Chemistry, Responsibility, and Modern Warfare
Stephen M. Contakes*
Department of Chemistry
Westmont College
955 La Paz Road
Santa Barbara, CA 93108
Telephone: 626-676-5084
[email protected]
Taylor Jashinsky
Student in Social Science
Westmont College
955 La Paz Road
Santa Barbara, CA 93108
Telephone: 916-749-6996
[email protected]
“…and that [the members of the Royal Society] and their successors (whose studies are to be applied
by further promoting through the authority of experiments the sciences of natural things and of useful
arts, to the glory of God the creator, and the advantage of the human race)…”
2nd Charter of the Royal Society of London, 16631
“Chemical professionals have a responsibility to serve the public interest and safety and to further
advance the knowledge of science. They should actively be concerned with the health and safety of
co-workers, consumers and the community...”
Chemical Professionals Code of Conduct, American Chemical Society, 20072
There seems to be a vast gulf between the sentiments of most contemporary scientists and
those of the men who shaped English early modern science. This is apparent from even a
cursory comparison of the aims and sentiments expressed in the Royal Society of London’s
second 1663 Charter and those in the 2007 Chemical Professionals Code of Conduct, both
important guiding documents of what are arguably the premier scientific societies of their
times. The charter is necessarily much more concerned with legal matters than the code but
its outlook is a great deal broader. One gets the sense that the men who wrote it and formed
its first members (unfortunately in that age there were no women) had a deep sense they
were engaged in the positive activity of building an enterprise that would shape our world, not
just in their time but for ages to come. Indeed, among them Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren,
and Robert Hooke did much to lay the groundwork for the growth of science in 16th Century
England. Yet these men lived centuries before the development of antibiotics, plastics, and
other chemical technologies that are widely regarded as benefits. It sometimes seems that
despite a massive growth in chemistry’s social impacts and success, the moral outlook of its
practitioners has grown narrower over the intervening gulf of years.
This is only partly true, however. Most chemists are ready to point out chemistry’s positive
social impacts, even if they tend to be less willing to consider its real or potential adverse
effects – at least aside from issues of human safety or environmental impact. Such
narrowness of vision is perhaps understandable. Human safety and environmental
stewardship are tremendously important and the chemical disasters of the 1960s and 70s –
Thalidomide, DDT, Seveso, etc… tended to focus attention on safety and environmental
issues in popular thinking. Chemists’ myopia and decreased awareness of chemistry’s social
impacts is also unfortunate, however, since any technological enterprise which exerts even a
fraction of chemistry’s historical and global impact has the potential to cause great social
harms as well as benefits, depending on how it is employed.
1
In part, much of the narrowing of chemists’ moral outlook occurred over the last 150 years as
science became increasingly professionalized. Most of the founders of the Royal Society
were gentleman of means or had the support of a wealthy patron; today, the vast majority of
scientists are part of the middle class. Furthermore, the late 19th Century saw the
development of specialized science education tracks that emphasized laboratory work and
professional knowledge at the expense of traditional liberal arts subjects.3 Today, Universitylevel chemistry education in America largely follows a prescribed set of courses, the content
of which has become relatively standardized through widely used textbooks and the
American Chemical Society’s standardized exam and accreditation system. This system of
education has many benefits, most notably in that it helps ensure that prospective chemists
receive a uniformly high-quality technical education. However, by privileging professional
training to the exclusion of broader more interdisciplinary liberal arts experiences,
contemporary chemical education can leave students inadequately prepared to navigate the
complex ethical issues that arise in real world scientific practice.
In part because of their narrow training, Chemists’ tend to only consider the potential social
impacts of their work when justifying its expense and limit their consideration of ethics to
conventionally professional issues such as research integrity, safety, and occasionally legal
responsibilities. Otherwise chemists largely avoid broader ethical considerations, usually by
deflecting ethical responsibilities onto other parties.4 Several common excuses are typically
offered. Some scientists argue that they lack the necessary ethical training.4 Others hold
that the industrial producers or end-users of scientific knowledge or technology are the ones
who should be held to be responsible for its adverse impacts. This isn’t to say that there is
an element of truth to these excuses. Scientific knowledge isn’t inherently beneficial or
harmful in itself – it’s how it’s used that matters. However, excuses based on the neutrality of
science don’t quite seem to agree with the well-accepted legal principle that individuals are
responsible to take reasonable precaution to identify and avoid foreseeable harms associated
with their actions. Consider, for example, the extreme (and hopefully hypothetical) case of a
chemist who provides consultant services to a known terrorist organization, enabling them to
release poison gas in a crowded shopping mall. Would that chemist be held morally
blameless for the attack on the grounds that only the terrorists themselves are responsible?
To be fair, few scientists choose projects solely based on narrow interests at the expense of
the common good. Most undertake projects they feel has at least some potential to “promote
the progress of science and human welfare” – a criterion that funding agencies like the US
National Science Foundation use when deciding which projects to support.5 However, even
when a scientific discovery or technology seems to be entirely beneficial, it is important to
consider the details of how those benefits will come about.
Few, if any, chemical
professionals have the capacity to truly bring about social changes on their own. Instead,
they work together with engineers, business managers, regulators, marketing professionals,
lawyers, public officials, investors, and members of the public in what is often a costly and
risky enterprise. These individuals often possess a diverse range of outlooks and aspirations
that may be incompatible with the disinterested scientific ideal and have great potential for
generating ethical dilemmas, particularly given the high-stakes nature of the chemical
enterprise.
Given this, programs of scientific training which narrowly focus on the
professional ethics of chemical research do little to prepare chemists to navigate the complex
dilemmas that arise in the real world. In effect, chemical education would do well to reimplement the liberal arts ideal of responsible citizenship with its aim of preparing individuals
to function as responsible citizens in human society.
2
The history of modern chemistry provides a wealth of examples of the importance of moral
decision making in chemistry. However, few episodes present as diverse and sophisticated a
range of issues as 20th Century chemistry’s involvement with warfare. Chemistry was
arguably the workhorse science of 20th century warfare, both in terms of the amount of
munitions used and deaths caused. While the atomic bombs dropped at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were together responsible for the deaths of 210,000 persons,6 high explosives and
incendiary bombs were responsible for over 300,000 deaths and the complete destruction of
180 square miles of city in the Pacific theatre alone.7 Furthermore, chemists were often
intimately involved in war-related work, and even took a leading role. As we’ll see the
German chemist Fritz Haber personally helped see that Germany’s armies had the nitrates
they needed to remain armed and in the field beyond the first year of World War I and was
almost single-handedly responsible for Germany’s first use of poison gas. Furthermore, large
numbers of chemists participated in military research during the two world wars and afterward
with approximately ten percent of US chemists were engaged in chemical weapons research
during the First World War alone.8 However, in this paper we’ll limit our considerations to four
historical episodes which we feel illustrate the most relevant moral issues. These include
Fritz Haber’s active support of Germany’s war effort during World War I, the German “devil’s
chemists” involvement in slave labor and gassings at Auschwitz, Louis Fieser’s involvement
in the development and testing of napalm and related incendiaries, and Dow’s response to
napalm protests during the Vietnam War. As we’ll demonstrate, these chemists and chemistindustrialists involved in these episodes engaged in moral reasoning over a variety of
dilemmas, many of which are analogous to those faced by political and military commanders.
Indeed, each of these cases required chemists or chemical engineers to make decisions
about whether to pursue and continue war-related work.
Aside from Fritz Haber and his collaborators, few chemists and engineers were directly
involved in the military application of chemical technologies. Instead, their role was one of
providing technologies and materials that could be used to expand the range of choices
available to military and civilian decision makers. Nevertheless, chemists often had a
reasonably good idea of how their work would be used. In fact, one of the central questions
chemists faced was the level of their responsibility for any dubious implications of their warrelated work. Their moral deliberations, while rarely couched in the language of professional
philosophy, often involved readily-identifiable moral concepts. Thus, in order to lay the
groundwork for subsequent discussion, it will be helpful to first consider the nature of
responsibility as it applies to the chemical enterprise.
Responsibility and Ethical Judgment in War-Related Chemical Enterprises
“Every scientist should feel a sense of personal responsibility, not necessarily for the mess in which the world is
in now, but a responsibility to think out his fundamental axioms and the system of ethics that he builds up on
those axioms, and then a responsibility for attempting, through personal decisions and personal actions, to
9
make the world the kind of place he knows it ought to be.”
