2 of 4
Aside from this quibble, the stories Tucker finds of ordinary people are both delightful and chilling. Delightful because they are well told and give the reader some insight into the kind of person who would develop or mass-produce weapons of mass destruction. Chilling because his subjects focus on the problem at hand—making thousands of tons of nerve gas, for example—with no apparent qualm. It's the job. They do it.
My favorite of Tucker's tales is the story of Boris Libman, a native of Latvia who could have walked straight out of the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Born in 1922, Libman was just 18 when the invading Russians confiscated his family's land and property and drafted him into the Soviet Army. He was seriously wounded early in the war, returned to duty after a long recovery, and was again badly wounded, the second time left for dead. He survived the war and applied to study at the Moscow Institute for Chemistry tuition-free as an honorably discharged disabled veteran. Libman was turned down because he was officially dead. He managed to prove he was alive, attended university, and became quite a talented chemical engineer. He supervised production of thousands of tons of nerve gas on impossible schedules for many years. In trying to do his best for the Soviet Union, he made an error with a containment pond for toxic wastes. A storm caused a flood, the pond burst its dike, and tons of toxic waste poured into the Volga River. Months later the delayed effects of the spill killed millions of fish for 50 miles downriver. Libman was blamed and sent to a labor camp to appease an outraged public. But as it turned out, no one else could run the nerve gas plant, and Libman was quietly released and returned to work after one year.
Fear of toxic gas and wild exaggeration of its dangers have their American roots in the debate over chemical warfare after World War I. In Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints (first published by Princeton University Press in 1968 and now reissued by Transaction with a new introduction by Jeanne Guillemin), Frederic J. Brown recalls the terror of gas during the years between the world wars. "Propagandists were totally irresponsible in their exaggerations of new weapons developments," Brown writes. He quotes H. G. Wells on the aftermath of a fictional chemical attack by aircraft using the Centox of the 1930s, what Wells called "Permanent Death Gas":
[the area attacked] was found to be littered with the remains not only of the human beings, cattle and dogs that strayed into it, but with the skeletons and scraps of skin and feathers of millions of mice, rats, birds and such like small creatures. In some places they lay nearly a metre deep.
Not quite "blood as deep as horses' bridles," but still a vision to warm the heart of apocalypse addicts.
Brown—Lieutenant General, retired, U.S. Army; he was a junior officer when he wrote the book—carefully recounts the military history of the use and, more significantly, the non-use of chemicals as weapons in both world wars and the period in between. Thorough and well documented, his book also captures the policy decisions and leaders' attitudes that kept chemical weapons, for the most part, off World War II battlefields.
Brown's book has the fat footnotes that have long been out of style even in scholarly publishing, but these footnotes are a delight for the reader who wants details. On page 18 is a three-paragraph, nearly full-page, small-type footnote describing President Woodrow Wilson's attitude toward gas warfare, with references to his biography and a meeting with the French commander at the battle of Ypres.
share this page
RSS Feed
