Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

German soldiers were stopped cold at the Marne River near Paris. German military officials now realized that this was going to be a different kind of war. One slugged out in the trenches. And one that would require massive amounts of one of the world’s most powerful explosives: ammonium nitrate. (In 1995, Timothy McVeigh used ammonium nitrate purchased from a fertilizer company to blow up a federal building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including many children; injuring 680 others; and destroying or damaging more than 300 buildings within a one-mile radius. All caused by a single, ammonium nitrate-containing truck bomb.) As the war came to a standstill, the German military became desperate for more explosives. Haber saw an opening. He convinced Carl Bosch that it was possible to convert ammonia into ammonium nitrate using a commercially feasible, one-step process and that the facility at Oppau was the perfect place to do it. Although Bosch initially disagreed, he eventually yielded. By May 1915, the Oppau plant was producing more than 150 tons of ammonium nitrate a day. BASF was no longer just a chemical company; it was an instrument of war. Whereas workers at Oppau had been working round the clock to feed people, now they were working round the clock to kill them. Brot aus luft, “bread from air,” had become blut aus luft, “blood from air.”