The Shadow of Death: Part 1
A history of Chemical Weapons and "Doomsday"
There's a mushroom, Amanita Ocreata, also called the Destroying Angel.
It's one of the most toxic fungi known to man.
It contains toxins whose specificity targets the enzyme responsible for reading and transcribing your DNA: "RNA Polymerase II".
Most cells in your body are constantly replenishing themselves; they have to. A single cell doesn't often last long. This is particularly true of organs like the liver and kidneys. That's what the Destroying Angel breaks. Your cells lose the ability to read your own DNA. You don't even know death is coming for many hours after it's already too late.
It's slow, and awfully painful.
It's also utterly inevitable.
Such toxins - like those produced by poisonous mushrooms - have been used to carry out murder for as long as recorded history. Hemlock, a plant of the same family as Carrots and Parsley (yes, really), has historically been a choice toxin, and it is said that Socrates in ancient Greece was sentenced to drink a mixture made with Hemlock as punishment for "corrupting the youth". Arsenic, a heavy metal, is another, as is Cyanide.
Cyanide is the default "Suicide pill" for spies and secret operatives in order to avoid torture if captured, however we know today that Cyanide is such an awful way to die, one might be better off going with the torture. It was also the substance used by the Jonestown cult in the mass murder-suicide in 1978. Don't drink the kool-aid.
Murder on the small-scale is one thing.
What about on the large-scale?
The idea of having a single weapon which can wipe out a whole army on the battlefield has captured the imaginations of leaders at war; especially when they're losing. Before the invention of the atomic bomb, there had been much experimenting with chemical means of inflicting mass death. This was particularly the case in the First World War.
The Germans have been masters of industrial-scale chemistry since forever, and it was on the battle fields of the Great War that they sought to make use of their supremacy in this field.
The question was simple enough: how can we make an area uninhabitable to the enemy for a period of time?
To most people, there seemed to be a simple answer: Fill the air with chemicals that the human lungs can't handle. The French had been making use of Capsaicin - Pepper Spray - in some locations, to limited effect. The Germans decided they'd one-up the French, and put the might of their chemical manufacturing industry to work.
They would release clouds of Chlorine gas from enormous drums, which would be blown by the wind across the French and allied lines.
Did it work?
Not really.
Although the use of Chlorine and other such things could have severely debilitating effects on individual soldiers unlucky enough to be caught up in particularly dense clouds which often formed at the bottom of trenches, the promise of mass casualties at the scale needed to turn the tide of war in favour of the Central Powers was never realised, for many reasons, not least of which was the difficulty in controlling the area of dispersal.
I'm not sure if you've noticed this, but the earth is relatively big; as a consequence, the atmosphere covers an enormous area. It's hard enough keeping a helium balloon from floating away out of reach and into the sky. Imagine trying to do that with a gas. Even a heavy gas like Chlorine was hit and miss.
The Allies, seemingly liking the idea of more death-by-chemistry, tried their own mixtures, like Hydrogen Cyanide. Unlike Chlorine, HCN is lighter than air, and just floats away.
Although the basic idea behind CW [Chemical Weapons] is simple, in practice, a chemical attack against a modern military force is an extraordinarily challenging undertaking. One might think that, in this modern industrial era, there must be hundreds of toxic chemicals that could be effectively used as means of warfare. In actuality, though, few are effective enough to be used in a battlefield setting. During World War I, for instance, traditional poisons such as hydrogen cyanide (HCN) failed to produce mass casualties.
Weapons of Mass Destruction: an encyclopedia of worldwide policy, technology, and history (2005, p. 86)
All sides worked to develop ever-more-potent poison gases, as well as delivery systems. This lead to the development of some terrifying substances like Phosgene, and the infamous Mustard Gas (which was more of an oily liquid than a gas, and rarely fatal, but most certainly debilitating). At the same time, all sides quickly developed highly effective defences to gases in the form of masks with filtration systems.
