Heritage of Horror: Lessons in the History of Chemical Warfare

Jonathan B. Tucker. War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to al-Qaeda. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. xi + 479 pp. $30.

Frederic J. Brown. Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints.New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005. (First published: Princeton University Press, 1965.) xxxiii + 355 pp. $29.95.

Reviewed by Neil Gussman

Television and terrorism seem to be made for each other. The ruthless cowards who want to promote their cause on the world stage through violence know that few things are more compelling than footage of dismembered children brought into homes around the world. Successful television shows like 24 and Alias project nightmare visions of the future, portraying terrorists attacking America with poison gas. But for real terrorists conventional bombs (or aircraft used as bombs) remain the weapons of choice, and since the end of World War I no regular army except Japan’s (in China), Italy’s (in Ethiopia), and the combatants of the Iran-Iraq war have used chemical weapons in battle. The only terrorist organization to use nerve gas was a Japanese cult that attacked the Tokyo subway system in 1994. So why don’t terrorists use chemical weapons? Two recent books, one a reissued classic, provide plausible answers for this surprising restraint.

For readers interested in the history of the most deadly class of chemical weapons, War of Nerves is a well-told story. Jonathan Tucker has written books on smallpox and leukemia and edited a volume on chemical and biological warfare, so this book adds to his growing list of nightmare topics. Focusing (as the title suggests) on nerve gas, Tucker recounts many tales of the development, production, and deployment of chemical weapons from the German laboratory where the first nerve agent was developed in 1936 to the present.

Tucker warns the reader that huge existing stockpiles of chemical weapons around the world pose significant potential dangers from accidents, neglect, or terrorist plots. Despite the deaths he records at every step in the story of nerve gas (he devotes two chapters to the Tokyo subway attack), I found hope in Tucker’s story. His long descriptions of the problems encountered by the cult that orchestrated the Tokyo subway attack and by Saddam Hussein’s chemists in the Iran-Iraq war show how difficult it is to make nerve gas.

The United States and the Soviet Union created huge stockpiles of nerve gas in the cold war, but even for developed nations with millions of dollars to spend, nerve gas synthesis is difficult. The ingredients are corrosive and dangerous. The equipment required to make nerve gas is specialized and difficult to obtain. Even the most talented chemists and chemical engineers faced huge difficulties and in many cases failed, either partially or completely, to produce nerve gas. Luckily for us, no weapon in the real world is as easy to use or works quite as well as its fictional counterpart on television.

In his account of U.S. policy on chemical warfare from 1914 to 1945, Frederic J. Brown, a retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army, finds the reason for restraint in politics, not science. In World War II, Germany and the United Kingdom were reluctant to use gas warfare (or have their allies do so) for fear of retaliation. Franklin Roosevelt was opposed to gas as a “barbarous and inhumane” weapon; in 1943 he pronounced that the United States would not initiate gas warfare, but would retaliate in kind. In 1968, Brown could take comfort that the restraints of World War II applied as well to the Cold War. Unfortunately, these restraints do not apply to international terrorists, who can inflict terror on civilian populations and trust that traditional Western reticence will preclude our retaliation with indiscriminate murder. We must hope that science (and our governments’ efforts) proves a sufficient obstacle to the use of these deadly weapons.