Choking, Blister, Blood, and Nerve
“once again find ourselves facing one of our oldest demons”
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The country that accepts them shall take this evil plague.
- Prayer of the Hittites in Anatolia, after driving infected animals and humans into enemy territory
Greek myth says Hercules invented poisoned arrows by dipping the points of his into the venomous blood of the vanquished Hydra. A lot of mythological bad guys were subsequently dispatched with those arrows, but also some of Herc's buddies, his son, and eventually the hero himself—from friendly fire, the unpredictable nature of such weapons, and the cascade of misfortune triggered by them. And that quiver of arrows went on after Hercules' death to cause even more turmoil in the Trojan War. Long before any actual historical record of their use, the Greeks were telling stories about their ambivalence toward the power and the pain of bio-chemical weapons.
The recent use of sarin gas against civilians during the civil war in Syria brought biological and chemical weapons to the front of the news cycle, a reminder of the last century's worst atrocities. This recent history is still understandably fresh in the world's collective consciousness. But humans have been trying to poison, burn, and ruin each other for so much longer.
The Scythians, also claiming the heritage of Hercules, used a mixture of rotted vipers, human blood, and animal dung to lace their arrowheads. Death from such wounds followed prolonged and torturous anguish. Warriors in India similarly used natural toxins and festering concoctions to poison the tips and edges of their weapons.
Ancient China had hundreds of recipes for poisonous or irritating vapors used in war. Mixtures of arsenic, gunpowder, wolf excrement, poisoned roots. Names like Five-League Fog and Soul-Hunting Fog.
In Greece's First Sacred War, in 590 BC, a league of city-states brought “total war” against the city of Kirrha, vowing to ruin everything within. They poisoned the water supply, sickening or killing soldiers, women, and children alike.
Clearchus of Heraclea conscripted dissident citizens into the army for a fake campaign in 363 BC, then forced them to camp in filthy swampland full of stagnant water. By the end of the summer all the men succumbed to malaria and dysentery.
In 1346 AD, the Mongols might have introduced the Black Death to Europe when they catapulted the bubonic plague-ridden corpses of their own soldiers into the walled fortress Kaffa on the Black Sea.
Some of the most effective and terrorizing weapons of early history were burning mixtures of petroleum, saltpeter, sulfur, pitch, quicklime, wax. The Byzantines perfected the delivery of their secret version, called Greek Fire, a liquid that stuck to everything, living or otherwise, and burned with intense, inextinguishable heat, even under water.
And those are just the highlights! By the end of the Middle Ages, though, much specific weapons knowledge was lost or abandoned (Greek Fire, for instance, although it was later resurrected as modern napalm). And as gunpowder became the predominate force in war, bio-chemical weapons turned up less frequently in the historical record: some noxious gases, the occasional intentional smallpox infection, an ignored suggestion by an American schoolteacher to use chlorine against the Confederate Army.
But like the Greeks who wrote down those myths centuries before, humans have never stopped feeling conflicted about the use of biological and chemical weapons. For as long as we've been trying to destroy each other with deadly poisons and caustic chemicals, we've had proscriptions against their use, especially our enemies' use.
In ancient India dueling treatises, the Laws of Manu and the Arthashastra, prohibited and encouraged, respectively, such dirty forms of war as bio-chemical weapons. The Romans were always badmouthing the barbarians for their brutal tricks, while simultaneously employing poisons, disease, and chemicals against opposition. Such inconsistencies can also be found in Muslim and Chinese traditions, and despite teachings of mercy elsewhere, there are hints of intentional biological warfare in that old chestnut of Judeo-Christian heritage, the plagues called down upon the Egyptians in the Bible.
The early part of the twentieth century saw science and large-scale war working in concert to drive the development of bio-chemical weaponry, leading to an arms race between competing nations to create and stockpile (and use against each other) some of the most deadly substances ever imagined. Simultaneously, a handful of treaties and agreements were enacted to coral these weapons and prevent their spread and use.
After the horrors of chemical warfare on the battlefields of the First World War (in defiance of standing treaties, no less), some forty countries signed the Geneva Protocol of 1925, prohibiting its signatories from using chemical and bacteriological weapons in war. It worked so well that Italy (a party to the treaty) dropped mustard gas on Ethiopia in 1935 while the rest of the world looked away. Japan followed suit in China a few years later. By the time the Second World War was in full swing, chemical arsenals were an option no serious waring nation could ignore. The Germans in particular went above and beyond, secretly developing tabun and sarin, two exquisitely deadly nerve agents whose postwar discovery by the Allies would contribute to a bio-chemical buildup that rivaled the nuclear arms race.
The last fifty years have seen a condensed version of the ancients' ambivalence towards the bio-chemical warfare. The Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. The United States dropping napalm and Agent Orange on the jungles (and by extension, people) of Vietnam. Iraq bombing Iran and the Kurds with tabun and mustard gas. The Japanese cult group Aum Shinrikyo poisoning civilians with sarin. The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, which intended the destruction of its signatories' chemical weapons, and to which Syria, in an eleventh-hour move to prevent Western retribution, just signed on.
Despite an inherent hypocrisy that spans millennia, there is an inextinguishable streak in humans that rivals that of Greek Fire or napalm: the fear and condemnation of the use of chemical and biological agents against other humans. Something in our shared experience, old and new, drives us again and again, against all precedent, to try to eradicate or at least ameliorate the destruction such weapons cause. In Syria in 2013, we once again find ourselves facing one of our oldest demons, armed with righteous indignation and the knowledge that we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
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References: Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World, by Adrienne Mayor (Overlook Duckworth); A History of Chemical and Biological Weapons, by Edward M. Spiers (Reaktion Books); War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda, by Jonathan B. Tucker (Pantheon Books); and, you know, the Internet