Although total deaths from gas weapons on all sides by the end of the Great War are estimated to be about 90,000 (much of this was guesswork, due to many incomplete records), this was a very small proportion of total deaths from the war as a whole (I know, imagine something so catastrophic that a figure of 90,000 lives was merely a drop in the bucket!).
It wasn't until the terrifying industrialisation of death by the Nazis that someone found a method for inflicting truly large-scale murder with the stuff, in the form of Zyklon B.
Using this new and powerful formulation of Hydrogen Cyanide, the Nazis went on to kill over 1.1 million people - mostly Jews - inside the infamous "gas showers". Squeezing hundreds of Jewish men, women and children at a time into purpose-built brick buildings at Auschwitz, for example, they would shut and lock the doors tight and release the deadly poison. The victims were packed in so tight, they could not move. After about 20 minutes, the bodies would be excavated from the room and dumped into mass pits, or incinerated.
Strangely enough, the Nazis never saw fit to use Chemical Weapons on the battlefields of WW2, save for the unintended dropping of a Mustard Gas bomb by the Luftwaffe on Poland in 1939. There has been much speculation about the reasons, but one thing was clear: all of these chemicals were mostly effective within sealed chambers, rather than in the open air.
You would think this same lesson had been learned by all sides more or less during the first World War: mass-poisoning of human beings on an open-air battlefield just isn't all that effective. It was much more reliable to use conventional explosives, or even the Atomic Bomb, which was now a thing by the end of WW2.
Some ideas die hard.
Primarily driven by eye-watering theoretical capabilities, chemical weapons continued to be developed both during and after the war, in the hopes of finding something with all the right attributes to overcome physical reality. When the Allies conquered the last German hold-outs, they found something very interesting: the Nazis had further advanced Chemical Warfare beyond anything they had ever seen before. There were stockpiles of a new substance which seemed able to paralyse within seconds of exposure. Even Cyanide took up to 20 minutes to cause death, and required relatively high concentrations. This new stuff could do it in seconds.
It was properly scary.
Breaking Biology
When you move an arm or leg, or expand and collapse your lungs to breathe, or your heart beats in your chest, the muscles are caused to contract by the action of a little chemical compound called Acetylcholine. It is the neurotransmitter that connects a nerve with a muscle, allowing electrical signals from the brain to activate and control bodily movement and function. When an Action Potential from the brain reaches the relevant nerve ending, the neuron releases Acetylcholine at the synaptic connection point, which binds to special receptors on the muscle fiber. Voila, the muscle contracts, and movement occurs
Great, now what about when we want to release the muscle? Y'know, un-tense it? Relax? Chill?
In order to do that, we need an enzyme. For whatever reason, the binding of Acetylcholine to the receptors is unusually strong. Most other neurotransmitters just wiggle free after a short period of time. Acetylcholine, however, does not wiggle free. If it's not actively removed, it will stay in place permanently.
When we need to let go of the tension, it's not meditation or tantric massage that does it; it's an enzyme.
Thankfully, we have one: Acetylcholinesterase, or AChE for short. (I like to call it "Archie.")
AChE is a very potent enzyme, and a single molecule of AChE can deactivate 5,000 molecules of Acetylcholine in one second [1], which is ridiculous. So, losing a few isn't the end of the world.
What if, suddenly, all of the AChE in your body stopped working? Or even just one part of your body, like your lungs, or your heart?
It turns out the Nazis had found a way to achieve exactly that, though entirely by accident.
It came out of a civilian project in the 1930s, where a team at German chemical giant IG Farben was developing insecticides using organophosphates, a common type of chemistry for pest control applications. When the Nazi government decreed all patents with possible military use be sent to the Ministry of War in 1935, the Army Weapons Office were given a sample of the stuff by its inventors, later being summoned to give a full demonstration. It was quickly classified Top Secret.
The Germans gave it a name that seemed well suited to the monster they had created: they called it "Tabun", or "taboo" in English.
