SUBTITLES:
Subtitles generated by robot
00:05
[Music]
i was asked to come tonight because i've
just written this book
uh toxic the history of nerve agents and
i'm going to talk a little about it
about this topic because it it
hits the present day with the navalny
poisoning the scruple event in uh
in salisbury several years ago now uh
it's not
ongoing chemical warfare in syria this
is not something just out of history
it's a bit of
history from the 30s and 40s that
reaches the present day
and so i'm going to start this
00:35
presentation here um
let me see there we go there we go
hopefully if everybody can see that
i'm here because the royal institution
asked me and
i actually i want to thank all of you i
can see that there's something like 338
of you have joined
i want to thank them for the opportunity
here and you should
if you feel so inclined give them a bit
of a donation i also like to thank my
publisher hearst before we go any
further
and tonight's talk i'm going to talk a
01:10
little about who i am that's not so much
i mean lisa already covered the
highlights of that i'm going to talk
about the
history of chemical warfare really at
its beginning because
i want to put my book in the right
proper
context and then i'm going to talk
about where nerve agents come from a
little bit what they are
what happened in the 1930s and how they
really got their start in the second
world war
there's a lot happening in the immediate
aftermath of the world war
01:41
world war ii and then the cold war and
the present day and hopefully well we'll
have plenty of time for questions here
and so i'm going to try to weave a
couple different things into this
narrative and that hopefully
that uh gets you interested enough and
answer some of the basic questions
uh about you know why nerve agents are
still important they're not just of
historic interest
and i'm gonna start well like i said
uh with a little bit of introduction
i've spent 30 years working in this
field
um i've evolved into practically the
02:14
only
historian of this subject uh you know
i'm not actually a chemist i'm not a
chemical engineer i got into this
almost by accident the us army stuck me
in this and i thought it was the worst
thing to ever happen to me but somehow
i've managed to make
a career out of it i'm not here to talk
about myself so much
there's a good little introduction to
myself in the in my book and
and all that so i'll you know i'm not
happy to answer questions about my
career
uh later on and how it's relevant to all
of this
so i want to start with some history uh
02:45
it's it's a rare thing to come to the
royal institution and talk about the
history
more than the science but you know my
book is my book is a history book
with science in it as opposed to a
science book with a little bit of
history in it
we're now up on the sort of 102nd
anniversary
within days now 102nd anniversary of the
end of the first world war
uh the people who remember it the people
who fought it they're all they're all
they've all passed away
uh you know this is going out of human
memory
but it's very important in our
03:17
consciousness and it's very important
our history because it was a
technological war
uh the military historians will argue
whether or not the crimean war the
american civil war was the first
so-called modern war
um but we all know that the first world
war is where we started having things
like airplanes
submarines uh tanks uh
machine guns predated the war but it was
the first huge
prevalence of machine guns and machine
guns on every side of the conflict not
03:48
just in colonial conflicts where one
side had machine guns and the other side
didn't
so that's the context in that you know
in the early 19 the early 1900s you know
the war starts in 1914
it's a it's a technological era
and new things are happening okay
and you know various different aspects
of technology are being applied to
warfare
i mean it's always been the case in
warfare where people try to make better
offense and better defense arms and
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armor it goes all the way back to
antiquity
but by the first world war we had
you know by that point we'd had 70 80 90
years of a
industrial revolution we had lots of
science and engineering being applied to
this
and so on this slide you see several
other things that are with us still
today
the major navies still have tank uh
submarines the armies have tanks there
are such a thing as an
air force and airplanes machine guns are
in practically every army
04:53
uh but there's also some things that
didn't work out as well
you know for example
we could talk about
chemical warfare all right chemical
warfare is one of those things that
worked out a bit but didn't work out so
much possibly
uh in the way that people expected um
chemistry was one of these things just
like metal work and electricity that was
one of those things that was really in a
in a state of transition
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and there's this whole chemical arms
race that goes on in the first world war
uh these two gentlemen here that fritz
harbor on the left and victor
grignard on the right these are two
rival scientists
fritz is in germany uh victor is in uh
is in france
and these two are engaged in what is
effectively of war
wits starting late 1914 early 1915 to
try to
take poisonous gases and turn them into
effective weapons
um and in that context you know
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what you have is you have a footprint
really of chemical warfare everybody uh
everybody has seen this probably this
famous picture here
the sergeant painting ghast i've seen
the original that hangs in the imperial
war museum
and i'm not sure everybody can read the
fine print down here the thing is
the impact in popular culture the impact
in literature the uh impact of people's
memories of chemical warfare in the
first world war are actually
broader and deeper than the actual
direct impact on the war
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something like you know 20 million
people died in that war
yet you know this study here on the
bottom this is taken from
these statistics you see here are taken
from something called the gilchrist
study done in the 1920s
you know where somewhere between 78 000
and 91
000 people died of directly from
chemical warfare
that's comparatively a drop in the
bucket um
