Chemical Warfare’s Home Front
Elizabeth Kolbert
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/contributors/elizabeth-kolbert/>
Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals
that introduce new problems.
New York Review of Books, February 11, 2021 issue
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/issues/2021/02/11/>
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Reviewed:
The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed
Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth
<https://www.bookshop.org/a/312/9780226697246>
by Frank A. von Hippel
University of Chicago Press, 389 pp., $29.00
The Contamination of the Earth: A History of Pollutions in the
Industrial Age <https://www.bookshop.org/a/312/9780262043830>
by François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux, translated from the French by
Janice Egan and Michael Egan
MITPress, 459 pp., $39.95
Barnegat Light, New Jersey
<https://cdn-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kolbert_1-021121.jpg>
Brandon Seidler
Barnegat Light, New Jersey, 2015; photograph by Brandon Seidler, who
treated the image with chemicals similar to the fertilizer runoff
polluting the area
What is often called “the first use of weapons of mass destruction” took
place on April 22, 1915, near the town of Ypres, in western Belgium. Six
months earlier, Germany’s hopes for a quick victory in World War I had
been dashed on the banks of the Marne, and the country had enlisted some
of its top scientists to break the stalemate. One of them, Fritz Haber,
the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and
Electrochemistry, had suggested releasing chlorine gas. Since the gas is
heavier than air, Haber reasoned, it would sink when released; this
would allow it to infiltrate the trenches of the French and English forces.
The Germans had signed the Hague Convention of 1899, which forbade the
“use of projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of
asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” Nevertheless, by interpreting this
clause literally—the chlorine would be released not from projectiles but
from canisters—the country’s military commanders managed to convince
themselves that the move was permissible. In any event the French, they
complained—accurately—had already been releasing “deleterious gas” in
the form of grenades filled with ethyl bromoacetate, a skin irritant
that can be fatal. Just a few months after Haber proposed his idea, he
personally supervised the placement of nearly six thousand canisters of
chlorine along the front. Ten canisters were attached to a single spout,
to minimize the number of men needed to release their contents.
Haber, a Jew who had converted to Christianity, was self-critical,
ambitious, and restlessly brilliant. His work ranged from the
electrolysis of solid salts to the thermodynamics of gas reactions. A
few years before the start of World War I, he devised a method for
converting ordinary nitrogen into ammonia. The Haber-Bosch process, as
it became known, allowed for the production of synthetic fertilizers and
fundamentally changed the world: without chemical fertilizers, it is
estimated, some 3.5 billion people—almost half the globe’s
population—wouldn’t be alive today.
During the war the Germans, cut off from supplies of saltpeter, which is
both a fertilizer and an ingredient in gunpowder, used the Haber-Bosch
process to generate a substitute. This enabled them to continue to
produce explosives and, according to Haber himself, prolonged the war
for three years.
The canisters Haber had had installed near Ypres were supposed to be
opened on April 22 at 4:00AM. But there was no wind that morning, so the
attack was delayed. Finally, in the afternoon, a breeze came up, and at
around 5:00PMthe Germans turned the valves. The chlorine—some 300,000
pounds of it—drifted across the landscape in a billowing cloud. Within a
few minutes it had reached the French lines. A Canadian soldier who was
stationed to the north of the French recalled seeing a “queer
greenish-yellow fog that seemed strangely out of place in the bright
atmosphere of that clear April day.” A German soldier who had helped to
release the gas and then witnessed the results reported:
When we got to the French lines, the trenches were empty. But in a
half mile, the bodies of the French soldiers were everywhere…. You
could see where men had clawed at their faces, and throats, trying
to get their breath. Some had shot themselves. The horses, still in
the stables, cows, chickens, everything, all were dead.
The Germans were unable to press the advantage Haber had given them,
because frontline commanders hadn’t put much faith in the plans of a
civilian and so hadn’t prepared to push through the opening the gas
attack created. “I was a college professor, and therefore not to be
heeded,” Haber later complained. But, once again, using chemistry, he
had altered the course of history. The attack at Ypres initiated a
ghastly cycle, as each side sought—and deployed—ever more potent
chemical weapons. After chlorine came phosgene, hydrogen cyanide,
diphenylarsine chloride, cyanogen chloride, and bis(2-chloroethyl)
sulfide, otherwise known as mustard gas. In 1919 Haber was awarded a
Nobel Prize for his work on ammonia synthesis. Not surprisingly, given
what he’d done in the interim, the award is one of the most
controversial in Nobel history.
