Editor's Note: This article about the strange and admonitory history of the chemical weapon lewisite was first published in the January/February 2006 issue of Books & Culture. Less than a week ago, I read a news article about cleanup efforts at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, where one of the plants produced mustard gas and lewisite. Other sites at the facility contain residue from chemical weapons produced during World War II. The cleanup is projected to last for several decades.
Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America's World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction
Indiana University Press
240 pages
$7.97
Does the word "chemical" make you uncomfortable? Do you think of "natural" and "chemical" as opposites? When the tv pitchman promises "Cleans faster with no harsh chemicals" do you give him just a little more attention? If so, you are not alone. Most modern people are afraid of chemicals. Which is too bad. Because elephants, bacteria, humans, mice, trees, and tigers are all chemical factories so efficient that chemical makers wish they could approach even a small fraction of the efficiency of any living organism.
Chemicals and chemistry were not always the subject of fear and dread. In the 19th century, chemicals became the building blocks for effective drugs and for rapid advances in public health. Clean water, anesthesia, and painkillers—things we take for granted today—were and are the result of advances in chemistry.
It's not hard to trace the beginning of the downhill slide in the image of chemistry. On April 22, 1915, Captain Fritz Haber ordered German troops to open the valves on 6,000 pre-positioned cylinders of chlorine. Within minutes, Algerian and French troops in trenches near the Belgian village of Ypres saw a yellowish-green cloud rolling toward them. As the heavier-than-air gas filled their revetments, the troops who could run did; the rest writhed in agony as the gas burned their throats and eyes and finally drowned them in the fluid of their own lungs.
It is doubly sad that Haber selected chlorine for the debut of gas warfare, because chlorine has made billions of lives better across the globe in the last hundred years. The vast majority of drugs use chlorine in some step of their synthesis, and chlorine is still the most widely used and effective disinfectant for public water systems. The beginning of the 20th century was the beginning of the end of cholera and other water-borne plagues because chlorine kills germs so well. Then, Captain Haber showed that an element that could kill germs could also kill and maim people.
Had the German army pressed its attack on that horrible day, the war might have ended before the United States joined the Allied armies in 1917. But the Germans checked their advance. The French and British counterattacked, and the war dragged on for three more years: years with millions of combat casualties, including hundreds of thousands injured and dead from chemical attack.
If chemistry's reputation was damaged by World War I, the field nevertheless retained much of its luster through the great advances of the mid-20th century. Then Love Canal, Silent Spring, Agent Orange, and Bhopal tarnished the public image of chemistry to the point that, beginning in the 1990s, some chemical companies and even some chemical trade organizations have changed their name to remove the word "chemical." Sometimes the switch is subtle, from chemical to chemistry (focus groups show the public is less afraid of the latter); sometimes the new name is a vague, Latin-derived neologism that hints at science.
And then in 2005, the 90th anniversary of the first use of chemicals as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) and the 60th year since the first use of the most fearful WMD, the atomic bomb, Joel A. Vilensky published Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America's World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction—a weapon hailed as the deadliest in history, yet one that has never been used by America in combat and likely would not have been effective if it had been employed.
Vilensky's account begins with two American chemists who were born in the same year and were instrumental in the development of lewisite. They never worked together, they did research in very different areas of chemistry, and while they may have corresponded, they probably never spoke to each other.
The development of lewisite began in 1903, when one of these chemists, Father Julius Nieuwland, mixed acetylene and arsenic trichloride and nearly killed himself. Fifteen years later, our second man, Captain W. Lee Lewis, a chemist with no background in poison gas development, volunteered for the war service. He was given lab equipment and told to develop a chemical weapon deadly enough to end the war.
Where did Captain Lewis begin his search for the ultimate weapon? In facilities donated to the war effort by Catholic University of America (CUA) and American University. His search ended when a librarian remembered that the first Ph.D. thesis ever approved at CUA included an experiment that put the candidate in the hospital for a week.
Lewis expanded Nieuwland's work and developed the organic arsenic compound that would later bear his name. In testing, this evil concoction killed dogs, donkeys, and goats by the score and had much to recommend it as chemical weapon, but it also had drawbacks; chief among them was a tendency to break down in water. (As a reader, I wanted to know why this weapon was selected for development and mass production when it had no combat trials. The author wanted to know this also, but the 90-year-old records were sealed shortly after the attack on America on September 11, 2001. Without a change in policy concerning these records, we may never know.)
Could the leaders of the American Chemical Warfare Service really have thought that the Germans had not developed and tested the same compound? Their commitment to secrecy suggests they did believe that the United States was alone in developing lewisite. In fact, however, the German chemical weapons program had synthesized and tested lewisite (along with other organic arsenic compounds) before rejecting it.
In this instance the assumption of U.S. weapons-makers was extremely parochial. During the period in which lewisite was developed, Germany dominated chemistry, especially organic chemistry. (An organic chemical is a compound that contains at least one atom of carbon. Lewisite includes two carbon atoms in its most deadly variant, more carbon in its weaker forms.)