more people were killed with cavalry
savers going back to an older technology
they were killed by
by chemical warfare but we don't think
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about the cavalry savers in the first
world war we think that's old technology
and we put that beside us
um but it was one of those things where
at the end of the war it had not really
you know chemical warfare the poison gas
had none of the chemicals used in that
war were
game changers europe it's really hard
for any military historian to point to a
single battle
a single campaign where it was really
truly the deciding factor
so it goes down in the annals of you
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know military history as
a bit of unfinished business um
things were clearly on a trajectory for
more and more improvements there were
things that were being worked on at the
end of the war that were
you know improvements in chemical
warfare um but the war ended
all right and in the aftermath of the
war
it's it's important to see that people
learn some interesting uh
lessons from this and so it's in this
it's in this period after the war where
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there's a lot of unfinished business
okay uh
i don't think any nation in in europe
really thought that this was really
going to be the warden in all wars
everybody was thinking of the next war
almost at the point at which this war
was done um
in fact you know wars were continuing
elsewhere on the european continent
anyway
uh war between greece and turkey the
russian civil war these things ground on
uh but the trajectory technologically
was that these things that people had
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worked on during the war
whether it be zeppelin airships or you
know
machine guns or aircraft improvements
continue to be made
and countries learn lessons from that
first war and they assume that these
things were all going to get used in the
next war
whenever that wax war come it comes
whenever that if it's going to be five
years from now if it's going to be 50
you know germany germany belgium france
italy
everybody assumed that another war was
eventually gonna come
now this picture you see here is part of
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the blockade squadron
uh the british blockade squadron of very
effectively
with with help from the french bottled
up and blockaded
germany so germany during the first
world war couldn't import things
it was cut off it was reduced to
smuggling
blockade runners were a thing but by and
large
99 nearly 100 of the commerce into
hamburg and bremerhaven was cut off
now this is important as a context to
09:36
see where nerve agents came from and
nerve agents come out of
a combination of things and i'm going to
take a little while to unpack this
because people always ask
why why nerve agents and they happen by
accident but they happened by
accident in a context that is i think
easy to understand if you
pick it apart into its pieces one is
this fact that germany has learned from
the fact that
it is easily blockaded and cannot rely
on imports in case of another major
european
war particularly a war against somebody
with a big navy
10:08
now there's another there's another
there's another factor
that's food supply now
one of the immediate causes for the end
of the first world war was not
an overwhelming victory on either the
western and eastern fronts to be honest
in germany had one on the eastern front
uh the russians had surrendered there
was the whole treaty of breslau toss
uh they've been able to move their
entire well most of the eastern front
soldiers to the west and we're you know
quite early on in 1918 we're actually
doing quite well
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until relatively late in the war it
could have gone either way
but poorer food supply is one of the
immediate causes that did for the uh
did for the germans in the first world
war uh
military mutinies because soldiers were
not being fed was a thing
so germany understands that it is only
one bad harvest away from
collapsing into war logistics are
important you have to feed the
population you have to feed the army
now what you see on this slide here on
the top right is a colorado potato
11:11
beetle
all right uh and on on the left you can
see this diagram of its gradual
you know uh spread across europe having
been introduced in the
accidentally in bordeaux uh having come
over and some imported potatoes from the
u.s
and so the germans are absolutely
paranoid about this
not just the potato beetle but other
other forms of pestilence affecting
their agriculture they have to protect
their agriculture
this is a point at which crop protection
11:42
is very important
going back to this previous slide
because they are so heavily blockaded
it's important that they come up with
ways of protecting the crops that don't
require
imports now you get into this whole
interesting issue of pesticides
in fact i'm not going to go to that
slide just yet the pesticides
and the era are mostly made either from
oil petroleum products
and germany famously doesn't have much
of a domestic petroleum supply
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or the other great pesticide of the era
was nicotine
the same stuff that people smoke in
tobacco guess what it kills insects
but the state of the art at the time for
using nicotine was to dissolve it in
kerosene and kerosene is a petroleum
product
so petrochemicals were extremely
important to crop protection one way or
the other
so there was a push for import
substitution
if germany was going to have to fight
this next war
it was going to have to save the oil for
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tanks and airplane fuel
and you know diesel fuel for its
submarines
um and so every bit of oil that wasn't
used for crop protection was going to
something else so there was a push to
come up with
ways and means of doing this now
germany in this era and germany has
always since its unification
particularly since since late since uh
since the late
1800s germany had been an industrial
giant
all right the industrialization of
germany was one of the great
13:20
was one of the great accomplishments of
the kaiser era
of imperial germany its universities
were very good its industry was very
good
in particular its chemistry departments
its physics departments