The story of Fritz Haber’s work to feed humanity on the one hand and gas
it on the other lies at the center of Frank A. von Hippel’s/The Chemical
Age./For von Hippel, a professor of ecotoxicology at Northern Arizona
University, the story turns out to be an unusually personal one. Von
Hippel’s great-grandfather was James Franck, a German physicist who won
his own Nobel Prize, in 1925, for his research on electrons. During
World War I, Franck was assigned to Haber’s institute in Berlin. Among
his duties was testing the efficacy of gas masks and filters. (Other
scientists on the testing crew included Otto Hahn, who received a Nobel
Prize in physics in 1944, and Hans Geiger, who later invented the Geiger
counter.) The testing was performed by sealing crew members into a room,
filling it with poison gas, and having them stay there until they felt
their masks starting to fail. Needless to say, the work was extremely
dangerous. Had things gone ever so slightly differently, von Hippel
might never have been born.
Von Hippel is interested in the ways people have solved problems with
chemicals and, in the process, created new problems. He introduces his
book with the example of Thomas Midgely Jr., who, in 1921, discovered
that he could eliminate “knocking”—essentially tiny explosions—in car
engines by lacing gasoline with tetraethyl lead. Over the next fifty
years, some six trillion gallons of leaded gasoline were produced and
combusted. Lead is toxic—in the course of his research, Midgely himself
suffered lead poisoning—and the price of eliminating knocking turned out
to be neurological damage in kids all over the world. (Studies suggest
that this damage persists into adulthood.) But Midgely was just getting
going.
Early refrigerators relied on noxious chemicals, like methyl chloride
and sulfur dioxide. After several people were killed by appliances
leaking methyl chloride, Midgely went searching for a replacement that
would be nontoxic and also chemically inert. In 1928 he and his team
came up with the world’s first chlorofluorocarbon, orCFC. For marketing
purposes, the compound was dubbed Freon.
Freon was a giant step forward for Frigidaire, but a great step back for
planet earth. Released into the air, the compound made its way to the
stratosphere, where it damaged the ozone layer, which protects the globe
from ultraviolet radiation. The first scientist to appreciate the impact
ofCFCs on the stratosphere was F. Sherwood Rowland, a chemistry
professor at the University of California Irvine. One night Rowland came
home from his lab and told his wife, “The work is going very well, but
it looks like the end of the world.” (For his insight, Rowland, too,
received a Nobel Prize, in 1995.) By the time Rowland’s calculations
were confirmed, in the mid-1980s, a large “hole” had opened up in the
ozone layer over Antarctica. The environmental historian J.R. McNeill
has observed that Midgley “had more impact on the atmosphere than any
other single organism in earth history.”
Von Hippel spends the first several chapters of/The Chemical Age/tracing
the discoveries that allowed scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries to identify and then fight the pathogens that cause diseases
like plague, yellow fever, and malaria. For reasons that are unclear,
these chapters linger over questions of precedence; for instance, was it
the French physician Alexandre Yersin or the Japanese doctor Kitasato
Shibasaburo who first discovered the bacterium responsible for plague?
The book picks up speed about midway through, when Haber makes his
appearance. As soon as the United States entered World War I, it, too,
began manufacturing chemical weapons, among them phosgene, mustard gas,
and chloropicrin. The US also developed a chemical that became known as
lewisite. Lewisite, it was said, was capable of wiping out “every
vestige of life—animal and vegetable.” A hundred and fifty tons of the
poison were en route to Europe when the Armistice was signed in November
1918.
After the war, the scientists who had been put to work in the army’s
Chemical Warfare Service had to find something else to do. The group
devoted itself to creating synthetic pesticides. Then came another war.
The insecticidal properties ofDDTwere discovered by a Swiss chemist
named Paul Müller just as the Germans were invading Poland, in 1939.
(Müller, too, was awarded a Nobel Prize, in 1948.) At the time the
Allies learned about the finding, in 1942, it wasn’t known whether the
chemical could be safely applied to human skin, and so, in the middle of
World War II, the US conducted tests, using conscientious objectors as
the subjects. A hundred body lice were placed in each man’s underwear
and allowed to reproduce. Every two weeks, the men were doused withDDTin
varying concentrations. The army decided thatDDTwas safe enough to dust
on people and virtually everything else, and began applying it in
fantastic quantities. In an effort to avert a typhus epidemic, US troops
appliedDDTpowder to nearly two million Italians. To preventGIs from
contracting malaria, the army droppedDDTon islands in the Pacific.
