“This Odious Weapon”
Winston Churchill noted, as he prepared for the entrance test at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in 1893, that of five required examination subjects he “held only a pair of Kings—English and Chemistry.”1 The first of these abilities facilitated his 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”² The second of these skills, born from a schoolboy’s aspiration to make bombs, facilitated his leadership while confronting the existential danger of German chemical weapons in the two world wars.³
The First World War is perhaps best characterized as a chemical war. The war saw the first use of weapons of mass destruction; they were chemical and initiated by Germany.⁴ Churchill played an immediate role in the response by leading the first British trials of airplane delivery of chemical weapons, including hydrogen cyanide bombs.⁵ By the end of the war, a quarter of artillery shells launched by both sides contained chemical weapons.⁶ Churchill recognized that the great diversity of chemical munitions invented and used during the war comprised just the beginning of what was to come. “As for Poison Gas and Chemical Warfare in all its forms,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book. Certainly every one of these new avenues to destruction is being studied on both sides of the Rhine, with all the science and patience of which man is capable.”⁷
East of the Rhine
Although Churchill was correct that chemical weaponry developed during the First World War was but the beginning of a terrible book, he failed to predict the lopsided and accidental development of these weapons in the upcoming war. It was only east of the Rhine where an entirely new class of chemical weapons sprang forth. These were the organophosphate nerve On 23 December 1936, Schrader added cyanide to one of these compounds and discovered that it not only killed insects at amazingly small concentrations, but that it also possessed extreme toxicity for people.⁸