top notch
so this picture here on the left is
is billy longa uh he worked in uh he
worked in berlin
uh and on the right i wish i had a
picture geared to von kruger it was one
a phd student working for him a very
rare
thing at the time a woman studying uh
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chemistry at the phd level in germany
as her dissertation there they worked on
phosphorus compounds and they did some
work in the late 1920s we're not even
into the nazi area
yet the nazis were a smaller political
party they were contesting elections
this is still the weimar republic
they come up with this whole new thing
they can't take full credit for it but
they can take
good partial credit for inventing a
category of chemicals called
the organophosphates and what they
14:24
what what they come up with is this new
category chemicals and to synthesize the
organophosphates you're not
necessarily using petroleum products
so we have this technical development on
top of this
you know you know agricultural
requirement on top of a geopolitical
necessity
now this leads to
some work now by this point now by this
point um
we're in the we're in about 1935 now the
nazis have taken over
um the gentleman you see here in both
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pictures is gerhard schroeder
and that funny icon you see there is the
uh
is the logo of the german chemical
company ig farben
ig farben had was perhaps
80 or even possibly even 90 percent of
the german chemical industry at this
time
um the german chemical industry had been
very consolidated with a view possibly
depending on which political party
came into power some of the political
parties in the weimar republic were
15:29
actually quite left wanted to
nationalize it and run it as a national
industry
the socialists surely did so the
chemical industry got
consolidated but it didn't get
privatized so what you had was a very
large
near monopoly in the chemical industry
still in private hands
but it realized that you know things
like crop protection were important
uh important and more important than
some other things
and so it put this gentleman and a small
group of other guys
15:58
on the issue of developing
new chemical compounds based on this
organophosphate work done by
longa and ed krueger
and so schroeder and his assistant klein
house
started working in their lab
synthesizing
literally hundreds of chemical compounds
from that new family of chemicals
i think during the course of his career
and his career spanned the war and even
went
after the war uh by the time
16:30
by the time the war ended uh the second
world war ended schroeder had
synthesized at least 2 000 2
000 organophosphate compounds
some of which completely useless his
notebooks
were found in his dustbin his dustbin
was collected by british intelligence
his um his notebooks are therefore
down in the national archives in queue
and i've looked at them and i've counted
and there's over 2 000 compounds in them
but more importantly he started actually
17:02
quite successfully
synthesizing some of these compounds
some of them worked quite well as
as uh pesticides i had a whole protocol
if he thought something was good he
tested on aphids or even a small sample
of colorado potato beetles that was kept
on their lock and key
make sure that they didn't escape uh
and he in late 1936
he came across this chemical compound at
the time he called it le100
and since after that took on other names
17:33
it was very good it killed all the
aphids
he diluted it it killed all the aphids
he diluted it again so he starts
engaging in
practically homeopathic dilution of this
thumbs
and even quite diluted this new
substance
kills all the aphids however
uh it makes it makes dr schroter
quite quite ill uh driving home one
night he
even though it was dark uh his vision
dimmed
and he he gets a torch out of his glove
18:04
box in his car
and he examines himself in the mirror uh
and realizes that even though it's dark
out his pimple
his pupils have pinpointed and to this
day that is one of the telltale signs of
exposure to nerve agents
um and he had a terrible headache that
went on for days he had some memory loss
ended up in the hospital for ten days
nobody know what to do with him
and he was actually disappointed he felt
that this was probably too dangerous of
compound to uh to
to work with however he said well maybe
18:34
if we dilute it enough we can
you know still use it so he set it off
for
product safety testing in the industrial
safety lab at
ig farben where it killed the guinea
pigs
it killed a barbary ape imported from
spain
it killed you know even in quite dilute
things it killed
all the safety test animals this is
caused actually quite alarm bells
uh one of the things was that in sort of
the military industrial complex of
germany one man's alarm bells are
another person's um
19:05
idea of interest so
um in fact i think i probably put this
slide in the wrong place but i'll talk
about here
what what uh gerhard schroeder had done
and continued to do while working on
these things
has he come across the um
he come across the intersection of
several types of chemistry
uh he'd been working firmly in this big
organic phosphorus chemistry and he
started playing with other
things hanging things on the uh sort of
the end of one of the one or the other
19:37
bits of the uh the organic
phosphorus uh molecule uh
and that very first compound that really
became the problem the one that made him
sick
is in this bit where it's it
intersects with cyanide chemistry and
that chemical chemical compound became
known as the chemical warfare agent
taboon
um these other two stars you know where
he starts to intersect with
the interesting and odd world of
fluorine chemistry
are the next two chemical warfare agents
20:08
in this category
sarin and soma and we'll get to those in
a little bit
but what you have here in fact
these chaps are the management okay
they are in upper management above
gerhard schroder and what they
what they have done is
they have the secret memorandum from
berlin berlin has this whole idea that
you know
industry is going to make us new things
20:38
and new important
technology and goods and services to
help us win the next war
germany is spending a lot of money
rearming itself and it
issues a secret memorandum berlin the uh
the uh the defense ministry out to all
the heads of industry
uh takes these guys like heinrich