Troops, refugees, displaced persons—all were sprayed withDDT. The
chemical is now considered an endocrine disruptor, as well as a possible
carcinogen.
Meanwhile, the Nazis, too, were searching for new pesticides, which,
they knew, could often double as chemical weapons. A German chemist
named Gerhard Schrader, tinkering with the structure of a toxic
compound, chloroethyl alcohol, came up with a new class of insecticides
that would become known as organophosphates. (Organophosphate pesticides
include parathion, chlorpyrifos, and diazinon.) Tinkering with
organophosphates, he came up with tabun, a nerve agent that can cause
death within minutes, and sarin, a nerve agent that’s even more deadly.
(The Nazis produced both tabun and sarin but never used them, for
reasons that are still debated.) When Germany was close to surrendering,
the Chemical Warfare Service learned about tabun and had hundreds of
tons of the stuff shipped to the US. It also began recruiting Nazi
chemists in an effort to thwart the Soviets in their search for new
toxins. Schrader was arrested in March 1945. He cooperated with Allied
investigators and produced two reports: an unclassified one on
organophosphate insecticides and a classified one on organophosphate
nerve gases.
Following the war, the production of organophosphate insecticides and
ofDDT, an organochloride pesticide, soared. The damage these chemicals
did not just to “pests” but to any other living things that came in
contact with them prompted Rachel Carson to write/Silent Spring/,
published in 1962. “The question,” Carson observed, “is whether any
civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself,
and without losing the right to be called civilized.”/Silent
Spring/documented that synthetic pesticides were causing mortality in
fish, birds, and, in extreme cases, people. (Parathion, an
organophosphate, was, Carson wrote, responsible for hundreds of
accidental deaths each year.) The book was a sensation, and it led to a
series of legislative and regulatory changes. Von Hippel ends/The
Chemical Age/with a chapter on its aftermath. For all of/Silent
Spring/’s influence, he argues, the habit of solving problems with
chemicals that introduce new problems persists. A good example of this
comes from neonicotinoid pesticides.
Since the 1960s, neonicotinoids, which include imidacloprid and
dinotefuran, have, to a significant extent, replaced organophosphates
and organochlorides. Neonics, as they’re often called, were supposed to
be the ideal alternative to older generations of chemicals, as their
toxicity to mammals is relatively low. Neonics are now so widely used
that the world is basically awash in them.
Unfortunately, neonics don’t affect just targeted insects; they
affect/all/insects, including many of the pollinators that the world’s
flowering plants depend on. It’s been hypothesized that they are at
least partially responsible for the alarming crash in insect numbers
that has recently been documented in places as varied as Germany and
Costa Rica. And, just as with earlier generations of pesticides, neonics
are having effects up and down the food chain. A study published last
year in/Science/found that application of neonicotinoids to rice fields
led to a dramatic decline in the food available for fish in Lake Shinji,
north of Hiroshima, which, in turn, led to the collapse of the lake’s
smelt fishery. Birds are major consumers of insects, so, indirectly,
neonics are likely killing them, too. A recent paper by two
entomologists in the/Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences/observed:
DDToffers a close analogy to the current debate over neonicotinoids.
By the time governments and companies had curtailedDDTuse, the
ecological and human health effects were indisputable and in some
cases irreversible.
With neonicotinoids, von Hippel writes, “chemists produced a class of
insecticides that kills pollinators and predators of pests, and thereby
puts at risk the very crop production that the insecticides were
designed to protect.”
François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux, cowriters of/The Contamination of
the Earth/, are also interested in the ways one set of dangerous
chemicals replaces another in a recurring cycle. And they, too, identify
World War I as a turning point—the start of what they call the “toxic
age.” Haber again makes an appearance, but this time it’s a brief one.
Jarrige, a lecturer at the University of Burgundy, and Le Roux, an
environmental historian at the French National Center for Scientific
Research, aren’t concerned with individual battles or discoveries so
much as with the economic and social forces that generate and respond to
“pollutions.” (The pair insist on using the term in the plural; one has
to assume this sounds better in the original French.) “Pollutions have
become a decisive element in the functioning of the capitalist
world-system,” they write. “To follow these pollutions’ historical
trajectory is therefore also to think about the conflicts and
organizations of powers in the industrial age.”
