A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Gas and Germ Warfare

INTRODUCTION

A Higher Form of Killing was the first book either of us ever wrote. It was published in 1982, fared reasonably well, was translated into German, and duly passed into honourable obscurity about a decade ago. We never expected to return to the subject.

But chemical and biological weapons have assumed a horrible importance again. Indeed, they are probably more of a threat to the security of the world now than they were twenty years ago, when America’s decision to develop a new generation of ‘binary’ chemical weapons first prompted our interest in their history. Astonishingly, it seems likely that more people were killed by poison gas in the 1980s than in any decade since the First World War – as many as 20,000 in the Iran-Iraq War alone. A type of weapon which most military experts thought to be obsolete, and which three generations of arms negotiators have sought to outlaw, has made a comeback – and with a vengeance.

Chemical and biological weapons (CBW) – frequently, and not inaccurately, described as ‘the poor man’s atomic bomb’ – are instruments of mass destruction which were once within the reach only of the world’s most sophisticated nations. But the proliferation of technology has now made them readily available to such secondary powers as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea. Indeed, Japanese terrorists have managed to manufacture one of the most deadly of all the nerve agents – sarin – in their own private facility. After the attacks on America of 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush declared that the world was ‘at war with terrorism’. It is, regrettably, fairly likely that at some point in the course of this ‘war’, the terrorists will try to strike back with at least one of the weapons described in this book. Five people have already died from weapons-grade anthrax in the United States. It is not, at the time of writing, clear where that anthrax came from, or who used it. But there are worryingly large quantities of weaponized anthrax in existence. The collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, has finally revealed the full extent of the Kremlin’s CBW arsenal. It must be regarded as a serious possibility that some of this material has found its way into new hands.

Our original purpose in writing this book was to put together the first general history of gas and germ warfare. It begins on the Western Front in 1915, when the Germans unleashed an attack using vaporized chlorine. It charts the growing escalation of gas warfare in that conflict, as each side sought to out-poison the other with new and more deadly weapons: phosgene, mustard gas, cyanide. It describes how the world’s powers then sought to outlaw chemical weapons, and how Nazi scientists developed a whole new generation of poison gases in the 1930s: the so-called nerve agents. It recounts the beginnings of the first major biological weapons programme – in Britain, in the Second World War – and tells how Russia and America eventually came to stockpile massive amounts of the most deadly toxins on the planet.

We describe it as a ‘secret history’ because these weapons have generally been tested and manufactured clandestinely – for obvious reasons. All methods of killing are distasteful, but there is something particularly repulsive and shameful about the use of chemicals and germs. They are, first and foremost, indiscriminate weapons – ‘dirty,’ as one young soldier we met during our researches put it. They rely for their effectiveness on taking their victim unawares. By and large they are invisible, and do their damage from within the body. You may not see the bomb or bullet that kills you, but that external threat is somehow ‘cleaner’ than the malignant tumour, the paralysis or suffocation inflicted by these unseen weapons.

Poison gas and germ weapons turn civilization on its head. Diseases are not fought, but carefully cultivated; doctors use their knowledge of the functions of the human body to devise ever more effective means of halting those functions; agriculturalists deliberately induce fungi and develop crop destroyers. The chlorine that poisoned our grandfathers at Ypres came from the synthetic dye industry and was available thanks to our grandmothers’ desire for brightly coloured dresses. Modern nerve gases were originally designed to help mankind by killing beetles and lice; now, in the hands of the military, they are insecticides for people. (Indeed, if you want to imagine the effect of a nerve agent on a human being, the frantic death of a fly sprayed by an ordinary domestic insect-killer gives an approximate picture.) Chemical and biological warfare, as one writer has put it, is ‘public health in reverse’.

Ever since the first gas attack during the First World War, man has attempted to come to terms with the impulse which led him to develop these weapons. The provisions of the Biological Warfare Convention of 1972, and, most recently, of the Chemical Warfare Convention of 1997, have done much to outlaw gas and germ warfare. Yet the spectre, somehow, has never entirely gone away. Why this should be so is one of the recurrent themes of this book.

We have not rewritten or revised the ten chapters which form the bulk of A Higher Form of Killing. No doubt if we were embarking on it today, we would approach the subject differently. Here and there, new facts have come to light – for example about the extent of testing on human volunteers at Porton Down in the 1950s – but these have not substantially altered the story as we originally told it. And we would probably not have been quite so naïve. Looking back, there is an occasional tone of astonished outrage in these pages which seems to belong to another era. This is no doubt partly because we were younger, but partly, also, because we assumed we were writing about weapons which were on their way to becoming obsolete. It never occurred to us that less than two years after this book appeared, Saddam Hussein would be using mustard gas to turn back waves of Iranian infantry, let alone that Iraq would end up filling Scud missiles with anthrax to fire at Israeli civilians.

Therefore the brief eleventh chapter we have added, to sketch in the principal events of the past two decades, we have called ‘Full Circle’. The world, it turns out, has still not heard the last of those terrible weapons, which first made their appearance on a warm spring afternoon in France nearly 90 years ago.