horonline and this other chap otto
ambrose gives them
secret security clearances and gives
them a secret memo
and this memo is basically a laundry
list it's a fishing list you know
these are the things we're interested in
industry it's things very boring from
21:08
better lubricants to better ways of
sharpening bayonets
to better ball bearings all the way up
to gee
if you have anything that might possibly
maybe be useful as a chemical warfare
agent
um we'd really like to know and so
the minute they see the safety report
from
schroeder and the dead animals these
guys are on the next train to berlin
and they convinced berlin that this is
an idea worth investigating
now berlin is all you know the the
scientists in berlin
21:39
the the german army has got some very
good chemists of his owner
they're curious about this they don't
understand how it's worked how this
stuff works
okay this new chemical taboo
and about a year later a new one sarin
they're playing around with trying to
find ways to mass produce it
not with much success at first but you
know it clearly shows potential as a
weapon
and they give it to this other guy uh dr
kuhn richard kuhn uh by the way he got
awarded a
nobel prize in 1938 had to turn it down
22:10
because by that point the
nazi germany had decided that nobel
prizes were
a foreign plot you know they were they
were a globalist
you know who can't have that sort of
thing so he was
at his work on vitamins that he was
doing he had to turn down the nobel
prize in 1938
but one of the things he did is he
figured out how nerve agents work
and so i want to take a little you know
somebody's going to ask in the comments
so i better say how nerve agents work
uh the human nervous system was not
hugely well understood
22:41
in you know the 1930s there's still lots
of things we don't know about the
nervous system but
i i guess one of the ways that you can
describe it is that the
it's a the human nervous system is a
chain of
electrical circuitry that runs from your
brain down through your spinal cord out
to every organ and bit of your body and
sends signals
up and down that pathway but unlike a
proper
sort of you know artificial electric
circuit made out of copper wire or
something like that
23:12
it uses a hybrid of things it uses nerve
cells which operate pretty much
like it's a copper wire but it's not a
continuous chain of nerve cells there's
these gaps between the nerve cells
that's what you see in that diagram
there it's called the synaptic gap
and there's these chemical compounds
called neurotransmitters
that send signals backwards and forwards
across this gap
and there's a complex balance of
chemicals to send signals and then to
stop the signals from
from from going and so what cune
23:43
discovered
is effectively that there's a there's a
thing called acetylcholine
it's one of the key it's one of the it's
one of the key
neurotransmitters it's not the only one
this is a complex area of chemistry
but acetylcholine works in conjunction
with this other thing called the
acetylcholine esterase
all right uh acetylcholinesterase works
to shut down the acetylcholine when
after a signal is sent now
nerve ages what they do nerve agents are
extremely powerful
binding agents what they do these all
24:14
these different organophosphate
compounds including the pesticide ones
they bind to the acetyl cholinesterase
so it can't turn off
uh the acetylcholine and so
acetylcholine builds up and you get
something called
a cholinergic crisis this idea that the
nerve agent shut down your nervous
system is absolutely wrong it causes the
other problem it causes your nervous
system doing it overdrive
and it was first it was first this guy
uh
cune by the way was chair of the german
chemical society
not every one of these scientists i
24:45
mentioned was a nazi but cunes certainly
was
um he was quite a key nazi um
and actually he developed a third of the
nerve ages this chemical substance
called soman which turned out to be just
too expensive to uh
to produce so it became it was a bit of
an oddity um
but anyway that's how nerve agents work
and so this this knowledge came about as
part of this
this this work here now
we're going to go to the we're going to
go to the german government now what you
see on the left there is spandau castle
25:17
and the right is an ammunition storage
bunker at a place called rob camera
now they've been work rob camera was the
proving ground for chemical weapons
uh to this day it's still the artillery
range for the german army
uh spandau castle on the left was where
the german armies
they called it a gas protection
laboratory um
and that was the branch of the german
army that was designed to do both
offensive and defensive work
uh they were working on trying to find a
way to take this chemical
warfare agent taboon that was the first
25:48
one that was the one that was easiest to
manufacture
and trying to scale it up and turn it
into weapon uh the problem was
like everything in defense bureaucracy
it competed for money with everything
else and they weren't getting a lot of
money for their work because money was
going into building tanks and making the
army bigger
uh things like that but then the war
happened
in on the first of september 1939 the
germans went to war invaded poland
26:17
and all of a sudden now the war is
actually happening and people are
shooting each other
uh german industries sees this and quite
rightly from their perspective
as a license to print money uh anybody
with a cunning wheeze to do something
for
for for the war effort descended on on
berlin and
so did i'm gonna go back one so did this
guy otto ambrose the guy on the right
always known for his being a very snappy
dresser by the way otto ambrose
26:49
he's literally the a in sarah sarah
being an acronym
s for schroeder and you know
conveniently the
r i n for our various procurement
officers in the german army always
better off the
contracting officer it seems otto
ambrose basically
went and told the german government and
told the third reich give us suitcases
full of cash
and we will give you thousands of tons
of nerve agent miracle weapons
basically was the deal and the german
army very quickly signed an open-ended
contract that was to the end
27:20
of to the tune of uh we'll give you as
much
money as you want as long as you come up
with the goods
and so i and i go through this in some
great detail in my book i'm not going to