Wars are destructive of the natural world, pretty much by definition.
According to Jarrige and Le Roux, the impact of artillery fire in World
War I on the French landscape was so great that it “corresponded to
40,000 years of natural erosion.” But what really distinguished World
War I, by their account, was the way resource extraction became central
to conflict. Moving troops and matériel now demanded vast quantities of
fuel; between 1910 and 1920, global oil production more than doubled.
(In 1917 the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau warned President
Woodrow Wilson that if he didn’t want to lose the war, he’d better
supply the Allies with petrol.) The war also gave rise to a whole new
energy-intensive industry: aviation. From 1914 to 1918, the number of
aircraft in the world increased by a factor of forty. Aviation, in turn,
demanded aluminum, which had to be smelted, producing another polluting
industry. (Among other things, aluminum production generates huge
amounts of bauxite residue, or “red mud,” which is so alkaline it can
kill any plant or animal that comes into contact with it.) The poison
gases developed for the war, which were then repurposed as pesticides,
led to still another form of pollution.
World War II accelerated the trends World War I had set in motion.
Between 1939 and 1945, global aluminum production tripled. In the US it
increased eightfold. After the war, aluminum manufacturers had to find
something to do with all their capacity and went looking for new
markets. Someone—Jarrige and Le Roux do not say who—came up with the
idea of putting soda in aluminum cans, and the cans became both
instruments and symbols of mass consumption.
To the growing list of “pollutions,” World War II added nuclear
contamination. The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima killed more than
100,000 people more or less instantaneously. The impact of the hundreds
of aboveground nuclear tests that followed has been more difficult to
quantify, but those effects still linger. The US tests over Bikini Atoll
made the islands uninhabitable. The Soviet tests at the Polygon, also
known as the Semipalatinsk test site, in Kazakhstan, rendered it one of
the most radioactive places on earth.
Jarrige and Le Roux argue that the wars of the twentieth century
fundamentally altered the relationship of man and nature “by initiating
new industrial trajectories” and disseminating “new toxic products.” At
the same time, they maintain, “these wars should not be analyzed as
aberrant phases; rather, they radicalized polluting practices that
existed in times of peace and that, in the emergency of conflict, found
new horizons in which to unfold.”
Presumably, poison gas, organophosphates, and nuclear fission would
eventually have been developed, even without two world wars. But if
there’s one thing we’ve learned since the start of “the chemical age,”
it’s that the rate of environmental change matters almost as much as its
magnitude. Had the major powers not rushed headlong into producingCFCs
and soda cans, chemical weapons and chemical fertilizers, nuclear bombs
and aboveground nuclear tests, at least we might have had time to learn
from our mistakes and limit the damage. Instead, Jarrige and Le Roux
observe, we got what “looks like a runaway race into the abyss.” As
Carson put it in/Silent Spring/: “Time is the essential ingredient; but
in the modern world there is no time.”
This Issue
February 11, 2021
Image of the February 11, 2021 issue cover.
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/issues/2021/02/11/>
Mark Danner
‘Be Ready to Fight’
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/articles/2021/02/11/stupid-coup-be-ready-to-fight-capitol-riot/>
Shennette Garrett-Scott
What Price Wholeness?
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/articles/2021/02/11/what-price-wholeness/>
Marc Weitzmann
A Rising Tide of Violence in France
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/articles/2021/02/11/terror-after-charlie-hebdo/>
All Contents
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/issues/2021/02/11/>
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*
More by Elizabeth Kolbert
He Tried to Be a Badger
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/articles/2016/06/23/he-tried-to-be-a-badger/>
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June 23, 2016 issue
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<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/articles/2015/01/08/can-climate-change-cure-capitalism-exchange/>
On ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate’
January 8, 2015 issue
Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/articles/2014/12/04/can-climate-change-cure-capitalism/>
Naomi Klein’s/This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate/
December 4, 2014 issue
Elizabeth Kolbert
<https://www-nybooks-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/contributors/elizabeth-kolbert/>
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at/The New Yorker/. Her new
book,/Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future/, will be published in
February. (February 2021)
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