BOOKSHELF : Nerve agentsToxic: A History of Nerve Agents, from Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia
Nerve agents are very much in the news these days. Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria repeatedly used Sarin against its own people during that country’s civil war. The Putin regime employed Novichoks in both Russia and the United Kingdom against citizens it deemed insufficiently loyal to Moscow. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un utilized VX in the assassination of his brother at an airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Across the globe, the use of nerve agents is challenging the international nonproliferation regime in numerous ways.
Nerve agents are very much in the news these days. Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria repeatedly used Sarin against its own people during that country’s civil war. The Putin regime employed Novichoks in both Russia and the United Kingdom against citizens it deemed insufficiently loyal to Moscow. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un utilized VX in the assassination of his brother at an airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Across the globe, the use of nerve agents is challenging the international nonproliferation regime in numerous ways.
Against this backdrop, Dan Kaszeta’s Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents, from Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia provides welcome background and context on these specific types of chemical weapons. A former Chemical Officer in the US Army with decades of chemical weapons experience including multiple stints at the White House, Kaszeta offers much-needed technical expertise on the invention, production, and investigation into nerve agents. The focus specifically on nerve agents is a welcome change from many other histories that tend to lump all chemical (and sometimes biological) weapons into one amorphous “poison gas” threat with little differentiation between them. While older chemical weapons such as sulfur mustard or phosgene are sometimes mentioned in comparison with nerve agents, the author never loses his focus on his primary subject. This focus also enables Kaszeta to bypass the introduction and extensive use of chemical weapons in World War I that tends to dominate many other similar histories. Instead, Toxic begins with the Nazi discovery of Tabun, Sarin, and Soman in the context of World War II and follows the history of the dissemination of this technology to the present day.
The in-depth discussion of Nazi nerve agents is one of the real strengths of this book. Kaszeta conducted extensive archival research and revealed numerous interesting new details including insights into why nerve agents were not employed during the war, either on the battlefield or in the gas chambers. Similarly, his discussion of nerve agent development by the US, UK, and USSR during the Cold War is impressive even if it tends to focus heavily on weapon systems (likely reflecting Kaszeta’s military background). The sections on the Syrian Civil War and the Skripal poisoning in the UK are also notable for their impressive detail and valuable discussions into those investigations.