Kathleen Lonsdale, British Crystallographer
Scientists10 and professional ethicists11 have written widely on the social responsibilities of
scientists, especially since the development of the atomic bomb. The accounts we have
found most helpful include a special issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences12 devoted to ethical issues associated with military research, the philosopher of
chemistry Joachim Schummer’s consideration of the ethics of synthesis,13 and Claus Jacob
and Adam Walter’s ethical analysis of the use of dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange in
Vietnam.14
3
The moral dilemmas faced by scientist are in some respects no different from those facing
other participants in modern warfare. As we will see, chemists engaged in morally-suspect
war-related research could excuse themselves on the grounds of supreme emergency or
employ the principle of proportionality as well as any politician or military commander.
However, there are two important differences. First, scientific work rarely requires timesensitive, let alone split-second, decision making. Because scientific projects often take
months or even years to complete scientists typically have time to think about the moral
implications of their work. Second, despite their intimate involvement in the development and
production of military technology, chemists and engineers rarely make the final decisions
about how their technologies are employed. In a typical chemical enterprise research
chemists hand off their discoveries to engineers or product development chemists who
develop them into economically-viable products or industrial processes. The decision to
produce, market, and sell the resulting technologies is typically made by managers subject to
the approval by government regulators. However, ultimately the government, industrial, or
individual end user is responsible for the final decision to employ the technology in any
particular situation. Because of this division of labor, many chemists feel that any
responsibility for the moral implications of their work lies with others. This can even be true of
chemists and engineers at the highest decision making levels. As Jacob and Walters noted
in their analysis of Dow’s response to the adverse effects of Agent Orange, even corporate
leaders can deflect responsibility onto the end users,14 particularly if there is some uncertainty
about a technology’s potential impacts.
Despite many chemists disclaimers to the contrary, all participants in a chemical enterprise
share responsibility for the benefits and harms of the technologies they produce, although
each participant’s level of responsibility and susceptibility to legal and moral judgment will
depend on their expected level of knowledge of potential harms and the types of decisions for
which they can be held responsible. Thus, before we look at particular chemist’s response to
the moral problems posed by the use of chemical technology in war, it will be helpful to
consider the concept of responsibility more generally.
At a basic level it can be helpful to distinguish between causal, legal, and moral responsibility.
Individuals are said to be causally responsible for an outcome if (a) they are competent – i.e.
mentally sound – actors that can (b) freely choose to undertake or not undertake the action
which results in the outcome. This is true even if the action isn’t strictly necessary for
bringing about the outcome or when the outcome is unintended. Thus, for example, the
chemists Walter Kreeft and Bruno Tesch who helped develop Zykon B are causally
responsible for its subsequent use in the murder of Jews, prisoners of war, gypsies and other
victims of the holocaust - even though they had no inkling that Zyklon B would be used to
murder innocent civilians when they first developed it for use as a delousing agent 20 years
earlier.15
Note that this assignment of causal responsibility does not mean that Kreeft and Tesch are
morally or legally culpable for the Nazi’s use of Zyklon B for mass murder. Causal
responsibility simply recognizes that it is impossible to use or misuse a chemical without a
chemist to synthesize or isolate it, a manufacturer to produce it, and - in most cases – sales
and marketing team to distribute it and encourage its use. In fact, the attribution of causal
responsibility is merely a prerequisite for making ethical or legal judgments about whether an
individual or organization’s actions, non-actions, motivations, or goals are obligatory (duties),
wrong, or permissible (with or without reservations). Legal judgments rest on legal
responsibilities determined with reference to common, national, or international laws. For
military research, the most important of these are the international laws of war embodied in
4
treaties such as the various Hague and Geneva conventions. Judgments of moral praise or
blameworthiness depend on how an agent acts with respect to their moral responsibilities
determined with respect to a particular ethical framework.
Since virtually all aspects of the chemical enterprise involve some degree of risk and
uncertainty, it is often helpful to distinguish between prospective and retrospective
responsibilities when making legal or moral judgments.13 Prospective responsibilities largely
involve readily foreseeable outcomes and are to some extent associated with duties and
liabilities while retrospective responsibilities involve unintended consequences, although
given the difficulty of determining what is foreseeable this distinction should not be pressed
too far. Thus one might say that Kreeft and Tesch were liable (prospectively responsible) for
the safety of sanitation workers who employed Zyklon B as a disinfectant since there was a
reasonable prospect it could cause harm if used improperly. They recognized this by adding
a warning malodorant to prevent accidental poisonings. However, Kreeft and Tesch weren’t
automatically liable for its use as an agent of mass murder.16 Instead, their responsibility as
inventors was retrospective since the real possibility that it would be used as a killing agent in
state-sponsored genocide was not apparent at the time it was first developed.17
Situations like the Zyklon B case are common in military research, where it can be extremely
difficult to foresee exactly how a given research result or technological product will be
employed under wartime conditions. Thus great care should be taken when assigning
prospective responsibilities to scientists engaged in war-related work. Nevertheless, in many
cases scientists will have a reasonable idea of how their work might be employed and may
want to either excuse themselves from war-related work or raise ethical questions about its
potential use.
The decision to engage in, refrain from, or raise ethical questions about military research is
often far from simple, however. Ethical responsibility dilemmas are quite commonplace in
war-related scientific work. These occur when individual chemists’ legal and moral duties to
individuals, groups, or all mankind (general responsibilities) conflict with one another.13 For
instance, scientists involved in military research may sense a dilemma between their
commitments to science’s ideal of open sharing of knowledge and science’s ideal of helping
mankind.18 Examples include the cyberneticist Norbert Weiner’s refusal to publish research
he thought could be militarily useful19 and more recent debates over the ethics of publishing
aerosol-transmissible variants of the avian flu virus.20 Some scientists may experience
tensions between their duties as a wartime national citizen, industrial employee, or
government grantee and the more general obligation of scientists to do justly in the service of
all mankind.21 Historically, scientists resolved this tension in different ways. While the
English chemist Michael Faraday refused to perform work on poisoned weapons during the
Crimean war,22 the biochemist Harold Urey rejected pacifist objections to weapons research
on the grounds that it is the government’s job to direct science policy and the scientists’ to
obey the government.23
The ethical frameworks scientists employ when thinking about the implications of military
research include a complex mix of ethical principles, theories, norms, and values. Ethical
principles largely consist of commonly agreed upon concepts and ideas that can be used to
evaluate the merits of an action.
Examples might be utility, intrinsic virtue, or
reasonableness, criteria that also play various roles in utilitarian, virtue, and deontological
ethical theories. Norms are rules for navigating particular social situations and include such
things as duties, taboos, and legal rules. Examples include prohibitions against the killing of
noncombatants and taboos against the use of chemical weapons,24 both of which are
5
reflected in international war conventions. Norms often reflect the things that a society
accords importance (or at least accorded importance in the past), which are known as values.
For example, recent attempts to develop a principle of noncombatant immunity place a high
value on human life.
Historically, the most important ethical frameworks for evaluating the morality of war are just
war thinking, realism, and pacifism. Just-war theory first arose from Augustine of Hippo’s
attempt to apply the Christian law of neighbor love to the political and military situation of the
late Roman Empire, although it was later modified by medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas,
Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Saurez, and Hugo Grotius. It is based on the idea that
particular situations exist when it is permissible – or even obligatory – to conduct a war to
prevent harm to others, protect the social order, or appropriately chastise an aggressor.
Thus it has been largely concerned with Jus ad Bellum (Justice towards war) and Jus in
Bellum (Justice in war) evaluations, which involve evaluating when wars may be or should be
fought and how they should be fought, respectively. Some writers have also called for its
expansion to include separate Jus Post Bellum (Justice after war) principles.25
The traditional Jus ad Bellum provisions of Just War Theory hold that conflict is justified when
undertaken by sovereign authority acting in a just cause with right intent. However, some
recent thinkers add additional prudential criteria based on the likelihood of success and the
calculus of risks, benefits, rights, and wrongs while others hold that wars are only justified in
situations of last resort.26,27 While it may seem that Jus ad Bellum mainly applies to political
leaders, the criteria have at least two substantive implications for scientists. First, under the
traditional Jus ad Bello criteria, military research can be justified based on its potential to
enhance states’ ability to protect oppressed peoples and advance global security.27 Second,
the Jus ad Bellum concept of sovereignty has sometimes led individual scientists to wrongly
assume they cannot be held morally (or even legally) responsible for their personal violation
of Just War criteria. Instead, the sovereign authority is believed to bear ultimate responsibility
for all war-related decisions. This is particularly true for those chemists engaged in war
related work during the first and second world wars for whom the moral and legal inadequacy
of the “Nuremberg defense” was not as breathtakingly obvious as it is to us. Finally, the
willingness of scientists and other citizens to engage in military research that seems to violate
commonly accepted ethical or legal standards is often conditioned on the degree to which a
nation meets the Jus ad Bellum criteria. This is one reason why America’s relatively
discriminate use of napalm in Vietnam became the focus of campus protests while the
deliberate use of napalm incendiaries to firebomb the residential areas of Axis cities during
the later stages of the Second World War enjoyed a large measure of popular approval.
