The G-34 Paradox: Inside the Army's Secret Mustard Gas Project at Dow Chemical in World War I

Every American, and world, citizen should become aware of the genesis of weapons of mass destruction and join the effort aimed at their elimination.Gas warfare was "more humane" than explosives, so the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service should be maintained, military leaders said after World War I. The Germans and French started the use of chemical weapons in the Great War -- a horrific escalation of battlefield carnage that still plagues us today -- a century later. America eagerly entered the race for ever-more deadly gas with top scientists from Case Institute, Harvard, Ohio State, Michigan, American University, Edgewood Arsenal and Dow Chemical among the leaders. Mustard gas to match German wizard Fritz Haber's evil vapours was the goal of thousands of Americans. Only one experimental site, an improbable rural lab where two dozen untrained soldiers and a lone genius worked in below zero conditions, was successful during the war. The full story of that remarkable effort and how it ended in an explosion of emotion and hysteria that might have lost the war for the Allies is recounted here at last. You can read how, only by a whim of fortune did the war end, defusing the misguided decision to cancel the nation's only source of mustard gas so desperately sought by Gen. Pershing to combat the enemy in Europe. The chain of events that led the governments of England and the U.S. to continue testing poison gases on military personnel, and the policy decisions sanctioning use of chemical weapons, are plaguing the world even today. The environmental effects of dumping chemical weapons in the oceans are still lingering, perhaps offering massive challenges akin to disposal of stockpiled poisons in the U.S., Syria and other Middle Eastern countries, as well as Europe.