War of Nerves

A little known German lance corporal recounted his traumatic experience of near-blindness caused by mustard gas in World War I - “My eyes were transformed into glowing coals and the world had grown dark around me”. He was to later oversee the Zyklon B gassing of 6 million Jews and the scientific production of the most deadly nerve gases in the world – Sarin and Tabun. Yet, Hitler (if you hadn’t guessed already) never actually unleashed the deadly gases on the Allies – even when they invaded Germany. Why? It is questions like these, and their answers, which make Jonathan Tucker’s book, ‘War of Nerves’ a must read.
Armed with a Yale degree in Biology and a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT, Tucker is a chemical and biological weapons specialist and it shows in his meticulously detailed and dense book. War of Nerves traces the trajectory of modern chemical warfare from the French-German treaty of 1675 outlawing poisoned bullets to the Sarin attack in the Tokyo Subway incident of 1995 by a Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo. Running through this narrative is the theme of utility and morality of chemical weapons. It becomes quite clear that countries have never shied away from development, production and stockpiling of these weapons despite a long standing tradition of international laws banning their military use The story begins in the 1930s at the pharmaceutical firm, IG Farben, where brilliant German chemists first manufactured Tabun and Sarin for Hitler’s war machine. Labeled the ‘perverted science’ by Churchill, the development and production of nerve gases was shrouded in secrecy on both sides, making the fear of retaliation a deterrent for Hitler. Among the spoils of war, scientists and manufacturing plants found to be engaged in nerve gas production were the biggest prize. Hived off to the Soviet Union, US, UK and France for help on the development of the respective countries’ chemical warfare programs, they were to prove critical in the balance of power in the post WWII, Cold War paradigm.
Tucker’s story then moves to the Middle East which was the battleground for proxy wars between the US and Soviet Union. In 1962, Egypt staged a coup in Yemen to replace the monarchy with a republican government. In the bitter conflict that followed, Egyptian forces dropped bombs with Cyrillic markings containing phosgene, mustard and later even V-agent gases, on royalist Yemeni forces. Even as Egypt’s patron, the Soviet Union’s complicity was being debated, Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s ally, filed a complaint with the UN only to be met by a muted world reaction. The deafening American silence to this flagrant violation by the Soviet Union was explained by its own use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. By 1967, Egypt had the capacity to indigenously manufacture nerve agents; it also used them to devastating effect in Yemeni villages. Chemical proliferation had begun, and the West wasn’t going to war to save a few Arab tribesmen. When the 1967 Arab-Israeli war came along, this was taken one step further with Israel’s own scramble for chemical weapons to counter Egypt.
Chemical warfare was to raise its ugly head once again in the Middle East – this time in the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s. In the turmoil following Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution, Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in a bid for regional hegemony. Iran’s “human wave” counterattack meant that Saddam considered the use of chemical weapons to over come the numerical disadvantage of his infantry. Tucker, in painstaking detail points out that Iraq’s chemical weapons were born out of a development program which received technical assistance from Egypt and foreign supplies from West German, Dutch, Swiss, French and US firms – Iraq’s chemical weapons were very much the West’s own creation. When Iran went to the UN protesting Iraq’s violation of the Geneva convention, it received the same muted response that Yemen had received. Believing that a militant Islamic Iranian regime presented greater threat to US interests, Reagan chose to side with the secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Convinced that an Iranian victory meant endangering the oil interests in the Middle East, US sent a certain Donald Rumsfeld to speak to Saddam and assure him that its public posturing against its chemical warfare was just a matter of principle. Using Egyptian assistance, Iraq concentrated on Tabun manufacture, which was later used on the Kurdish village of Halabja – the same incident of genocide for which Saddam stands in the dock today.
War of Nerves identifies the thread running through Nazi Germany to Bush’s America. The multi-layered complicity of nations on this disturbing path of human progress leaves one with the rankling conclusion that there are no innocents in this dangerous game. The labels of ‘victims’ and ‘aggressors’ can be applied to any country depending only on the historical timeframe one chooses as reference. Tucker’s expertly woven history of chemical warfare is a chilling tale, which leaves a reader frustrated and cynical of the world’s governments’ vocal resolutions to abolish these weapons. Faced with global terrorism and the relative ease with which groups like the al-Qaeda could obtain these weapons, the choice is not an easy one. And it would require nerves of steel to make it.