Dan Kaszeta - Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents, from Nazi Germany to Putins Russia

TOXIC

A History of Nerve Agents,
From Nazi Germany to Putins Russia

DAN KASZETA

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Dan Kaszeta 2021

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August 21 2013 was a significant day in the history of nerve agent use. Through videos shared on social media the world saw first-hand the effects of a Sarin attack on civilians in rebel-controlled Damascus, the largest use of such weapons since the Halabja chemical attack of 1988. Over 200 videos showed the victims, among them children, suffering from the effects of Sarin, while the munitions usedlocally made Volcano rockets and M14 140mm artillery favoured by Syrian government forceswere documented by activists and the UN team that investigated the attack.

Despite this evidence, those who would prefer to deny the Syrian governments culpability in such attacks, from the Russian government to online conspiracy theorists, did all they could to cast doubt on the evidence and who was responsible for the atrocity.

This pattern was repeated in the hundreds of chemical weapons attacks in Syria that ensued, which occurred despite Syria having signed the Chemical Weapons Convention. The August 2013 attacks were followed by helicopter drops of chlorine cylinders, the aftermath of which was widely documented yet provoked little response from the international community. This prompted the escalating use of chlorine as a chemical weapon, and eventually a series of Sarin attacks in March and April 2017 against the towns of Al-Lataminah and Khan Sheikhoun, compelling the world to take notice.

Again the denialists and truthers challenged the evidence and those investigating the attacks, hoping to change the perception of what occurred, creating a false version of history in which the Syrian governments use of nerve agents was spun as a series of false flag chemical strikes meant to draw external powers into the Syrian civil war.

It is not only conflict zones where nerve agents continue to be used. In 2018 in the cathedral city of Salisbury, Wiltshire, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were exposed to the nerve agent Novichok, placed on his front door by operatives of the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU. As with the use of nerve agents in Syria, the Russian government and online conspiracy theorists quickly spread false claims about the incident, peaking with the bizarre RT (formally Russia Today) interview in which the two suspects identified by British authorities claimed they were nothing more than simple sports nutrition salesmen who had travelled to Britain in order to see Salisbury cathedral and its famous 123m spire. Shortly afterwards, their real identities became known: Anatoliy Vladimirovich Chepiga and Alexander Yevgenyevich Mishkin, GRU officers and recipients of the Russian Federations highest honorary title, Hero of the Russian Federation, bestowed personally by President Vladimir Putin.

The Salisbury attack was not an isolated incident. Further investigation of the Skripal attack revealed a third suspect, Denis Vyacheslavovich Sergeev, a GRU officer who had found himself in Bulgaria in 2015 at the same time Emilian Gebrev, a Bulgarian businessman, was poisoned by an as yet unidentified nerve agent. Local authorities had dismissed the poisoning, with the prosecutor general suggesting that Gebrev had fallen sick after eating a tainted rocket salad. With the revelations around the Skripal case and the third Skripal suspects travels to Bulgaria, the investigation was reopened four years later, with more GRU officers identified as having been in Bulgaria at the time of the poisoning, staying close to Gebrevs place of work.

There is a growing interest in the history of nerve agents, not only how they are made and deployed, but how their use is denied by those pursuing their own political agendas. From Sarin to Novichok, the twenty-first century demonstrates that the use of nerve agents, far from being an unacceptable and unethical practice, is an increasing threat to civilian populations across the world, be it part of conventional wars or state sponsored assassinations. How we reached this moment should not be forgotten, and nor should that history be twisted by conspiracists pursuing their own agendas.

Eliot Higgins

London, January 2020

During the Cold War, generations of soldiers from many countries, myself included, were taught to fear nerve agents, a category of chemical weapon that would kill us in nine seconds if we failed to put on our gas masks. Other, better known, chemical weapons such as Mustard gas would contaminate things or make us sick, but nerve agents were the worst imaginable.

Throughout my career, as I learned more about nerve agents, the less I feared them. It was only later that I started to ponder their history. They had been developed in Nazi Germany, but never used, even when Hitlers regime was struggling desperately for survival. The Eastern Bloc and the West later embarked on a chemical weapons arms race and amassed thousands of tons of nerve agents. Fortunately these chemical arsenals barely saw the light of day, given their mutual deterrent effect. By the time I was putting on gas masks as a young Chemical Corps lieutenant, it had been over two decades since the US Army halted its mass production of chemical weapons and many of those with first-hand knowledge had retired or died.

Realisation dawned on me gradually. Nerve agents were unpredictable as battlefield weapons and generally disliked by military commanders. As weapons of war, they did not live up to the claims of their inventors, yet that offers no comfort to soldiers scrambling to put on gas masks in order to stay in the battle. A well-trained, well-equipped army can defend itself against nerve agents provided their discipline and equipment are of a high order. Nerve agents kill far more effectively when deployed against the poorly equipped and poorly trained.

The bloody IranIraq War of 198088 saw the first significant battlefield use of nerve agents, as Iraq fought a numerically superior Iranian adversary whose anti-chemical weapons training was minimal. As if this were not bad enough, in March 1988 Saddam Husseins government unleashed nerve agents on civilians.