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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.

Today sees the second part of Jeffrey A. Lockwood’s three-part account of the creation of nerve gas through the synthesizing of insecticides. Check back tomorrow for the last part.

Jeffrey Lockwood is the author of Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War. You can read the first part of his blog here.

Schrader understood the strategic implications of his discovery. He named the chemical “tabun” and communicated his findings to Army Weapons Office in Berlin. A Nazi decree required that all inventions with military potential be reported, and they were especially keen to find a chemical that would improve on the agents used in World War I. Hitler’s objections notwithstanding, the Germans were fully aware that the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, had successfully used mustard gas in his 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and—more importantly—there had been no international repercussions for the week-long chemical bombardment of the African nation. The Axis powers reasonably concluded that the Geneva Protocol was a convention of convenience—and chemical weapons were still viable if used with discretion against the proper opponent.

Schrader was summoned to Berlin to demonstrate the efficacy of his chemical to the military leaders, who were amazed with the power of tabun. They watched in horrified rapture as even a minuscule dose applied to the skin of a dog or a monkey immediately caused the animal’s pupils to shrink to pinpoints, after which it frothed at the mouth, vomited, and collapsed. As the gruesome demonstration progressed, the animal began to defecate uncontrollably, its limbs twitched, its entire body convulsed, and finally it died. The entire ordeal was mercifully completed within 15 minutes, although mercy was the farthest thing from the mind of the military. They were mesmerized by this chemical’s virtues—not only did it kill within minutes (phosgene and mustard gas took hours), but it was lethal though both inhalation and skin contact. Moreover, tabun was practically odorless; the enemy would never know what was coming until the ghastly symptoms took over their bodies.

The German military moved Schrader to a new facility at Elberfeld, providing him with state-of-the-art equipment and an undisturbed setting in which to continue his research on the organophosphates. Their faith in the chemist was well placed. In 1938 he discovered sarin, a compound with what he called an “astonishingly high” toxicity. Although the etymology of tabun seems to have been lost in history, “sarin” was an acronym honoring the key scientists involved in its discovery. The formula was dutifully delivered to the Wehrmacht’s laboratories in Berlin, where tests revealed a toxicity ten times that of tabun.

The deadliest organophosphate, soman, was isolated by Dr. Richard Kuhn, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. Kuhn’s work on deadly chemicals came too late in the war for the Nazis to put his nerve gas into production. Discovered in 1944, soman completed the evil trinity of G-agents, so-named for either Germany or Gerhard (Schrader). There were two other G-agents, but these received only cryptic code-names and never became serious contenders for the Nazi’s nerve gas program. By the time of Kuhn’s discovery, the Germans were also beginning to understand why these chemicals were so lethal.

The organophosphates inhibit the enzyme responsible for breaking down acetylcholine. This chemical is the primary neurotransmitter in the human body, carrying impulses between nerve endings. Without the enzyme to deactivate the neurotransmitter, the signals continue unabated. With no way of stopping the nerves from firing, we cannot control our bowels, muscles, or breathing—and a grisly death follows in short order. But the Nazis didn’t need to know how these insecticides-cum-nerve gases worked in order to understand that they had the potential to turn the course of the war.