Douglas Neckers: The disturbing history of chemical weapons – HollandSentinel.com

Douglas Neckers| Community Columnist

All weapons of war are awful guns, bombs, bayonets, even arrows from bows whenever one of these is fired, no good can come to the person on the other end.

But war is war. The mortal hate that marks it means opposing armies will use everything at their disposal in quests of victory over the enemy. So that Putin might use chemical weapons in the Ukraine was taken seriously by the Allies. The compounds sarin and tabun probably have never been used in battle, but are so toxic that micro quantities kill humans.

The Germans made tons of both at three different sites in the 1940s, and considered using them. But Hitler wouldnt give his approval.Society is terribly ignorant, it seems, and if the kinds of drugs that were peddled to everyone including the former president of the United States to treat COVID-19 are any indications, the general awareness of the people toward chemical things hasnt improved. Hitler wasnt chemically more aware, but he surmised that if he had supplies of nerve agents, his enemies would have larger stashes.

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In war making with chemicals, most everyone knows the Germans introduced waves of chlorine gas over the battle fields at Ypres in Belgium in April 1915 and that most combatants used mustard gas and phosgene during World War I. Less known perhaps was a much more toxic mustard gas analog, Lewisite, so-called "dew of death" that was never used.

Lewisite had an impressive academic profile the reaction to make it was discovered by Father Julius Nieuwland later at Notre Dame, where he probably gained more fame as Knute Rocknes chemistry instructor than from the reaction of arsenic trichloride with acetylene. The toxic substance in that mix was identified by Northwestern University professor Winfred Lewis and manufactured by the U.S. chemical corps at the former Ben Hur automobile site near Willoughby, Ohio, under the direction of James Bryant Conant, later the president of Harvard. As 1918 was winding down, tons of Lewisite were shipped east by rail through Corry, Pennsylvania, where I was born and up over the mountains to Baltimore where it was loaded on vessels headed for France. The War ended so the Lewisite was dumped in the ocean.

The late Professor Paul Fried of Hopes history department knew I was a chemistry major when I took his European history course as a senior, and he urged me to study chemical weapons by the medium of a former day the ubiquitous semester ending "term paper." Fried assigned term paper topics in his classes and because he knew I was to become a chemist, he assigned me to write a paper on the chemical organization, I.G. Farben.

Farben was a cartel of 11 companies formed after WWI to do what cartels do control markets, prices, patent positions and distributions. Farben was a WWI reaction by German industry to rebuild after the Versailles treaty had taken the best efforts of its industries in reparations for their causing WWI. Farben aspired to take over the world of chemical manufacturing much as the Nazis saw the Third Reich as lasting 1,000 years. I found one book on Farben in all of Holland, at the Herrick Library (it no longer has it I checked), so I read what I could I understand of the history of I.G. Farben, and most particularly of its involvement in making weapons of mass destruction in German chemical companies. Farben was the topic of Nuremberg trial No. 6, the case of the U.S. v. Karl Krauch et al. and its overriding impact on the chemical industry world wide continued until it was broken up following WWII. From that simple assignment came a lifelong interest in the involvement of chemists in War.

Nerve agents were made in huge quantities by other combatants after they were discovered, and their structures revealed. The U.S. stash of sarin, soman and other agents took German scientists to help us make, and later, to destroy. They have been used occasionally. Once by a Japanese terrorist in the GUM attack on a Tokyo subway; also by Russian operatives on agents in Britain, and last year on Alexei Navalny when Putin agents put a novichok, Russian for "new agent," in his underwear in Siberia.

Chemical weapons treaties were signed by many nations including Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russian scientists who developed the novichok agents claim they are the deadliest ever made, with some variants possibly five to 10 times more potent thansoman. Chemical stocks were to be destroyed and no new compounds found or made. From reports published by a Russian scientist in the 1990s, we found that the chemical structures were only slightly different than other known compounds. And though this has not been officially released, a specific novichok, (Russian for "new agent") of known chemical composition that was not new was used in the poisoning of Alexei Navalny the Putin critic since jailed in Russia for his anti-government politics. Fortunately Navalny was treated in Siberia saving his life; and at the Charite Hospital in Berlin, where he was brought back to normal and released only to be jailed again when he returned to Russia.

Do we expect the Russians will use chemical weapons? No army has been as horrific as the Russian army in Ukraine; and no leadership as brutal. Its impossible to know for sure, but when cornered, Id guess the Russians would. When Fritz Hater, the German scientist that advocated the use of chlorine in Belgium in 1915 was about to depart to the east with armies that would use gas there, his wife chemist Clara Immerwahr tried hard to talk him out of doing so. And when he wouldnt, she took his pistol and shot herself. The conscience of a single spouse, also a chemist, says volumes to the rest of us. Lets hope she really could effect a never, but never, again.

Douglas Neckers, in addition to being a proud Hope alum, is an organic chemist, the McMaster distinguished professor emeritus and the founder of the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University. He is also a former board chair of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, N.Y.

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