The Jus in Bello criteria used to determine whether a war is fought well are proportionality
and discrimination. The principle of proportionality holds that one’s conduct in war should not
create greater evils than would be caused by the injustice the war is designed to avert while
the principle of discrimination holds that reasonable care should be taken to avoid harming
noncombatants. These provisions in effect preserve the notions of justice and social order
which are necessary for concluding a just and lasting peace.25 Nevertheless they are not
merely applicable at the level of political leaders. It has long been recognized that military
commanders can be held responsible for violating Jus in Bello criteria, especially when these
are codified by treaties or in generally accepted Laws of War. The moral status of scientists
engaged in weapons research is less clear but has been a subject for debate. For example,
some scientists’ horror at the first use of chemical weapons in World War I was due partly to
the feeling that they were disproportionately cruel. Others felt that the involvement of
scientists, who were supposed to contribute to human knowledge and progress, in the
6
carnage of trench warfare violated the principle of proportionality since their degradation of
science could not be outweighed by any battlefield advantages that resulted from their
work.28 Since the development of the atom bomb, a few religious and secular thinkers have
attempted to argue that chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons research is inherently
wrong because the harms caused by weapons of mass destruction (particularly nuclear
weapons) is greater than any which could be avoided by their use.29
Finally, it should be recognized that the practical application of the Jus ad Bellum and Jus in
Bello criteria involve a host of meta-judgments – e.g. about who is a noncombatant and what
constitutes just cause, right intent, proportional response, and military necessity. This is
reflected in past debates about the legitimacy of civilian bombing in the Second World War
and more current debates over the application of the Jus in Bello criteria in guerrilla warfare
situations like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.25,30,31,32 For scientists engaged in military
research these difficulties are further exacerbated by the difficulty of determining whether a
given weapon or technology might be incompatible with Just War criteria.29 Regardless, the
Just War criteria can serve as a helpful starting point when deciding on the legitimacy of a
certain course of action or when evaluating the actions of others.
Realist perspectives have become increasingly important throughout much of the 20th
Century. Realists hold that states and actors shouldn’t worry about an objective code of right
or wrong but instead always do what is most likely to advance their own interests. The
Athenian perspective in the Melian Dialogue that “right, as the world goes, is only in question
between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they
must,”33 exemplifies the realist position. Although realism is opposed to the deontological
approach inherent in just war principles, Just War theory’s Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello
criteria are not necessarily incompatible with realism. Realists might still want to uphold since
they might promote practical aims like security, stabilize a favorable status quo, or prevent
the unnecessary escalation of hostilities.
At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 realist perspectives were in the
ascendant. The days when it was common for eminent scientists like Michael Faraday to
refuse to perform work on poisoned weapons on moral grounds were largely past.22
Although chemical weapons had been banned by the 1907 Hague IV convention, at the
outbreak of World War I number of prominent scientists came forward with suggestions about
how particular chemicals might be used in combat. However, it was the German physical
chemist Fritz Haber whose prodigious efforts paid off first.34 Indeed, Haber’s life and work
arguably exerted the greatest impact on the conduct of World War I - and perhaps Warfare in
the 20th Century more generally.
Fritz Haber and the Shaping of the First World War
“…Nevertheless, within a few weeks of the outbreak of war several proposals were made in different countries
to introduce unconventional weapons. These projects were vigorously promoted by individuals who badgered
and bullied the professionals until the new materials were tested. …Sir William Ramsay recommended acrolein
to the members of the Royal Society sub-committee. …The Germans (probably at Nernst’s suggestion) also
experimented with trench mortar bombs filled with phosgene or with a mixture of phosgene and chlorine.
Nevertheless if the stalemate of trench warfare was to be broken in 1915, a novel solution was required. It was
found by [Fritz] Haber, and to the extent that he originated and developed the concept of the gas cloud, [it is]
right to call him the father of chemical warfare.”
34
Ludwig “Lutz” Haber (son of Fritz Haber), The Poisionous Cloud, pgs. 22-27
7
“Although his motto advocated that one should work for humanity in times of peace and for one’s fatherland in
times of war, I see no evidence that Haber ever deliberately worked for anything other than his fatherland.”
35
Henry Harris, Regius Professor of Medicine, Oxford
Fritz Haber was at the pinnacle of German science when the First World War broke out in
1914. A few years earlier, he had developed a process for making ammonia from
atmospheric nitrogen – a discovery that would later win him the Nobel Prize. In the
meantime, the enterprising Haber licensed his process to BASF, whose chief chemist Carl
Bosch developed it into a large scale industrial process. Because the large quantities of
ammonia produced via this Haber-Bosch process could be used to make nitrate fertilizer,
Haber and Bosch had solved one of the great technological problems facing society in the
early 20th century – that of world food production. Europe faced the possibility of famine
because the supply of Chilean nitrates on which it depended for fertilizer was running out.36
Now Haber’s process would not only hold off starvation but allow for population growth. As
the German physicist Max von Laue would later note, Haber had literally made it possible to
“win bread from air.”37 Nearly one hundred years later Haber’s process still undergirds world
food production. Haber-Bosch plants operate in nearly every country on Earth and
collectively consume between 1 and 2% of the world’s energy.38
Haber’s great achievement would eventually earn him a place among the great figures of the
20th century. Of more immediate interest, however, it had provided Haber with excellent
industrial connections and led to his 1911 appointment as head of the newly inaugurated
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, which was located on
the grounds of the Kaiser’s farm at Dahlem near Berlin.39 When the First World War erupted
in August 1914, Haber was not only technologically well placed to contribute to Germany’s
war effort, but socially and geographically as well.
Haber’s unique position would be fateful for both Germany and the world. Although Haber
was not the rabid nationalist he is sometimes portrayed to be, he felt a deep sense of duty to
his country and was quite eager to help the German war effort.40 He was among the
intellectuals who signed the manifesto of the ninety-three defending Germany’s participation
in the war41 and, although 45 years old, had even volunteered for military service at the front.
However, Haber’s most important contribution to Germany’s war effort would be through his
skills as an organizer, industrial contacts, technical expertise, and perhaps above all his
industry and sheer doggedness.
Shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, Germany’s military and political leaders were unaware
of the crucial importance of the Haber process for the war effort. Nitrate was needed to make
explosives as well as fertilizer and Germany was going to need large quantities if it hoped to
keep its armies adequately supplied with munitions beyond the six months of the war.42
Since the route to Chilean saltpeter was now blocked by the allied navies, this meant that
Haber’s process would have to take up the slack. Haber was among the first to recognize
this and personally sought to address Germany’s need for nitrates as part of his work with a
select group of scientists and industrialists headed by the German economist Walter
Rathenau of the German War ministry. Within a few weeks of the start of hostilities, Haber
tried unsuccessfully to convince the German chemical giant BASF to develop an industrial
scale process for converting ammonia to nitrates. BASF’s leaders, worried over the practical
difficulties of getting a laboratory process to work on an industrial scale, initially rejected
Haber’s proposal. They changed their minds once gravity of the situation became clear. The
modern weapons used by Germany’s armies were consuming massive quantities of
ammunition even as Germany’s defeat at the First Battle of the Marne ended its hope of a
8
quick end to the war. After further spurring from Rathenau, Bosch and BASF decided to
produce nitrates after all.40 The delighted Haber, now head of a department that would deal
with the issue of limited natural raw materials,43 helped negotiate the details between BASF
and the German government. By the end of the war, Germany’s ammonia production alone
had increased tenfold – enabling the production of enough explosives for Germany’s armies
but tragically not enough to adequately feed its people as well.40
Haber also directly supervised a host of military research projects intended to advance
German war aims. Early in life Haber had hoped to become a Prussian officer. Now his
status as director of the Kaiser Wilhem Institute would help him realize that dream. His
institute sprawled into a vast military research complex with guards and barbed wire fences.
