January 05 Newsletter

A Higher Form of Killing
The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare
Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman
Hill and Wang, New York, 1982

Editor's note:
While it may seem the height of folly to review a book now out of print, A Higher Form of Killing provides its readers with the historical context omitted in the books usually recommended to those seeking to understand the genesis of the threat of biological and chemical agents as weapons of terror. Contemporary books generally restrict themselves to the events subsequent to the 1972 conventions. This book should be on the must-read list for the serious student of biological and chemical warfare, and is well worth the trouble of requesting by inter-library loan.

The title of the book is derived from remarks made by the German pioneer of chemical warfare, Fritz Harber, on the occasion of his receipt of the 1919 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. "In no future war will the military be able to ignore poison gas. It is a higher form of killing."

This carefully documented history of the development and use of chemical and biological agents from 1915 up to the end of the Cold War demonstrates how real the threat of terrorism using these higher forms of killing may be.

The book opens with a well-documented account of the first known use of chemical warfare on the morning of April 22, 1915. The German army released one hundred sixty tons of chlorine gas against the unsuspecting French and Algerian soldiers defending Ypres and surrounding villages. The descriptions of that attack and the subsequent counterattacks by the British are presented in the words of the survivors, and are truly chilling.

Those historical accounts of chemical attacks are particularly interesting for those interested in understanding the consequences of a contemporary terrorist attack using chemical agents. The initial chapter includes brief excerpts from the autopsies of the victims of chemical warfare and concludes by recounting the casualty rates caused by "gas warfare." This chapter also documents the research, development and production of the Nitrogen Mustard, and Phosgene compounds that remain of concern today. Subsequent chapters document the use of chemical agents by the British during their intervention in the Russian Civil War, the French and Spanish in Morocco, the Italians in Abyssinia and the Japanese in China.

The authors offer careful documentation of just how close the world came to experiencing the use of chemical warfare during WWII, and they document the relatively unknown events surrounding the bombing of a U.S. government transport laden with Mustard gas in the Adriatic port of Bari in 1943. While it resulted in the deaths of about 2,000 soldiers, civilians, and sailors, the facts surrounding the bombing were highly classified and are even now omitted from the historical accounts of the Italian campaign.

In the chapters dealing with biological warfare, the authors make effective use of original source documents declassified in the late 1970's to detail the research and development done by the Allies, the Nazis and the Japanese during WWII. The section dealing with the Japanese use of biological warfare against the Chinese is one of the best to be found outside of the book Unit 731 by Williams and Wallace (Free Press, 1989).

As informative as the first eight chapters of this book are in recounting man's quest for "a higher form of killing," it is the last two chapters of the book that are the most interesting. "The Tools of Spies" (chapter nine) begins with the details of the now infamous "Markov Pellet" in which the Bulgarian secret police used a ricin-impregnated micro sphere fired from the tip of an umbrella to assassinate Georgi Markov. The chapter then details the WWII and Cold War R&D efforts of Soviet, British, and American secret services to develop and use both chemical and biological agents as tools of assassination, interrogation and incapacitation. While serving as a reminder of the pervasive paranoia and excesses of WWII and the Cold War, some of the well-documented techniques described in this chapter seem to have been taken from a bad parody of an episode of "Benny Hill meets the Secret Service" and would be humorous had the clandestine agencies of the major powers not been writing the scripts.

The final chapter, "From Disarmament to Rearmament," is an excellent account of Nixon's unilateral decision to abandon the biological and chemical arms race. Because the book was published in 1982, the authors were unaware of the enormity of the Soviet bioweapons program, subsequently revealed by the defections of Pasechnik and detailed in Alibek's book Biohazzard. In light of its 1982 publication date, the authors' discussion of the Sverdlosk anthrax accident in A Better Form of Killing was well balanced. They dismissed the story put forth by the Soviets and supported by their American apologists, that the outbreak had been caused by tainted meat. The authors' discussion of the allegations of the Soviet use of T3 micotoxins (yellow rain) in Laos and chemical agents in Afghanistan were also well balanced, and, given the level of security classifications at the time of publication, reasonably well detailed.

The 1982 epilogue is particularly prophetic as the authors speculated on what could result from the misapplication of "gene splicing" to the field of biological warfare, which, as we know from Alibek and contemporary Russian publications, is exactly what Soviet scientists had set out to accomplish.
This book is highly recommended to anyone who wishes to understand the historical context of the development of weapons of mass destruction and the potential for those weapons as the ultimate tools of terror.

Have a question or comment? Email bioterr@slu.edu