How extensively did Germany dominate organic chemistry? On November 2, 1916, while America remained neutral and World War I raged in Europe, the submarine Deutschland, having crept through the British blockade of American ports, landed at New London, Connecticut. Onboard this unlikely cargo vessel was a shipment of indigo dye and of Salvarsan, the first drug to successfully treat syphilis. America's chemical industry was weak enough and the German need for currency was strong enough that a U-boat carried less ammunition in order to deliver dye to American mills. The following year, America was at war with its dye and drug supplier, and U-boats no longer docked in Connecticut.
Unaware of the German testing and rejection of this purported superweapon, the United States began to produce lewisite on a large scale. The result: hundreds of casualties among soldiers who never left America, poisoned ground in Ohio and Washington, D.C., tons of arsenic-based poison dumped at sea and buried on American soil, and not one enemy casualty.
The story of lewisite shows that even an unused weapon can be lethal. At the end of World War I, the U.S. Army was making lewisite at the rate of at least several tons per day in Willoughby, Ohio. Since the government records are sealed, Vilensky could not determine the exact amount stockpiled by the end of the war, but it is likely that many tons of lewisite and lewisite-contaminated equipment were buried in and around Willoughby as well as near Catholic University and American University, where Lewis and his team did much of their testing and development work.
Although informed opinion concluded that lewisite was impractical for battlefield use, leading American newspapers and magazines reported on lewisite after the war with claims that have their genesis in a Department of the Interior exposition held in Washington. One of the displays included a vial of the "deadliest poison ever known, 'Lewisite.' " On May 25, 1919, the New York Times said ten airplanes carrying lewisite "would have wiped out . . . every vestige of life—animal and vegetable—in Berlin." The article went on to claim "a single day's output [of the Willoughby plant] would snuff out millions of lives on Manhattan Island." Also reporting on the exposition on the same day, the Washington Post said, "one day's output of the lewisite plant was sufficient to kill all four million inhabitants of Manhattan." Less than three weeks later an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer said lewisite was "72 times as toxic as mustard gas." Mustard gas was in fact used during the war with devastating effect by armies on both sides of the conflict. Vilensky quotes these and many other contemporary sources—in which the sense of horror is trumped by a boasting tone—to paint a picture of an age almost beyond the imaginative reach of most people living today, an age in which the label "scientific" was good and the godlike men of science would lead us to a better future.
But the story doesn't end there. Vilensky goes on to tell how this untried weapon spread across the globe. In the years between the world wars, most military leaders were averse to using chemical weapons but needed to have these weapons in case the other side used them. So most of the major combatants in World War II built up stockpiles of chemical weapons that were never used. As in World War I, the only lewisite casualties in World War II were plant workers who made the poison and soldiers who "volunteered" to test the weapons. The greatest production—and the highest death toll—by far was in the Soviet Union, with stockpiles the precise extent of which, Vilensky says, cannot be accurately determined but were surely in the tens of thousands of tons.
These Soviet stockpiles have been buried, dumped at sea, or are still waiting to be neutralized and disposed of. And the tale of horror continues. Japan, China, Canada, and other countries as well as the United States and Russia are still dealing with lewisite-blighted ground and poisoned citizens nearly 90 years after it was hailed as the most deadly weapon in the American arsenal.
This brief and thoroughly chilling book shows how men of good intentions under the pressure of war can make errors in judgment that haunt the world long after they are gone. Vilensky connects America's two largest WMD programs to one man: James Bryant Conant. In the summer of 1918, Captain Conant moved lewisite from development to mass production facilities, hoping that lewisite could at last bring an end to the terrible conflict. When the war ended sooner than expected, Conant returned to civilian life and went on to become president of Harvard University. Then during World War II, he became administrative head of the Manhattan Project. In that role, Conant used many of the procedures that he developed as production chief for lewisite to aid in development and production of the first atomic bomb. And this time, Conant oversaw the production of a weapon that was infamously effective.
Vilensky opens a window into the world of science at war, how discoveries become weapons, and how weapons can harm those who wield them. His modest original intent was to explain the origins of a compound called British Anti Lewisite (BAL) that was developed as an antidote to lewisite. BAL has been used to treat nervous disorders for half a century and has been much more useful in this role than as an antidote to a poison gas never used against British troops. His persistence and curiosity led to a book that will have an important place in the literature on this ghastly form of warfare.
Before launching into the text of the book, the reader will see that politics and WMDs are never far apart. Richard Butler, former head of the United Nations Special Commission to Disarm Iraq, writes in the foreword that chemical weapons were not used in the latter half of the 20th century with "two notable exceptions." They are Iraq in its war with Iran and the United States in Vietnam. Butler says that the United States used defoliants with the intent to harm enemy soldiers and has been lying about that use ever since. From its foreword by a controversial weapons inspector to its very thorough bibliography, Vilensky's book is interesting, provocative, and frightening.
Neil Gussman writes about the history of chemistry for The Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.
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