At its peak, Haber employed over 1,500 scientists and other technical specialists organized
into eight separate departments spread throughout various locations in Berlin.39,40 In effect,
Haber had become director of the world’s first national weapons lab. The most notorious of
Haber’s research projects – and perhaps the work closest to his heart – was his work on
poison gas. Sixty years later his son, the British economic historian Lutz Haber, wrote the
authoritative account of his and other World War I chemical weapons work.34 We largely
follow it in the following account.
In 1914 the world was ready for chemical warfare. The growth of modern chemical industries
in Britain, France, the United States, and above all Germany meant that it was possible to
produce large quantities of inorganic and petroleum derived chemicals that could be used in
warfare. Thus, although the 1907 Hague IV convention specifically outlawed the use of
poisoned projectiles, Britain, France, and Germany all attempted to develop chemical
weapons prior to the First World War and the French had even acquired stocks of tear gas.34
After hostilities commenced, these efforts accelerated as a number of eminent chemists,
including Haber, Walter Nernst, Carl Duisberg,44 and William Ramsay, were either consulted
or came forward with suggestions for employing chemicals in war. Some even began to
develop chemical munitions.
Helped by Duisberg and Nernst, the German army was ready to use artillery shells filled with
tear gas only a few months after the war started, in October 1914. Militarily, these weapons
were a dismal failure. The o–dianisidine chlorosulphonate they contained dispersed without
effect and the French did not even realize they had been attacked with chemical weapons. In
fact, the only significant impact of the attack was on Fritz Haber. He became convinced that
any effective chemical attack would need to involve the coordinated delivery of large
quantities of toxic gas and turned his intellect and energies to the development effective
delivery methods. His first suggestion involving coordinated batteries of trench mortars was
rejected by the German High command. Thus Haber began investigating the use of chlorine
gas delivered from cylinders, which German military leaders considered more practical due to
the ready availability of chlorine from the chlor-alkali industry.
Although German military commanders had a significant impact on the direction of Haber’s
war gas research efforts, it was Haber who convinced Germany’s military leaders to employ
large quantities of lethal gas in the first place. The German commander, General Eric von
Falkenhayn, and other officers tended to regard chemical weapons as unchivalrous.
Nevertheless, having invaded neutral Belgium, Germany’s High Command knew how to
choose expediency over chivalry. In the hope it might lead to a quick victory, Falkenhayn
approved Haber’s use of gas – but only after legal experts assured him that since the chlorine
came from cylinders, the attack would not violate the letter of the Hague convention, which
applied only to projectiles.45
9
Even after receiving approval from Falkenhayn, Haber had difficulty persuading the leaders of
individual German units to employ gas on their sector of the front. After four refusals, Haber
finally secured permission to attempt the first gas attack at Ypres in Belgium. Haber’s unit of
special gas troops moved into position, accompanied by “observers” that included the future
Nobel laureates Gustav Hertz, Otto Hahn, and James Frank.46 Together they took
meteorological readings, taught the troops how to handle gas, and supervised the
emplacement of over 6,000 chlorine cylinders along a seven kilometer section of the German
front near Ypres, Belgium. After a series of delays these cylinders were finally opened in the
late afternoon on April 22, 1915. Over 150 tons of chlorine advanced toward the opposing
French-Algerian troops in the form of a slow moving (~1 mph) yellow-greenish cloud that
towered 10-30 meters above the ground. Within minutes French troops began choking and
experiencing spasms. The remainder broke and ran. The Germans would soon capture over
2,000 French and a hundred guns as the French line collapsed. Nevertheless, their victory
was both modest and short lived. A number of problems prevented a decisive breakthrough the late afternoon start, problems moving through the gas-laden battlefield, and (since
German commanders had not anticipated the extent of Haber’s success) a lack of adequate
resources to support the breakthrough. The allies would soon retake the area.
The moral effects of the first gas attack were more substantial. The French claimed a
horrifying 7,000 casualties, including 350 dead, as the Allies portrayed the attack as yet
another example of German barbarity.43 In response, the German’s alternately argued that
Hague IV did not forbid cylinder-released gas and charged the French with having violated
the convention first by using tear gas the preceding year. There is some evidence that these
claims were not merely propaganda. The Germans wrongly suspected the French of
employing tear gas in the fall of 1914 and had reliable evidence the French were planning a
large-scale gas attack for the spring of 1915.34 Indeed, despite the British and French official
protests at the use of gas, they were only too happy to retaliate in kind. As the war dragged
on, both sides brought additional chemical warfare innovations to the battlefield – phosgene,
the Livens projector, and mustard gas – and devoted increasing energy to chemical warfare.
By the end of the war 10-50% of artillery shells (depending on the nation) were filled with
gas.47 However, as advances in chemical weapons were accompanied by the introduction of
effective gas masks and other countermeasures, chemical weapons largely served to
increase the horror of trench warfare without affecting its outcome.
All this was contrary to Haber’s intent. His friend and fellow gas soldier Otto Hahn recalled
that Haber justified the gas attack at Ypres by arguing that “in war, methods have to be used
that lead to its rapid conclusion.”43 Indeed, as a cultured member of the German
intelligentsia, Haber was sensitive to the moral issues associated with chemical warfare. It’s
not that he agonized much - Haber was almost certainly a relatively unscrupulous realist.
Instead, he had to confront the objections of more skeptical colleagues and subordinates. To
convince men like Franck, Hahn, and Hertz to participate in poison gas operations, for
example, Haber used a variety of arguments. These included the argument from necessity in
that Haber claimed Germany – surrounded on all sides - was facing its “hour of greatest need
and helplessness.”48 When Hahn’s objected that chemical weapons violated the Hague
convention, Haber used France’s supposed first use of poison bullets to justify Germany’s
use of the more poisonous chlorine in retaliation.49 Coupled with Haber’s argument that
poison gas would save lives by ending the war quickly, this put Hahn’s mind at rest.49 What
is more, Haber asserted that the morality of war was a matter for the state, not individual
scientists.48 In his view the political and military leaders who decided whether poison gas
10
could be used were morally responsible, not the chemists who developed them in the first
place.
Of course Haber was hardly an innocent pawn of the German High command. After the war
the Allies decided that the use of poison gas was a violation of the Hague provisions.
Haber’s name appeared on a list of potential war criminals50 and his receipt of the Nobel
Prize in 1918 evoked widespread protest in Britain and France. In a move that Haber’s own
son would consider an evasion of responsibility, Haber blamed Falkenhayn for informing him
that cylinder-released gas was not a violation of the Hague IV statutes.34
Perhaps more importantly, Haber’s chemical weapons work had earlier elicited disapproval
from other scientists, including his friend Albert Einstein and, more importantly, Haber’s first
wife Clara, herself one of the first female Ph.D. chemists in Germany. According to some
accounts Clara even called Haber’s involvement in gas warfare a “perversion of science” and
her suicide shortly after the attack is sometimes attributed to Haber’s war work.51 Other
German and Allied scientists disapproved of weapons related work. The British radiochemist
Frederick Soddy had even publicly refused to engage in poison gas research52 while after the
war the German pacifist-chemist Hermann Staudinger argued for an international ban on
poison gas.53 After the war the American Chemical Society54 and a few scientists advocated
for chemical weapons on the basis of its military utility or the potential of chemical weapons
research for advancing the chemical sciences more generally.55
Although Haber used the argument from necessity with his subordinates and privately
believed that all was fair in war,48 in public he defended the moral legitimacy of chemical
weapons using of the principle of proportionality. In his words, chemical weapons caused
“more fright and less destruction.”40 Haber himself noted that when he surveyed the
battlefield an hour after the first chemical attack he noticed relatively few gas casualties34
and, indeed, post-war gas casualty estimates seem to support Haber’s contention that gas
was more likely to wound or incapacitate than kill.56 Furthermore, a number of thinkers
agreed with Haber. The British military historian Basil Liddell Hart even concluded that gas
was the most humane weapon used in the war based on his study of the casualty statistics
and own experiences as a gas casualty35,57 while Henry Harris, Oxford’s Regius Professor of
Medicine, noted that most gassing victims were able to recover in a matter of days.33 Of
course the concept of proportionality could also be invoked to argue that chemical weapons
should be outlawed because they caused unnecessary suffering. Indeed, moral outrage over
the horror of chemical weapons was keenly felt in the interwar years, when many veterans
had vivid memories of the “guttering,” “choking,” “drowning”, and ‘gargling” of blood described
in poems like Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est.58 Against this Haber replied that the
suffering from chemical weapons was only different in kind from that inflicted by conventional
weapons, which can also lead to a slow and terrible death.40
Haber’s post-war apologetics was in all likelihood not merely rhetoric. There is no indication
Haber felt remorse over his chemical weapons work. In fact, he continued supporting
German chemical warfare programs in word and deed throughout the 1920s - in defiance of
the Versailles treaty provision which specifically banned Germany from possessing chemical
weapons. Many of Haber’s interwar efforts to advance chemical warfare were unsuccessful.
