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Discovery: Chemists' Dirty Secrets: From the Crimean War to the end of World War Two

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25/02/2019 GMT

From the Crimean War to the end of World War Two

Chemists' Dirty Secrets

BBC World Service - Discovery, Chemists' Dirty Secrets, From the Crimean War to the end of World War TwoSearch BBC

Andrea Sella looks at the role chemists have played in the development of weapons

Andrea Sella looks at the role chemists have played in the development of chemical weapons.

In the first of two programmes he looks back to the first attempts to ban the use of chemical weapons at the end of the 19th century. Heavily defeated in the Crimea, Russia succeeded in getting unanimous agreement at the 1899 Hague Convention that poison and poison weapons should be banned from warfare. But chemicals such as chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas were heavily used in the First World War by both sides. More substances were developed in the 1930s and 1940s but weren’t used in the battlefield in World War 2. Andrea Sella tells the stories of the chemists behind these developments. 

Picture: GB Army soldiers train for biological and chemical warfare, Credit: BBC

Discovery: Chemists' Dirty Secrets

Andrea Sella looks at the role chemists have played in the development of chemical weapons

For more than a hundred years chemical weapons have terrorised, maimed and killed soldiers and civilians alike. As a chemist, the part his profession has played in the development of these weapons has long concerned Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at University College London.
 
In this programme he examines the motivation of chemists like Dr Fritz Haber, who first encouraged the German military to deploy chlorine gas in World War One for the sake of “The Fatherland” and of Dr Gerhard Schrader, who, in his hunt for an effective pesticide, accidentally discovered a new class of lethal nerve agents for Nazi Germany.

From chlorine, phosgene and the mustard gases, to tabun, sarin, soman, VX and the novichok agents used to target former Soviet agent Sergei Skipal in England, Andrea weaves archive with interviews with key figures in the ongoing campaign to control and ban the use of such weapons and he asks how science educators can prepare young chemists for the moral hazard posed by this particular class of weapon.

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