More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This same quality led the German troops to employ the tarry, viscous fluid as a non-lethal chemical weapon (therefore exempt from the Geneva Convention), pouring it into wells in North Africa to slow the advance of General Patton and his men, whose tanks pursued them across the desert sands.
What he could not imagine was that two hundred years after his death, well into the twenty-first century, its industrial, medical and chemical applications would be such that, each month, a sufficient quantity would be manufactured to poison every person on the planet.
The greatest testament to the terror caused by history’s first weapon of mass destruction was the universal acceptance of the prohibition on gas during the Second World War.
Even Hitler, who showed no qualms when using gas in the extermination camps, refused to do so in fields of war, for although his scientists had manufactured some seven thousand tons of sarin, enough to eradicate the population of thirty cities the size of Paris, he had witnessed its effects first-hand as a foot soldier in the trenches of the First World War, had seen the agony of the dying and had suffered some of its lesser effects himself.
it provoked the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years.
Haber’s nitrogen allowed the European conflict to drag on for two more years, raising the casualties on each side by several millions.
He died in Basle in 1934, clutching the canister of nitroglycerine he needed to dilate his coronary vessels, not knowing that, years later, the Nazis would use in their gas chambers the pesticide he had helped create to murder his half-sister, his brother-in-law, his nephews and countless other Jews who died hunkered down,
Did you know the first symptom of a psychological disturbance is the inability to contend with the future? If you consider that, you will realize how implausible it is that we are able to exert control over even an hour of our lives. How hard
it is to control our thoughts!