The post war German army did not maintain its chemical weapons capabilities and his call for
the creation of a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemical Warfare and Pest Control ultimately
did not pan out. However, Haber was able to assist in the successful construction of German
chemical weapons production facilities in the Soviet Union and Spain39 and continued to
direct chemical weapons research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
11
After the war, Haber also pursued a variety of other technological schemes to advance
German interests, the most notable of which was a failed effort to pay Germany’s war
reparations debt by extracting Gold from seawater.40,43 Other projects were more successful,
including Haber’s efforts to develop pesticides for the use against lice and vermin, work that
tied in well with his poison gas expertise. During the war he had even created a division in
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to investigate whether poison gas could be used to delouse
clothing and granaries. By the early 1920s, this division’s work paid off in the form of a highly
effective hydrogen cyanide-based process for pest control.59 Haber even helped create a
public company, Degesh, to help commercialize the results.15 Later, after Degesh was
acquired by a larger firm, Degassa, two of Haber’s enterprising assistants, Walter Kreedt and
Bruno Tesch, developed an easily transportable solid-stable form of cyanide by mixing liquid
HCN with solid adsorbents.15 Under its trade name, Zyklon B (cyclone B),60 the Nazis would
use it to murder Jews and others they considered undesirable in the gas chambers of
Auschwitz.
Bruno Tesch, Otto Ambros, and the “Devil’s Chemists” of the Holocaust
“…as so often in the history of the Holocast, cooperating with its perpetrators was not the royal road to riches for
Bruno Tesch…when the SS began [experimenting with the use of hydrogen cyanide] to kill people at Auschwitz,
Tesch’s commercial relationship with the organization promised to yield him rather small future profits. Yet,
preserving these ties seemed vital to the survival of his company for other reasons in 1941-1942, and
understanding them is essential to comprehending the decisions he made then, which contributed to the deaths
of hundreds of thousands of human beings and ultimately proved fatal to him as well.”
15
Peter Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich
In early 1942, Bruno Tesch was the director of Tesch and Stabenow (Testa) in Hamburg, a
supplier of Zyklon B that essentially functioned as a subsidiary of Degesh, which in turn
functioned as an independent subsidiary of Degassa. Due to agreements Testa had with its
larger parents, Tesch agreed to only sell or use Zyklon B in certain areas of the German
Reich. Since these included the German capitol, Berlin, Testa in effect became the main
wartime supplier of Zyklon B to the German government, military, and later the SS.15
Although the SS would never dominate Degussa’s sales, it became an increasingly important
customer as its system of concentration camps ballooned in size from 21,000 to over 700,000
inmates throughout the war.15 As early as 1940 Testa technicians were involved in delousing
work at Auschwitz and over the following two years Tesch personally conducted training
seminars for the SS personnel involved in fumigation work at the camp.15 By April 1941 the
SS had found Zyklon B so useful that they obtained authorization to use it on their own.
From then on, Tesch would function primarily as a Zyklon B supplier, although he would also
provide SS technicians and concentration camp inmates with occasional training in its proper
use.
There is good evidence that Tesch learned Zykon B was being used to gas Jews sometime in
June 1942 and anecdotal evidence that he provided technical advice as to how it could best
be used to kill humans in enclosed spaces.15 Not only did Tesch continue selling Zyklon B to
the SS after learning how it was being used, he showed “indifference to reports from
returning subordinates about the dreadful conditions of concentration camp inmates” and
“made sure that his closest aides squelched any suspicions [about Zyklon B’s use in
gassings] that arose in-house.”15 Because of his remarkable indifference, Tesch was tried by
the British after the war for his part in the murder of Allied nationals who were killed with
Zyklon B in Auschwitz and other camps. He was ultimately convicted and hanged.61
12
Despite the weight of the evidence against him, Tesch never publicly admitted he knew about
the use of Zyklon B for killing concentration camp inmates. Consequently, it is difficult to
determine for certain why he acted with such seeming callousness. His coworkers noted his
petty and often unkind personality, as well as his mistreatment of a half-Jewish secretary.
However, as Peter Hayes notes in his study of Degaussa’s complicity with the Third Reich, it
is much more likely that Tesch’s continued faithful support of the SS was due to the
precariousness of his position at the helm of Testa. For two years preceding his knowledge
of Zyklon B’s use as an agent of murder, Tesch had been embroiled in a fight to retain
managerial control of Testa, and had only succeeded through his good graces with the local
Nazi government.15 Under these conditions, Tesch may have been unwilling to risk his
position and income over whatever moral qualms he may have felt about the gassing of
Jews. Tesch was not alone in his moral complicity for the use of Zyklon B in the Holocaust.
Gerhard Peters, head of Degassa’s pest control department and Tesh’s rival, also apparently
knew about the killings and even agreed to supply Zyklon B without the warning odorant.15
A similar lack of compunction seems evident in the wartime behavior of some managers and
chemists at the German Chemical giant, I.G. Farben, twenty four of whom were brought to
trial at Nuremberg. Dubbed the “Devils’ Chemists” by the American prosecutor Josiah
DuBois,62 most stood accused of crimes of aggression related to the rearming of Germany.
Motivated more by economic self-interest than genuine nationalism, I.G. Farben, the largest
chemical concern in the world, worked closely with Hitler’s government to prepare Germany
for war through the development of synthetic fuels, artificial rubber, and other substances that
obviated or reduced its need to import materials from abroad.62,63 The most serious charges,
however, related to Farben’s role in slavery and mass murder.
In late 1940, Otto Ambros, a former student of Fritz Haber’s friend and colleague Richard
Wilstaetter, was I.G. Farben’s expert in the manufacture of synthetic rubber.63 Under his
tutelage and with the support and subsidy of the German government, Farben had developed
its synthetic rubber production capabilities in the years leading up to war.64 Now, as
Germany prepared to attack the Soviets, Ambros had been asked to expand Farben’s
synthetic rubber production capacity further by adding additional plants.64 Farben’s process
for producing Buna rubber65 required significant quantities of coal, running water, and
inexpensive labor and Ambros scoured the Reich for suitable sites with good rail access. He
finally found one in Silesia, a recently conquered region of southwestern Poland. It wasn’t
perfect - the housing available for Farben’s engineers and technicians was of poor quality but his old school friend, the SS leader Heinrich Himmler, promised him access to a nearby
source of cheap labor.63,64,66 The partnership would ultimately lead to an expansion of both
men’s operations. Farben’s Buna rubber plant would be at Auschwitz.
Although Farben would ultimately sink 900 million Reich marks into the Auschwitz Buna
project, things did not go exactly as planned. Between labor and equipment shortages the
Buna rubber project rapidly fell behind schedule. In response, Farben’s management
spurred the SS to increase the laborers’ productivity, a measure that added to the inmates’
suffering. After the war one of the few survivors, Rudolf Vrba, described a typical scene:
“…Wild-eyed kapos drove their bloodstained path through rucks of prisoners, while SS men shot
from the hip, like television cowboys who had strayed into a grotesque, endless horror film, and
adding a ghastly note of incongruity to the bedlam were groups of quiet men in impeccable civilian
clothes, picking their way through corpses they did not want to see, measuring timbers with bright
yellow folding rules, making neat little notes in black leather books, oblivious to the blood bath.
They never spoke to the workers, these men in the quiet grey suits. They never spoke to the
kapos, the gangsters. Only occasionally they murmured a few words to a senior SS [non-
13
commissioned officer], words that sparked off another explosion. The SS man would kick
viciously to the kapo and roar, “Get those men moving you lazy oaf. Don’t you know the wall’s to
be finished by eleven o’clock?” The kapo would scramble to his feet, pound into the prisoners,
lashing them on, faster and faster.”67
While it is likely that few, if any, of the men in the grey suits described by Vrba were Farben
chemists, Farben’s management heard about the maltreatment of prisoners through weekly
reports from their men on the spot, Walter Dürrefeld and Max Faust, although a number of
Farben’s directors also visited the plant on one or more occasions.64 More concerned with
the slow pace of the project, they were apparently unmoved. Their next attempt to intervene
occurred when Ambros suggested that productivity could be improved by eliminating the time
consuming and exhausting four mile trek between the Buna works and main Auschwitz camp.
