Book review: Toxic, by Dan Kaszeta

Detail of the cover image from Toxic, by Dan Kaszeta

After seeing the title and blurb of this book, readers may be surprised that the prologue is devoted to Sir Robert Christison, physician to Queen Victoria and Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University. The doctor, a trail-blazing toxicologist, had been intrigued by missionaries returning from West Africa and telling of “trial by ordeal” using the Calabar bean: the accused, if innocent, vomited the poison, but if guilty they absorbed the poison, frothed at the mouth, had a seizure and died. Christison’s words on a Calabar bean death in his lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1855, says Dan Kaszeta, could be describing the fate “of a Syrian victim of a Sarin attack in 2013” – nerve agent poisoning.

The naturally occurring chemical in the bean can also be used to treat medical conditions, but the development of pesticides by Nazi Germany produced related synthetic chemicals which, it was realised, could be used in weaponry. In 1945, the victorious Allies discovered the records, laboratories and factories behind these developments and, as they did with rocket scientists, debriefed the German experts before taking some back to their domestic chemical weapon research centres. During the Cold War the foes consolidated the Nazis’ work, particularly on the more lethal Sarin, but each nation was guilty of scandals and errors.

At Porton Down in 1953, the Ministry of Defence exposed a group of young servicemen to Sarin. One of them, Ronald Maddison, died within minutes and after a secret inquest his family was paid £40 to cover funeral expenses. Following a police investigation 50 years later, the verdict of a second inquest was “unlawfully killed,” and members of Maddison’s family received compensation of £100,000. In the Soviet Union, rivers became contaminated with poisonous effluent and in the United States a spray tank test of the “VX” agent went wrong when the wind changed and more than 5,000 sheep in Utah were poisoned, most of them killed. Storage of the agents became a problem as shell casings containing them corroded and when the media in the United States discovered that the leaking shells were being dumped in the sea there was outrage. The unlikely hero at this time was President Richard Nixon who, while keeping his nation’s defence against the likes of Sarin and VX, wound down the chemical and biological weapons programmes. Ironically, the Soviet Union was unaware of this and carried on its research, thereby developing new poisons, the “Novichoks” or “Newcomers” that were used in the assassination attempt in Salisbury.

Toxic, then, details the last 100 years of nerve agent history, taking in Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the war with Iran, the 1995 Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway which killed 13 people and President Assad’s use of Sarin on his own people in Syria.Beyond this, as well as outlining the history and the science, Kaszeta is not afraid to take on those who peddle conspiracy theories and disinformation. He is a regular contributor to the open-source investigative website Bellingcat, which identified the two Russian military intelligence officers who went to Salisbury tasked to assassinate Sergei Skripal. Kaszeta has a difficult theme but he avoids both jargon and the intricacies of the science. He often addresses the reader directly or draws you in, say, by giving you the idea of the size of an open air testing site by saying it was “larger than Lancashire.” You feel part of the discussion, helped through the complexities and invited to turn back to previous pages to better understand a line of history or thinking.

Toxic, by Dan Kaszeta, Hirst & Company, 408pp, £25

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