go into it much here but
what happened was ig farben built a huge
industrial empire uh involving the
equivalent
of these days of billions of pounds of
dollars um
at least 12 000 highly skilled you know
yeah as in sort of degree degree level
you know employees are higher
27:51
and many thousands more unskilled labor
and many thousands more
convicted prisoner labor uh building a
vast
industrial empire and spending huge
amount of money
not just to build nerve agents but to
also to make the other chemical warfare
agents do
because you know germany also wanted to
make sure that it had adequate supplies
of the older what we call the first
generation warfare against the
the mustard gas the fosgene the stuff
that was used in the first world war
as this nerve agent stuff was not quite
a proven thing yet so
28:23
ig farming builds this massive
commercial empire
to to do this and it builds several
factories
it it builds
it builds a nerve agent factory a place
called iron firth
uh they are in the process of building a
nerve agent factory
uh at a place called falcon hagen to
produce sarin they don't get very far
because even by the end of the war they
hadn't worked out the mass production
route for
for sarin um i'll spare you some of this
28:53
uh but basically what i'll what i will
tell you is that a lot of people got
very rich on this including otto ambrose
he got very rich quite personally on
this
this diagram down in the bottom is is an
attempt
uh to make out an org chart of how this
stuff works and how the money went
and in reality it was much more
complicated than that because
on top of everything else the directors
at ig farben didn't want to be seen to
be directly doing this
so there was a huge web of cover
29:24
companies
shell companies joint ventures
deliberate obfuscation money laundering
tax evasion
uh it would take me five years and a
bunch of german-speaking
forensic accountants to go through the
records and the records are there you
can go find them in queue it's amazing
to leave through them
but what happens is
by by the end of the war the germans
have maybe
10 tons of sarin not much but they have
12 600 or so probably
29:56
maybe a little bit more but the exact
inventory is lost
of this chemical warfare agent taboo
and so the question is why didn't hitler
use this stuff
and some i better answer that because
somebody's going to ask that at the end
and i go into great detail in my book on
this
uh but to summarize um
germany was afraid of retaliation in
kind
for various reasons that you know i
explained in greater detail
uh you know in the earlier chapters of
30:28
my book
several key figures were convinced that
the allies had the same technology it
turns out that they had it
uh there's reasons why that was a
logical guess
i can see how they added to two and two
and got seven
and so that was part of the problem is
that they realized that they thought
they thought that
the vast weight of american industry in
particular possibly the british with ici
but in particular america
with monsanto and dupont and shell oil
and companies like that they reckon that
30:58
the vast weight of the american industry
obviously would have come up with a
nerve agent
another factor was because of shortages
of rubber
rubber winter tires the german army was
very short on gas masks
throughout the whole war struggled to
field gas masters troops so
it's worried about protecting itself and
particularly struggles to protect its
civilians
it wants to do like the like britain is
doing and give a gas mass to every
household
and the entire war is struggles and
31:29
struggles greatly to do this so the idea
that
well we'd best not start this chemical
warfare stuff because we can't
really protect ourselves it's a thing
another factor is
even though there is such a thing as a
gas mask for a horse
horses don't like wearing them nerve
agents actually absorb through the skin
of a horse not just the respiratory
tract so you
it's hard to protect a horse against
nerve agents and even to the very end of
the war
the germans are very much more reliant
31:59
on horses than
than the british or the american army
are so that's a factor
and so you know getting into chemical
warfare is going to endanger their
logistics
some people talk about whether or not
hitler is
very personally against chemical warfare
having been
having been uh allegedly having been
gassed in the first world war
don't really know about that uh um
hitler was also
quite one for you know exaggerating his
own war career
uh don't know he certainly had no
32:30
confunction with using hydrogen cyanide
a which is a not a nerve agent but it's
a hydrogen cyanide is very much a deadly
deadly poisonous gas used terribly in
the concentration camps so
whether so i don't know this i
i don't know how much to put behind this
uh hitler
uh was afraid of chemical warfare thing
i don't know
uh and there are a lot of other sort of
fundamental logistical reasons
uh why chemical warfare was
going to be hard for the germans to pull
33:01
off not impossible but hard
and not to put too fine a point on it if
if you think about it if you
if germany were to say in late 1944
early 1945
start to use the nerve agents it's not
going to win the war
it's just going to delay the war okay it
might delay the war by months
but even so little as a three-month
delay to the war
is going to end up with that first atom
bomb being on berlin because that was
the plan all along
so instead of hiroshima it would have
been berlin so
33:32
who knows how that would have changed
the the context of modern history
towards the end of the war uh there is a
great russian germany
to hide this stuff to get rid of it to
stash it away
more importantly if if nothing else keep
it away from the soviets
so all sorts of interesting things
happened in the end of the war where a
lot of resources and manpower tied up
shuffling this stuff
moving it further west further north in
germany to get it away from the
34:03
advancing red army
i think some of this was a military plan
because various bits of the military
high command
even to the end of the war were terribly
hopeful that they can negotiate a
settlement
on the west and continue fighting the
east they could come to some sort of
arrangement with the western allies and
keep fighting the soviets
it wasn't going to happen you know
churchill stalin roosevelt had all
agreed that that wasn't going to happen