The solution hit upon by Ambros and other Farben managers was for Farben to construct and
run its own camp at the Buna works. The camp, which became known as I.G. Auschwitz or
Auschwitz-Monowitz, was completed in 1942 and featured “watchtowers, armed guards,
electric fences, sirens, gallows, punishment cells, mortuary, and searchlights” just like every
other camp.64 The inmates who worked there were driven at what was literally a murderous
pace. For the chemist-managers of Farben68 people could be reduced to the status of a
commodity:
“… I.G. Auschwitz has assured I.G. a unique place in business history. By adopting the theory
and practice of Nazi morality, it was able to part from the conventional economics of slavery in
which slaves are traditionally treated as capital equipment and depreciated over a normal life
span. Instead, I.G. reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which
the mineral of life was systematically extracted. When no usable energy remained, the living
dross was shipped to the gas chambers and crematoria.… Even the moans of the doomed
became a work incentive, exhorting the inmates to greater effort.”63
In the postwar I.G. Farben trial at Nuremburg, Farben’s managers variously disclaimed any
knowledge of or responsibility for the death of inmates in the Buna works at I.G. Auschwitz.
Ambros in particular repeatedly claimed he was just a “plain chemist.” Nevertheless, it is
clear that they knew what was going on and – whether they had any moral qualms or not –
decided to advance the interests of their firm at the expense of the most basic standards of
human decency and welfare. Indeed, Farben’s actions not only illustrate the dangers of a
compartmentalized morality which dutifully fulfils professional obligations at the expense of
the greater good, they provide a striking example of the importance of individual moral
responsibility in a time of politically and socially-accepted evil. In other contexts Ambros and
other Farben leaders were regarded as good men - in some cases even pillars of their
communities. DuBois notes that the French prisoners of war who worked in a dye plant
Ambros managed even affectionately referred to him as “Director Bon” in recognition of the
humane treatment they received.62 Indeed, the reason for the Farben’s slide into such
severe moral indifference isn’t easy to understand. Perhaps the oppression and corruption of
the Third Reich contributed to its directors’ unscrupulous focus on narrow-minded business
goals. The historian of Soviet science, Loren Graham, noted that scientists adopted similar
tactics when confronted with similar conditions in Soviet Russia.
“…researchers sought to escape the politically and morally corrupt atmosphere around them by
submerging themselves in their work…Science was the one activity that made sense in their lives,
the one area where they could serve truth without automatically coming into conflict with the
system.”69
Of course it is difficult to tell whether this was the case for Farben’s leader’s, some of whom
were quite adept at gaming the Nazi system.63,64
Regardless of whether Farbens’
indifference to moral concerns was the result of a reckless indifference or narrow self14
interest, one lesson the can be drawn from its use of slave labor at Auschwitz is that chemists
would do well to beware of finding solace in the narrow pursuit of “technically-sweet” goals.70
Indeed, as Farben’s directors ignored the moral implications of their involvement in the
Holocaust, across the Atlantic another morally unaware chemist was engaged in the
development of one of the most powerful and dreadful weapons of the 20th Century.
Louis Fieser, Napalm, and the Firebombing of Cities in the Second World War
“During the summer of 1941…I had been instructed to terminate work on explosives and to work instead on
poison gases, vesicants. This reallocation did not please me. Use of poison gases seemed to me inhumane.”
71
Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method
“We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in
72
vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
General Curtis Le May as quoted in Grayling 2006
Today, chemists largely remember Louis Fieser as the author, with his wife Mary, of the
Fiesier and Fieser series on Reagents for Organic Synthesis, although older chemists might
also remember him as the author of many popular Organic Chemistry textbooks.73 It might
surprise them to know that Fieser began writing these textbooks during lull periods in his
work for the American military during the Second World War.71 Fieser undertook a variety of
war-related research projects, which he later recounted in his The Scientific Method: A
Personal Account of Unusual Projects in War and Peace.71 These included the synthesis of
cortisone and the antimalarial drug quinine - projects that made good use of his expertise as
a synthetic organic chemist. However, the bulk of Fieser’s efforts were devoted to the
development of incendiary devices for use in espionage, pilot survival kits, and a variety of
munitions ranging from antitank grenades to 1,000-lb aerial bombs. For a time Fieser even
attempted to use incendiary-bearing bats as a weapon.74 Most of these projects used a
sticky gelatinous material Fieser’s group had developed – a material known as napalm.
In July 1940, after Germany had overrun Poland, France, Denmark, Norway, and the Low
Countries, American military, political, and scientific leaders began to recognize that America
would need to prepare for war against a determined and capable foe. As part of their efforts,
a National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) was created in July under the
chairmanship of Vannevar Bush.71 By October Fieser was assigned to work on TNT
explosives71 on behalf of its chemical division.75 His indendiary research came out of a
NDRC conference on explosives in early 1941. After learning about a series of industrial
explosions involving divinylacetylene he volunteered to test oxidized divinylacetylene’s
usefulness as an explosive or incendiary.71 According to his memoirs, Fieser mainly sought
to pursue the divinylacetylene project because he considered his postdoctoral researcher,
E.B. Hershberg, “ideally qualified” for the task.”71 Hershberg was a chemist with an unusually
practical bent. According to Fieser, he was skilled in engineering, mechanical drawing,
carpentry, machining, glassblowing, photography, and the construction of mechanical
devices. Moreover, Hershberg was a reserve officer in the Army’s Chemical Warfare service
and had extensive experience with “military explosives, fuses, poison gases, smoke pots, and
grenades.”71
Fieser and Hershberg soon learned that the sticky gels of peroxidized divinylacetylene they
prepared were not terribly shock sensitive explosives. However, on burning their failures at
the end of the day they noticed that the gels “burned with an impressive sputter and sparkle”
and did “not become fluid but [retained] its viscous, sticky, consistency” – an observation
which soon gave them the idea that divinylacetylene gels might be useful for producing “a
bomb that would scatter large burning globs of sticky gel.”71 With the help of the British Air
15
ministry, they began work on incendiary bombs. Unfortunately, their early success was
followed by a potential setback. In the summer of 1941, the NDRC asked Fieser to focus of
his work on potential vesicants (tear gases) instead of explosives. Fieser initially agreed.
However, after his research on vesicants stalled due to safety considerations, Fieser
obtained permission to switch from vesicants to incendiary research.
Newly flush with
NDRC money, Fieser formed a six-man team of graduate students and postdoctoral
researchers to investigate potential new incendiaries. They tried a variety of substances
include a rubber-benzene gel initially looked at by the British and rubber-gasoline gels, both
of which proved highly effective. By November, Fieser and his team had even developed
effective bombs which they tested at Harvard’s stadium and demonstrated to military officials
at Edgewood arsenal in Maryland. For the time being, however, Fieser’s rubber-benzene
bombs were not to be. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and soon
were in control of the Malaysian rubber plantations. Fieser and his team would have to use
more readily available alternatives.
The search for alternatives to natural rubber eventually led Fieser and his team to look at
metal salts of fatty acids that were used to thicken lubricating oil into greases. Fieser soon
discovered that the NDRC incendiary group at Arthur D. Little Corporation found Aluminum
Napthenate produced suitable gels, but only after a heating step that could not be used as
part of a field-filling process. To rectify this problem Fieser suggested that his group
investigate the use of multi-component soap gels containing more than one fatty acid
component. Eventually they found that mixtures of Aluminum napthenate and “Aluminum
palmitate” mixtures gave sticky gels when mixted with gasoline at low temperatures. Fieser
named the substance napalm after the napthenate and palmitate components, although it
would soon be discovered that the properties of the gels could be improved by adding
chemically unsaturated acids like oleic and linolenic acid and that the “palmitate” he obtained
from Metsap Corporation really consisted primarily of the shorter chain Lauric acid.
