Nerve agents are arguably the most brutal chemical weapons.
Trace amounts of compounds such as sarin can wreak long-term havoc on a victim’s nervous
system.
Higher doses kill gruesomely, typically by asphyxiation.
Despite their infamy, nerve agents have a history unknown to many.
And it begins in Nazi Germany.
When you talk about chemical weapons history, most people think about World War I.
That’s when the German army released chlorine gas for the first time on the Allies.
Thereafter, both sides attacked each other with a variety of deadly chemicals, including
phosgene and mustard gas.
During World War II, Nazis used poisonous gases such as hydrogen cyanide in concentration
camps to kill millions of Jews, as well as the nomadic Roma people, homosexuals and political
dissidents.
Despite Hitler’s directive to gas civilians, the Nazi dictator vetoed using chemical weapons
on the battlefield.
Some speculate that this was because Hitler himself was gassed as a soldier in World War I.
Others think it’s because he feared the Allies would retaliate with a much more potent weapon.
In fact, both sides had many scientists secretly searching for new poisons to use on the enemy
--just in case.
But little did both sides know, the Nazis had the upper hand.
And that’s how the chemist Gerhard Schrader made his mark.
Working for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, Schrader was trying to find molecules that
would kill weevils and other insect pests that were destroying Germany’s food supply.
The 33-year-old chemist didn’t have much luck when he tried working with the elements
of other successful pesticides, such as fluorine and sulfur.
The tide turned in December 1936 when Schrader set his sights on the element next to sulfur
on the periodic table—phosphorus—and married it to cyanide, a poison in its own right.
The product was so toxic that it was soon dubbed tabun, a play on the German word for taboo.
Dilute solutions destroyed insect pests and it also caused vomiting, shortness of breath,
pupil dilation, drooling, sweating, diarrhea, and death in apes and other mammals.
Schrader had failed to invent a usable pesticide because of its potential to hurt humans.
But his superiors at IG Farben alerted the German military about the potential weapon,
and they ran with it.
German military scientists soon learned that tabun could likely kill a person in about
20 minutes, whereas existing chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene took hours.
Schrader and a colleague actually earned the equivalent of about $20,000 at the time for
the discovery.
And the army started figuring out ways to militarize the chemical at this Medieval fortress
in Berlin.
By the end of the war, the German military had produced at least 12,000 metric tons of
tabun and loaded it into aerial bombs and artillery shells using prisoners at forced
labor factories.
Hundreds of these inmates died of toxic exposure, overwork, disease, and malnutrition.
Meanwhile, military scientists invented other nerve agents such as sarin, which is more
potent and easier to synthesize than tabun.
The Nobel Prize winner Richard Kuhn invented another nerve agent known as soman, and he
also discovered how nerve agents hurt people.
The compounds block a vital enzyme called acetylcholinesterase.
Normally, acetylcholinesterase breaks down neurotransmitters after they have been released
into the brain.
This prevents our nerve cells from being perpetually excited, which means nerve agents keep our
nerve cells in a constant state of overstimulation.
Although both sides were developing chemical weapons, the Allies had nothing near as potent
as the German nerve agents--that is until after the war
After the Allied Invasion of Germany, the Russians were the first to discover the potent
chemical weapons. The Brits and Americans rapidly launched their own nerve agent programs once
they discovered that these weapons existed and that the Russians already had a factory
in the works.
The worldwide proliferation of nerve agents is partly the result of Cold War rivalry between
the two World War victors.
In the intervening decades, many more nerve agents have been invented and tested, chemicals
like VX, VM, VG, VE and the Novichok agents.
And nerve agents have been deployed by armies and terrorists alike.
They were dispatched on the battlefield of the Iran-Iraq War, during the Tokyo subway
attack of 1995, and most recently on civilians in Syria.
Their discovery may have been accidental but their intentional use since then is despicable.
If you want to learn more about the history of chemical weapons, please have a look at
the resources in the description below.
And thanks for watching.