but
you know the germans thought that that
might be the case after all i mean they
managed they managed to pull that off in
the first world war
they managed to get russia out of the
34:34
war in the first world war so
the idea is that we've got to keep this
stuff away from the advancing russian
army
the soviet army so various things happen
here
there's an interesting story in my book
about a commando raid
uh pictured here is max saxenheimer
there was a commando raid on the
on the sarin factory because i'm sorry
the tabon factory because it got stuck
behind
allied allies and it wasn't destroyed
yet so
the there's a fascinating tale about
something called operation barbara
35:05
um that's also in my book i don't think
i have time to really dig
deep into detail on that here
and then at the end of the war there's
this great
epiphany the allies both the western
allies you know france britain
uh the united states the in the east the
soviet union
are stunned shocked appalled amazed at
these new nerve agents
now it's a myth that the allies didn't
know about it
uh the allies knew about it and filed a
35:36
way a bit like the uh
the ark of the covenant in indiana jones
because actually the the allies had
captured a
a german officer who knew about the
nerve agents and interrogated him in
1943 in north africa
but i don't think they believed him they
just wrote up a nice six-page memorandum
and filed it away and it collected dust
for the rest of the war
but at the end of the war there's a
massive struggle to exploit the
technology of germany
and that exploitation technology
36:08
certainly extends into chemical warfare
the chap you see on the screen there is
a very young photograph of a guy named
edmund tilly he's a bit of a ghost
uh he was a major than a lieutenant
colonel at the time we're talking about
that
photo is much earlier he worked for the
intelligence corps in the british army
spoke fluent german and turns out he was
the great interrogator
and a pretty good detective he ran
around
like ran around occupied germany finding
these guys and locking them up including
36:40
otto ambrose who was a
very very evasive character otto ambrose
had taken
something like 19 000 pages of documents
and had them buried in the forest
and you know it was edmond tilly who
found them that
dug up the paint barrel and that paint
barrel is still to this day in the
imperial war museum the papers are down
at q and i managed to read them
so thanks to edmund tilly i was able to
write this book now if anybody here
knows anything about lieutenant colonel
edmund tilly
37:10
um i'd be desperate to find out about
him because i i've really drawn a lot of
a blank on his career and what he did
uh his ex boys in this particular niche
are famous and then he disappears out of
the record again and i'm i'm just
dying to find out about him now
the the place you see on the right there
is a place called schloss cransberg
which is where the allies locked up
these scientists
and interrogate the interrogated they
make great
at great length uh some of them gerhard
schroeder
37:41
uh he sang like a canary he filled
hundreds of pages of the interrogation
others were
you know made up stories you made up
excuses
told tilly he was uh yeah he
tried to tried to tell lies to tilly
till he sort of
basically got the truth out of everybody
eventually something cracked in
10 minutes some it took 30 days but he
did it
but what you end up with at the end of
the war
is an arms race between west and east
38:16
both sides of the both sides of
the cold war spend their time absolutely
convinced that
the other side is ahead in this new
chemical arms race
the the factories are pretty much
destroyed but were captured by the
the soviets um the west doesn't realize
how thoroughly they destroyed the war
assumes the worst case scenario and
thinks that well
okay they've gotten tagged factories
over there or
the the the the west assumes that the
east
38:49
has the staff directories and he knows
all the people that are working these
factories and takes them off the list
and realizes has very few of them
they've all gone west
okay so the the they're they're left
with guys who turn wrenches and swept up
you know they have a lot of staff
capture but very few of them know very
much about it
the scientists all saw what was going on
and fled west
okay uh gerhard schroeder yeah otto
ambrose klein ends all these other guys
they're in the west
uh only one scientist goes east i don't
even i'm still having to figure out how
39:20
glonbach ended up
uh ended up in the soviet union uh
interestingly he ends up in the soviet
union not as a
not as a prisoner but as a paid employee
so maybe all along he had
perhaps you know sympathies that way
maybe they blackmailed them maybe
you know who knows there's a story there
i'm told
but what happened was with this
knowledge
uh in both both east and west having
part of the knowledge
an arms race to make nerve agents
involves
what you see here uh these photographs
39:52
here neither these buildings exist
anymore but what you see is this is part
of the us
industrial complex to make nerve agents
the us
takes this other nerve agent sarin which
had not been
you know the secret to making siren had
it really really been cracked at least
not mass producing it
and spends seven years and a lot of
money to crack the uh
the crack the secrets to making sarin
and develops a
very large chemical warfare arsenal
mostly out of serenity
later in conjunction with the british a
40:24
a uh
a chemical called vx i just did a huge
threat on twitter about vx today so
some of you may have seen that um
the soviet union well this is
this this slide here shows part of the
us arsenal the soviet union
was into it too um the soviet union
did the same thing uh was further behind
each each each side in the war thought
the other side was further ahead in
reality
the soviets were actually right that
40:55
this was further ahead
um there was a bit of a british
there was a bit of a british angle on
this most of the nerve agent from the
german
effort uh in the second world war was in
the form of aerial drop
bombs uh britain ended up
uh holding on to those things in an
airfield in wales pictured top left
there
until a point at which they had to get
rid of them the tail
the tail how they got rid of them it's
you don't want to know but it's in my
book
41:25
um bottom left is a place in cornwall