Petroleum-based incendiaries like napalm produce the most heat per unit weight of all
incendiaries,76 and both Fieser and the military discovered the effectiveness of napalm
bombs, particularly after Hershberg developed a white phosphorous burster that produced an
even scatter of “large, burning, globs” over a 50 yard radius.71 In experiments at various
military proving grounds napalm won out over the industrial competition, having proven itself
extremely effective against wooden building and stable during rough transport. As Fieser
would later note, “Japan’s early acquisition of the major supplies of raw rubber turned out to
have been a blessing to the allied nations.”71 Napalm was going to war.
During the Second World War, the allies used napalm effectively in a variety of munitions.
These included the 100-lb M-47 bombs Fieser developed as well as 500-lb “goop” bombs,
napalm-filled aircraft belly tanks, and flamethrowers where it helped to burn the Japanese out
of caves and other emplacements during the Allies island hopping campaign.71 The most
fateful use of napalm however was in the M-69 cluster bomb, which consisted of an “aimable
cluster” of 38 bomblets each of which was filled with several pounds of napalm.72,77 This
bomb was designed to burst over the target where each of the bomblets, held vertical by a
tail streamer, were designed to ignite after they had penetrated the top floor of German and
Japanese houses. There a flaming stream of napalm up to 100 meters in length would be
ejected from the bomb, rapidly turning the structure into a raging inferno. Indeed, the M-47
and M-69 incendiary bombs were used with great effect in the bombing of German and later
Japanese cities, particularly when used with a mixture of high explosives that would destroy
water mains, fire breaks, and firefighters and rescue crews that tried to combat the blaze. By
the end of the Second World War, Fieser’s napalm mixture had been used to devastate
16
dozens of German and Japanese cities. Its effects were particularly devastating in the
firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden and Tokyo in 1945, where it helped fuel
massive firestorms each of which produced tens of thousands of civilian casualties.7,72
Despite the civilian deaths caused by British and American area bombing of German and
Japanese cities, respectively, most Americans were in favor of the bombing campaigns,
largely due to feelings that these deaths were justified by the necessity of defeating the
immoral Nazi regime and the seemingly barbarous Japanese.78 Indeed, Fieser’s reports of
his napalm work show no indication that he experienced moral qualms at the time.71,79 Fieser
only publicly engaged the moral questions associated with napalm much later, during the
anti-war protests of the 1960s. In 1966, after reading a report of napalm being used against
civilians, Fieser wrote to his friend the biochemist J.B Neilands explaining that he and his
coworkers on the napalm project “certainly had no thought about the use of napalm against
non-military personnel.”80 Relatively late in the Vietnam War, he even wrote to President
Nixon encouraging him to “promote an international agreement to outlaw further use of
naplam or naplam-type munitions.”81
Despite his apparent concern for the principle of discrimination, it seems hard to believe that
Fieser had not considered the possibility that napalm might be used against civilians.
Fieser’s bat bombs were designed to incinerate Japanese houses and at least some of the
tests on napalm were conducted on the model German and Japanese Villages at Dugway
proving ground in Utah.82 In order to determine the ideal conditions for burning out Axis
cities, these villages were made up of model German and Japanese homes designed to
closely replicate the construction and furnishing of German and Japanese “working-class
housing.”83 Perhaps Fieser, who was aware of these tests, didn’t know of their true character
or else thought that German and Japanese civilians would be in bomb shelters as his
incendiaries burned their homes to the ground. However, on the face of it his claim that he
thought napalm would only be used against military targets seems difficult to believe.
Regardless of what he truly believed about napalm’s intended use, Fieser remained adamant
that he should not be held responsible for how napalm was used:
“I discovered that a jelled fuel burns more efficiently than a free fuel," he says. "I don't think I have
to be ashamed of having made that discovery. And I would be the first to suggest that
antipersonnel use be outlawed. But how in the world do you make the distinction? Why should the
investigator be called on to rule on the uses?"81
While Fieser may be right in claiming that investigators have limited responsibility for the way
in which their inventions are employed, his argument bears further scrutiny. Taken at face
value, Fieser wasn’t merely causally responsible but morally as well, particularly since he had
ample opportunities to read reports of Allied bombing campaigns and, more importantly,
observe his bombs being tested against civilian structures.71 This is not to say, however, that
Fieser knew that incendiaries would be used to burn the residential areas of Axis cities from
the start. When Fieser began work on napalm incendiaries in 1940 America had entered the
war and the Allied firebombing of Axis cities had not yet begun and throughout much of the
war the U.S. publicly advocated the precision bombing of military and war-related industrial
targets.7 Moreover, Fieser’s memoirs, written before the Vietnam-era napalm protests began,
bear out his claim that his group was largely concerned with finding improved incendiaries for
the destruction of enemy structures.
In fact, despite the shortcomings of Fieser’s moral reasoning, there is no indication that he
was unscrupulous. He had an “unabashed tendency for self-promotion”73 that sometimes led
to his being considered intolerably arrogant,74 although even a cursory read of his war
17
research memoirs show that he was very willing to give ample credit to his colleagues and
students when it was due.71 In the chemical community Fieser and his wife were well known
for their deep commitment to chemical education and efforts to advance organic chemistry
through their textbooks and series on Organic reagents. Before beginning work on
incendiaries he even expressed qualms about work on war gases, although these probably
represented his recoil at a social taboo rather than a considered judgment. In fact, we
suspect that Fieser was simply not a deep moral thinker and that – uncomfortably like his
counterparts in Germany - he simply went along with the prevailing social norms. Throughout
the period of Fieser’s involvement with the NDRC Americans overwhelmingly favored the
bombing of Axis cities.78
Whatever the merits or demerits of Fieser’s moral reasoning, it would not be his lot to bear
the burden of anti-napalm sentiments. That burden would fall on Dow Chemical, which
produced an improved version of napalm made from polystyrene, benzene, and gasoline for
use by the U.S. military in Vietnam.
Dow Chemical’s Moral Stand in Producing Napalm for use in the Vietnam War
“Hell comes in the form of large egg-shaped containers, dropping from the first plane, followed by other eggs
from the second and third plane. Immense sheets of flames, extending over hundreds of meters, it seems,
strike terror into the hearts of my soldiers. This is napalm, the fire which falls from the skies. … There is no way
of holding out under this torrent of fire which flows in all directions and burns everything in its passage. On all
sides flames now surround us. In addition, French artillery and mortars now have our range and transform into
a fiery tomb what had been ten minutes ago, a quiet part of the forest.”
84
85
Viet Minh officer’s diary, from Fall 1961 as quoted in SIPRI 1975
“…Our “Skyraider” was loaded with 750-pound napalm bombs and 300 pound napalm bombs, plus our four 20millimeter cannon. Our wing plane carried 7,500 pounds of high explosive antipersonnel bombs, plus our four
cannon…As we flew over the village it looked very much as any normal village would look … It was a peaceful
scene. The napalm was supposed to force the people – fearing the heat and burning – out into the open. Then
the second plane was to move in with heavy fragmentation bombs to hit whatever – or whomever – had rushed
86
30
out into the open ...”
Air Raid on a Fishing Village, from Fall 1965 as quoted in Petrowski1969
The quotes above illustrate the Janus-faced nature of napalm. Militarily, it was highly useful.
It could consume a horde of enemy infantry in a flaming inferno, suck the air out of a bunker,
or transform a previously safe jungle into horror of death and destruction. During the island
hopping campaigns of the Second World War, marines using napalm-equipped
flamethrowers and tanks found it incredibly effective at burning Japanese soldiers out of
pillboxes and tunnels.87 Later, American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam learned to rely on
napalm to disrupt attacks by enemy troops. However, when it didn’t kill napalm often stuck to
the skin, melting flesh and causing horrible burns and disfigurement. Furthermore, it could be
difficult to avoid harming noncombatants when napalm was dropped from planes. Thus,
napalm could provoke a sense of moral outrage not unlike that evoked by poison gas. In the
closing stages of World War II when the allied leaders were discussing how best to end the
war against Japan, the American chief of staff George Marshall suggested that the allies
should try poison gas – at least it was not as terrible as napalm-based incendiary weapons,
he argued.7
If napalm caused some degree of unease in the midst of the most paradigmatic of just
causes - the American and British war effort of the Second World War – things would only get
worse when it was later employed in Korea and Vietnam. In these conflicts the American war
aims were less clear and the battle zones more civilian-rich. There were no great widespread
protests during the Korean conflict, although English churchmen protested the United
18
Nations’ use of napalm and Korean Christians asked President Eisenhower to reconsider its
use for aerial bombardment.88 Despite their reservations, British and Korean public largely
felt the U.N. effort in Korea to be a worthwhile effort in the fight against communist
aggression. Furthermore, the use of napalm was largely discriminate as it was still relatively
easy to tell friend from foe. This would change in the jungles and villages of Vietnam where
the Northern strategy of guerrilla warfare made it difficult to tell friend from foe. In response,
American commanders sometimes adopted or tolerated morally odious policies and rule of
engagement. Thus, while napalm was primarily employed in close support of US troops
against enemy soldiers (a role in which it was invaluable), aerial attacks against villages
occasionally occurred.85,86 Although there is some dispute over the geographic distribution
and extent of civilian casualties, graphic and sometimes exaggerated89 accounts describing
the U.S. use of napalm against civilians were widely reported in the Western press.85 When
coupled with many American’s unease over America’s Vietnam War aims, these accounts
helped provoke a storm of protest over America’s use of napalm and against companies
which since 1966 supplied the napalm America used in Vietnam. These included the United
Aircraft Corporation, Witco Chemical, and Dow Chemical.90 Of these three, only Dow would
attempt to defend the morality of supplying napalm to the U.S. forces fighting in Vietnam.
