weapons stockpiles.

Each member state of the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is mandated to declare if it is in possession of chemical weapons.

If so, it must undertake a commitment to destroy all stockpiles by a particular deadline, initially 2007, with an ultimate deadline of 2012.

The Chemical Weapons Convention which has been signed by 182 countries, became international law on April 29, 1997 and mandated the OPCW to eliminate all chemical weapons forever and to verify the destruction of the declared chemical arms stockpiles within stipulated deadlines.

Unless every country joins the OPCW, there will be a dangerous loophole that could trigger the continued spread of the deadly weapons of mass destruction.

The director general of the OPCW, Rogelio Pfirter harshly criticized those countries which are resisting efforts to destroy their chemical weapons arsenal.

"There remains a hardcore of some countries in which we don't see any real evidence of their moving towards accession," he said.

"It is very unfair to other countries if a few countries retain for themselves the privilege of producing chemical weapons when all the others are transparent in this field," added Pfirter.

He stressed "there could be no moral, strategic or legal excuse to remain outside" the convention, which given the number of signatories, is considered international law.

"Having even a single state outside the convention provided a major loophole that allowed the manufacture of very deadly weapons at the expense of humanity," Pfirter said.

The six countries which have declared the possession of chemical weapons are the US, Russia, India, Albania, Libya and "a state" believed to be South Korea, according to OPCW insiders.

All six nations are required to destroy over 8,670,000 items, including ammunition and containers stockpiling over 71,000 metric tons of extremely toxic chemical agents.

Israel is among a handful of countries which refuse to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The illegal Jewish state confessed to using phosphorous bombs which are barred under the Chemical Weapons Convention, during the Lebanon war last summer.

Meanwhile the Islamic Republic of Iran is the only country in the Middle East to have become victimized by chemical weapons on a large scale as the deposed Iraqi Baathist regime - backed by western countries - massively used chemical weapons against Iranian civilian and military targets.

Almost 20 years after the end of the eight-year-old imposed war (1980-88), tens of thousands of Iranian war veterans and civilians are still suffering from the long-term effects of deadly Iraqi chemical agents.

The plight of Iran's 'forgotten victims' has been largely ignored by the western media because of political considerations.

Iranian authorities have registered more than 50,000 victims of chemical weapons needing costly special medical treatment and it is thought that about one million Iranians were somehow exposed to Iraqi mustard or nerve gas during the war.

One event however that will forever stick in the minds of people around the world was the chemical weapons attack by the former Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein on Halabja, a predominantly Kurdish town in northeastern Iraq.

On March 16, 1988, an estimated 5,000 civilians were killed and 10,000 injured when Iraqi air forces bombarded Halabja with mustard and other poison gases.

To this day, the people of Halabja still suffer from very high rates of serious diseases such as cancer, neurological disorders, birth defects and miscarriages.

The actual first emergence of chemical weapons dates back to World War I when German troops used poisonous gases on the battlefield near the town of Ypres in Belgium.

Another country which also used chemical weapons during its war with Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s was the United States as more than three million Vietnamese suffer the effects of chemical defoliants.

In order to deny food and protection to those deemed to be 'the enemy', the US defoliated the forests of Vietnam with the deadly chemicals Agent Orange, White, Blue, Pink, Green and Purple.

Agent Orange, which was contaminated with trace amounts of TCDD Dioxin - the most toxic chemical known to science - disabled and sickened soldiers, civilians and several generations of their offspring on two continents.

In addition to the millions of Vietnamese still affected by this deadly poison, tens of thousands of American soldiers are also affected.

It has caused birth defects in hundreds of thousands of children in Vietnam and the US - that is, the second and third generations of those who were exposed to Agent Orange decades ago.

Medical evidence indicates that certain cancers among them soft tissue non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, diabetes (type II), and in children spina bifida and other birth defects, are linked to chemical agents.