it's called it was called cde chemical
defense establishment nanskuke
and that picture there you have is one
of the few surviving photographs of the
uk's sarin factory
it wasn't very big compared to say the
u.s sarin plant
and actually at the point at which they
cracked the code to making sarin
britain was broke the suez crisis has
just happened
um it's the late 1950s and
41:56
sarin turns out to be a hugely expensive
thing to make so the
the britain gets out of the offensive
chemical warfare program
on the basis that we're gonna they're
gonna specialize in defensive research
share information with the americans and
the canadians and the australians
uh and the idea is that if they ever
need offensive chemical weapons the
americans will supply them
now some of this some of this defensive
research
was not really what you would call
ethical by modern standards you know
uh this guy here madison
42:29
uh he died as a result of saturn
exposure at porting down
uh and his legal case dragged on for
decades in the court before his family
finally got some sort of settlement out
of the mod uh
his his particular circumstances uh you
know
bear i mean there's probably a whole
book to be written there about
about private medicine
and so what that gets us now
is you know the
the cold war happens um basically
chemical weapons are our footnote during
43:02
the cold war
uh the great third world war between
uh the west and the soviet union never
happens
but what happens is a bunch of proxy
conflicts all around the world these
so-called
brush fire wars and the korean war the
vietnam war
uh but you know dozens of other
conflicts as well too where
east and west are fighting through sort
of third parties
and you get the occasional flare up
uh the occasional hint aroma of
43:32
of nerve agent use of these conflicts
but i mean one of them for example the
rhodesians used a commercial pesticide
during their quite dirty bush war um
there is rumors probably unsubstantiated
that the egyptians used nerve agents in
a war in yemen
in the early 1960s it's quite clear that
they used they used the older chemical
warfare agent mustard gas
now one of the legacies of the cold war
is that
these industrial complexes to to make
44:06
chemical warfare agents and to test them
and you know in the end to try to get
rid of the weapons we don't need them
all this becomes a
huge environmental health and safety
debacle
the us ends up
even before they get officially out of
chemical warfare they have
many thousands and tons of older
chemical weapons they don't know what to
do with them they ended up
putting them in old merchant vessels and
sinking them in deep spots of the ocean
where they still
sit and they did i think by the stands
44:41
of the day a reasonably good job of it
they took the shells and
rockets all that encased it in concrete
and then put these encased concrete in
the ship and then poured more concrete
and then sank the whole thing so there's
lots of stuff entombed uh five six seven
thousand feet down
mostly in the atlantic a few places in
the pacific
um there were a couple great big
industrial accidents uh one was a huge
massive fish kill in the volga river
called
the white sea incident where basically
you know
45:12
hundreds of thousands of fish including
very expensive and commercially valuable
sturgeon were killed in a
in an accident downstream from the the
soviet sarin factory
uh the photo you see bottom right is a
accidental
um killing of sheep outside dugway
proving ground in the us
in the late 1960s that really started a
chain of events in the us that
eventually led to president nixon in
1969
basically ordering the us to stop
testing chemical weapons and putting a
moratorium on offensive chemical and
45:43
biological research
so you know president nixon's legacy is
mixed but his legacy in chemical arms
control and environmental stuff is
actually quite positive
now i understand i'm getting towards the
end of my hour i want to wrap this up
um the tale of nerve agents makes its
way out of the
sort of the the the the
rump end of the cold war into other
conflicts and
actually the the most statistically
significant use of nerve agents
46:13
has been was in the iran-iraq war where
the
where the iraqi military faced by
a numerically superior but less
less well-equipped iranian force uses
chemical warfare agents including
including nerve agents to fight many
battles
um it's one of the few instances
actually in military history where you
really can point to
specific battles and military campaigns
for chemical weapons
performed as needed by the commanders
that used them and
46:44
you know actually made a significant
operational difference
um this is all happening at a time where
the east and the west
are negotiating the chemical weapons
convention all that
um there was a several horrific
massacres of uh
largely kurdish civilians including
places like halabja that
that uh the graveyard picture there is
halabja the
palm jam massacre is still quite an
infamous incident
possibly the largest use of nerve agents
um again
47:14
depends how you compare it to some use
of nerve agents on the battlefields near
the chantal arab but
that's for another story but
what you get is you get actually
chemical arms control out of this
eventually the end of the cold war the
realization
in the west particularly that these are
not useful weapons
so there wasn't it wasn't a single
military in the west that was advocating
to keep these things for
battlefield use and so it became much of
the rest of the world trying to handle
down the uh
47:44
haggle the uh angle the soviet union uh
into it and eventually the collapse of
the soviet union rise of boris yeltsin
in russia then you get
actually in the 1990s the chemical
weapons convention
and an organization behind it the opcw
to
enforce this and although there have
been instances afterwards
uh i'd have to say that this is clearly
a a case
mostly good most of the chemical weapons
around the world have been identified
seized destroyed demilitarized under
48:16
opcw
certification so there is there is some
good in this story
but what you have is you have a secret
program that continues despite the
chemical weapons convention
in in and started out in the soviet
union ended up in post-soviet russia
uh the so-called nova chucks
and they they uh they wear their ugly
head
also you have a cult in japan in
the 1990s the alm cult the shinrikyo the
48:47