Tabun - this new and highly-secret chemical the Nazis had developed - was capable of seeping into the skin and wreaking havoc within 30 minutes. If inhaled, effects began within seconds. With the Acetylcholine in your throat no longer being cleared away from the neuromuscular junctions, the first signs upon inhalation is usually a weird fruity smell, followed by the rapid constricting of the oesophagus. The lungs stop functioning shortly thereafter.
Although highly toxic, Tabun is extremely difficult to manufacture in large quantities. It is not a chemical that can be produced continuously, rather it can only be done batch by batch. There are so many steps to go through, and each step produces many other extremely toxic chemical by-products which have to be dealt with somehow. Every single stage of production could kill a worker or 3, despite taking every precaution.
Could anything be scarier?
It turns out yes. The Germans were really good at this crap. Alongside Tabun, they'd developed something called Sarin.
Tabun was not an easy chemical to fabricate, but Substance 146 proved fiendishly difficult to produce. It had tactical advantages, however, and the benefits were justified as being worth the work if the engineering and industrial obstacles could be overcome. In conjunction with IG Farben, Substance 146 acquired a new name, just as Tabun had. Henceforth it would be called Sarin.
Dan Kaszeta - Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents from Nazi Germany to Putin's Russia (2021)
The Exposure Dose for toxins and nerve agents dispersed in air is typically measured in the form of milligram-minutes per cubic meter, or mg*min/m^3. To get a sense of the difference in scale for nerve agents, Washington University has a handy website called "Neuroscience for Kids", with a page on Nerve Agents. Kids these days...
While both Tabun and Sarin can kill from skin exposure at relatively low concentrations, they have roughly the same lethal skin-contact exposure dose. The inhalation exposure-dose, however, is markedly different. Sarin can be 4 times more potent when inhaled than Tabun.
Then, in 1944, yet another form of this new line of Nerve Agent was discovered by the Germans: Soman. Ratcheting up the difficulty level even further, this one the Germans didn't even bother to attempt to make in large quantities, because it was just too difficult (and in 1944, they were running out of resources and territory very quickly). Somans potency was twice that of Sarin in the air; but when exposed to the skin, it was nearly 200 times more potent than both Tabun and Sarin.
When the Allies conquered Germany, they found what the Germans had made. It shocked them. It wasn't that their morality was offended, no; they were shocked that the Germans had this stuff sitting around the whole time and never made use of it on the battlefield.
The theoretical lethality was eye-watering.
The Americans were on the cusp of developing the worlds greatest super-weapon, having ploughed their massive scientific, technological and industrial resources into the project in what they believed was a race against the Nazis, who were thought to be seeking the same objective.
It turns out - or so the Allies thought - the Germans already had super weapons, of a different and much scarier kind.
This has been Part 1 of the story of Chemistry and the Doomsday Weapon idea. Thank you so much to my paid subscribers, you make all of this possible, and to everyone who has donated to the coffee fund, you fuel me with continuous caffeine! If you enjoy my writing and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription or a donation to the coffee fund here:
Stay tuned for Part 2!
Purves D, Augustine GJ, Fitzpatrick D, et al., editors. Neuroscience. 2nd edition. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates; 2001. Acetylcholine. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11143/
Nice. Always impressed by your detailed dives. Also love any opportunity to highlight that natural things are not necessarily always good, not because I like poison, lol, but it’s important to understand the harshness of nature. The naturalistic fallacy is annoying enough to poison. More generally your gas mask illustrations remind me of hanging out with my older brother years ago. He was into military themes, particularly chemical warfare.
Really interesting piece, I wasn’t familiar with German development of chemical weapons, although it makes sense.
Ultimately while (imo) the development of chemical weapons is outright evil, the principle of prevent the movement of your opponent forward in the battle field is really genius. Obviously now war has progressed to the point where at least in America we aren’t fighting many foot solider battles and this doesn’t really have a ton of practical application in war any longer, but that was pretty smart thinking. If we ever do have foot solider wars for whatever reason I can only hope we stop people with more moral solutions lol, like what comes to mind is the dune force field stuff they put around their estates.