Six-Legged Soldiers Part Three: Nerve Gases, Then and Now

This is the last part of Jeffrey Lockwood‘s blog on the development of nerve gases from insecticide. The previous installments can be read here and here. Today he looks at nerve gases then and now.

His book, Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects and Weapons of War, is out now.

While the nerve gases did not realize their lethal potential in World War II (probably because the Nazis, who had a monopoly on these weapons, mistakenly believed that the Allies could reply in-kind), these chemicals had too much promise to disappear from the military scene. In the closing weeks of the war, the invading Soviet army stole the secret formula of soman and captured the massive production plant for tabun. Ecstatic with these spoils of war, the Russians dismantled, transported, and reassembled the German plant on the banks of the Volga. The machinery was back in operation a year later and by the late 1950s, the Soviets had stockpiled no less than 50,000 tons of nerve gas. While the Red Army was pumping out organophosphates as weapons, the chemists of the West were busy upping the ante.

In 1952, a British chemist synthesized an odorless toxin capable of penetrating the skin. Not only did this organophosphate have a toxicity ten times that of soman, but it was viscous enough to form poisonous puddles that would persist and produce deadly vapors for weeks (the earlier, G-agents were volatile and short-lived on the battlefield). The pinnacle of the new V-agents was VX, which became the golden child of the American chemical warfare community and tens of thousands of tons were produced and loaded into bombs and shells over the next 20 years.

All the while, agrichemical companies searched for organophosphates that were substantially more toxic to pests than they were to humans. And they finally struck insecticidal gold. Today, farmers and homeowners are intimately familiar with the chemical legacy of the nerve gases. An incredible 70 percent of all insecticides applied in the United States are organophosphates—about 73 million pounds per year. Diazinon and malathion of two of the three most commonly used home-and-garden insecticides. Worldwide sales of organophosphate insecticides approaches $3 billion, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the entire market. Malathion, the most widely used of these chemicals, has a human toxicity 15,000-times lower than its nerve gas ancestors, while still being remarkably lethal to insects. However, even the relatively safe forms of these insecticides have been used as murderous weapons.

During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, organophospate insecticides became the weapon of choice for assassins operating within extremist factions of P.W. Botha’s violent apartheid government. Parathion—a chemical cousin of malathion—was an ideal poison, being readily available and generating a set of indistinct symptoms such as nausea, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, disorientation, confusion, and respiratory arrest. The killers quickly discovered a bizarre but wickedly effective method for delivering the poison to a political enemy: breaking into the victim’s house or hotel room and smearing the odorless, colorless insecticide onto the person’s underwear. The optimal penetration of the chemical was through the body’s largest hair follicles, conveniently located under the arms and in the crotch. If the targets of these insecticidal weapons were limited to victims of demented murderers (and the occasional, incautious farm worker) we might be somewhat relieved, but there is a much darker potential.

In 1975, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute provided a disturbing analysis of the potential for unholy alliances between agrichemical industries and modern militaries: The possibility that chemical plants, especially those producing organophosphorus insecticides, could be converted to the production of nerve agents or other CW [chemical warfare] agents cannot be excluded…So far as plant safety measures are concerned, if a plant were producing very toxic insecticides, the safety measures would possibly differ very little from a plant producing nerve agents.

Indeed, in 1995 we learned just how easy it is to produce the evil progenitors of today’s insecticides. On March 20th, just before the height of rush hour, an apocalyptic cult called “Aleph” released sarin into the Tokyo subway system. The chemical was carried along by five high-speed trains which spread the nerve gas through the teeming subterranean tunnels. The attack was poorly conceived and executed but still managed to kill a dozen people and injure 5,000. Had the mastermind, Shoko Asahara, not been half-blind and entirely crazy, his followers might have murdered thousands.