almond supreme truth cult
used nerve agents in a two attacks
actually the
lesser known matsumoto siren attack uh
and then a the the infamous one later on
in 1995
in tokyo up to this point it had been
really considered that nerve agents were
too difficult for
so-called you know non-state actors to
get terrorist groups to acquire
um i would say that you know alm is kind
of the exception proves the rule
it was such a large group that it
49:19
effectively was the equivalent of a
small country
uh at one point they had over a hundred
thousand members
uh their membership was heavily
intellectual
uh they managed to assemble a
you know a chemical warfare research and
development team
uh of phd level chemists and chemical
engineers
who were ideological true believers
really wanted to do it
they spent a lot of money uh they set up
front companies to buy
uh buy precursor chemicals they
49:50
spent a lot of money in cash in the
former soviet union to get some
interesting information on how to make
sarin
and the information they got on how to
make sarin was
about 80 percent correct it wasn't you
know
you know it got them a good long way
towards making the siren they had to do
some some particular work on that
but i would say the level of effort they
put to it the amount of money they spent
they spent somewhere
between 50 and 90 million us dollars at
the time
okay uh that the the effort and the
amount of money they spent was the
equivalent of one of the smaller
50:21
nerve agent programs from a nation-state
standpoint it wasn't any
it wasn't any smaller than
the yugoslav the uh nerve agent program
under
under marshall tito and they they
managed to make sarin so
just try to say oh well no nerve guys
and non-state actors
you know can't do it they largely can't
these guys
got to enough critical mass where they
were the equivalent of a small country
and then we have the syrian war
50:52
uh you can read my posts in bellingcat
where you know
uh i spent a lot of time nitpicking the
chemistry on this stuff
uh and there's a whole chapter in my
book on the syrian war
uh the use of sarin the nerve agent
sarin is part of a broader context in
the in the
syrian civil war the majority of the
chemical warfare stuff done in syria
is chlorine uh i mean some of that is
the fact that chlorine is less strictly
controlled by the chemical weapons
convention and and the syria has been
caught out several times on the saren
front and had
51:22
have been slapped around for it but the
international community seems less
exercised about chlorine
but there are two particularly big sarin
incidents one in gouta
involving rockets that's the left-hand
one and a later one in a place called
khan sheikhoun which involves at least
one aerial dropped
bomb that's the crater thereof both
involving sarin
and the syrians by the way their program
is actually quite old this is not a new
thing for the syrians the syrians have
been working on nerve agents since
at least the early 70s possibly the late
51:54
60s
and i'm about at the end of my time here
but
this stretches in the modern day here
the events of salisbury
uh the uh yulia and sergey skripal
uh charlie rowley dawn sturgis who died
from exposure
um detective sergeant nick bailey who
was affected by it so we uh you know it
happens
here in the uk and i'm not sure i have a
picture of it
52:24
no no no i don't have a picture of mr
navalny i probably should put one in
the revelation that uh mr navalny was
poisoned
um
you know in circumstances they're
heavily controlled by their by the
russian government that's
you know this is this all kind of shows
that you know this is not stuff that's
just antiquity it reaches from
it reaches you know it reaches from the
1930s
you know from its evil wicked nazi
origins
to today so there was a thread running
from colorado potato beetles to
52:56
the streets of salisbury and
so here's my shameless plug for my book
then i'll take some questions i mean
there's a lot of things going on in my
book is
bad people doing good things there's
good people doing bad things
uh gerhard schroder that scientist all
he ever wanted to do was
protect crops you know as soon as he had
a chance he got out of
nerve agent weapons went back to
pesticides
there's a couple bad people that did
some good things
uh really really difficult
technology and i talk about how how the
53:28
technology is actually quite difficult
i talk about the collaboration with
industry because all
all of these successful nerve agent
programs required a
a combination of ideology in form of the
government that wants to use this stuff
and an industry willing and able to
cooperate
and even the auction regular thing is
they well they didn't have an industry
willing to cooperate so they built their
own
arms races have talked about that
there's a whole
theme of there's a whole theme of
53:59
technology used for good and evil there
are certain chemicals in the nerve agent
category that
are actually useful as medicines so it's
not like this entire category is evil so
there's
and you know you can you can argue the
environmental merits of organophosphates
as pesticides but clearly they've
they've helped crop production
i've got spies i've got secrecy i've
even got a good commander rate in there
i've got some treachery double doing
um deterrence you know deterrence is a
thing
54:30
deterrence deterrence mostly kept
chemical warfare
from happening uh most most of the
possible chemical attacks that could
have ever happened in history never
happened because the other guy was
convinced of retaliation kind
uh and i've got interesting anecdotes
and environmental disasters
and so there's something for everybody
in
in toxic and i hopefully i haven't given
stolen my own thunder so much
i'm almost exactly on one hour uh
there is a link here by the way i think
55:01
this will be available for all of you
um if you go to if you use the toxic 25
at checkout at my publisher you will get
a
you'll get a uh i believe a 20 25
discount something like that and there's
uh that's only for uk delivery
uh non-uk customers can still order
through through hearst and they will
ship it's not stupidly expensive
uh north american customers we are
awaiting at some point soon an
announcement for
a oxford university press to uh announce
the release date for a u.s
55:33
and canadian edition and on that note
i am happy to take questions
you
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