The protests against Dow took the form of a nationwide boycott of Saran Wrap,91 occasional
vandalism, picketing of offices and industrial facilities, and over two hundred campus
protests.91 Invariably, protesters featuring slogans like “Napalm Burns Babies, Dow Makes
Money” and “Nazi Ovens in 44, Napalm in 66” elicited the most publicity.90,92 At the start of
the protests the Midland Michigan-based Dow Chemical was primarily known as the producer
of Saran Wrap and other consumer products, although only 38 percent of Americans had
even heard of Dow.90 Dow’s napalm production facilities were only a tiny part of its operation,
accounting for only 0.25% of its annual revenue and employing only ten employees.90 Ned.
Brandt, who served as Dow’s public relations director at the time, later reported that not one
member of Dow’s governing troika even knew of Dow’s napalm operations when the protests
started.90
A few months after the anti-napalm protests began, Dow’s chairman, Carl Gerstacker, drew
up a position statement which summarized the argument Dow would employ in the following
years:
“…Our position on napalm is that we are a supplier of goods to the defense department and
not a policy maker. We do not and should not try to decide military strategy or policy.
Simple good citizenship requires that we supply our government and our military with those
goods which they feel they need whenever we have the technology and capability and have been
chosen by the government as a supplier.
We will do our best, as we always have, to try to produce what our defense department and
our soldiers need in any war situation. Purely aside from our duty to do this, we will feel deeply
gratified if what we are able to provide helps to protect our fighting men or to speed the day when
90,92,93
fighting will end.”
Taken at face value, it seemed that Dow was simply deflecting moral responsibility for the
use of napalm to the U.S. government. Thus, Dow’s President Ted Doan, later clarified that
Dow was not simply adopting the “Nuremberg defense:”
“…All of the debate in the world about how we got [into the war in Vietnam] or how we get out
is proper and right in its place, but it doesn’t change the fact that we are there nor the fact that our
men are there and need weapons to defend themselves.
…We reject the validity of comparing our present form of government with Hitler’s Germany.
In our mind our government is still representative of and responsive to the will of the people.
19
Further, we as a company have made a moral judgment on the long-range goals of our
government and we support these. We may not agree as individuals with every decision of every
military or government leader but we regard these leaders as men trying honestly and relentlessly
to find the best possible solution to very, very complex international problems. As long as we so
regard them, we would find it impossible not to support them. This is not saying as the critics
imply that we will follow blindly and without fail no matter where our government leads. ..Should
despotic leaders attempt to lead our nation away from its historic national purposes, we would
cease to support the government.
Our critics ask if we are willing to stand judgment for our choice to support our government if
history should prove us wrong. Our answer is yes.”90,92,94
Thus, Dow’s public stance was that (a) the war in Vietnam was a just cause undertaken by a
sovereign authority with right intent and thus (b) Dow had a duty to provide the U.S. military
with the goods it needed to achieve its war aims and (c) the means for soldiers to defend
themselves against the enemy.
Privately, however, Gerstacker, Doan, and other Dow leaders were deeply concerned that
the napalm they produced was being used indiscriminately against civilians. They spent over
two days of the March 1967 board of directors meeting discussing the “moral and ethical
considerations involved” in Dow’s supplying napalm and deliberating over whether to
continue to supply napalm to the government. A number of board members consulted with
clergy. Gerstacker, who was privately a very devout Presbyterian,93 consulted his pastor
during these deliberations. Ultimately, they decided to continue supplying napalm to the
government, having received assurances that the Government was taking reasonable
precaution to avoid hurting civilians and apparently convinced that the rightness of the
American cause justified any civilian casualties that inadvertently occurred.95
The strength of Dow’s argument from the doctrine of double effect, which holds that civilian
deaths are excusable when they occur in the course of attempts to destroy a sufficiently
important military objective, depended to some extent on the U.S. military’s discriminate use
of napalm. Dow’s leaders largely believed this was the case as there was little indication that
civilians were being directly targeted in napalm attacks from 1967 onward. They made much
of the reports of American doctors who found relatively few cases of “war-related burn
injuries” in Vietnamese hospitals.85 Later in 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara
assured Ted Doan that napalm was “a military necessity” that was used with precautions “as
painstaking as we can make them without hamstringing our military operations”96 and Doan
would later claim in a television interview that “napalm is a good discriminate, strategic
weapon.”95 Later evaluation would largely bear this out. The use of napalm against civilians
was inconsistent with the degree to with the American bombing campaign in North Vietnam
carefully distinguished between military and civilian targets. The capitol of Hanoi was largely
spared, as was the irrigation system on which so much of the North’s agriculture depended,
factors which Roman Catholic ethicist Paul Ramsey to conclude that these bombings “abided
by the [just war] principle of discrimination.”97 Nevertheless, Dow President Ted Doan
remained open to the possibility that napalm was being used indiscriminately. In April 1969,
while meeting with a group of protesters that included Richard Fernandez of Clergy and Laity
Concerned About Vietnam, Doan indicated that “if we could prove to him that napalm was
being used, intentionally or not, primarily on a civilian population, he would do all he could to
get the company out of the contract.”98
Doan’s comments did not satisfy Fernandez, however, who silently wondered what type of
evidence might convince Doan that napalm was being used primarily against civilians.93 In
fact, Fernandez’s unease reveal’s an unavoidable weakness in Dow’s position. As napalm’s
20
supplier, Dow had to rely on the assurances of government officials and the testimony of
eyewitnesses on the ground to back up its claim that napalm was being used discriminately.
As Michael Walzer pointed out in his Just and Unjust Wars, the American rules of
engagement in Vietnam in many cases effectively served to minimize US military casualties
and merely had “the appearance of attending to the combatant/noncombatant distinction.”31
Furthermore, while it is far from clear that Dow would have supported the more indiscriminate
use of napalm under actual battlefield conditions, these more indiscriminate uses fit in well
with its emphasis on supporting American troops on the ground.
Despite the aforementioned weaknesses in Dow’s moral analysis, not to mention its public
relations campaign,99 it should at least be noted that Dow was the only individual or
organization of those we considered which genuinely tried to address the potential moral
implications of its activities. Its failure to consider that napalm was being used in ways that it
did not intend does not obviate the nobility of its intentions of seeking to support what it saw
as a just cause or the rightness of its attempts to take due care to prevent unnecessary harm
to civilians. Indeed, Dow was willing to buck public opinion in the pursuit of what it thought
was right. Thus Dow’s basic stance may be worthy of emulation even though the defects in
its analysis point to the need for chemists and chemical corporations to apply a healthy dose
of logical rigor and skepticism to the analysis of moral issues.
Concluding Reflections
The case studies we’ve selected fall readily into two categories. Fritz Haber and Louis Fieser
represent individual academic scientists involved in war work. Haber, though apparently
more cultured, was also much more unscrupulous and aggressive in pushing war-related
projects. He also differed from Fieser in two other significant ways. First, Haber was one of
the prime movers in the battlefield use of the weapons he developed. Second, Haber directly
engaged the moral implications of his work from the start by using rhetoric and a variety of
Just War arguments to convince morally sensitive subordinates to participate in poison gas
research or confronting the objections of his wife at home. In contrast, Loius Fieser seems to
exemplify the narrow technical specialist who gives little consideration to the potential
implications of his work. Indeed, Fieser seems to have been an otherwise inoffensive and
enjoyable person who went along with his prevailing culture and could have benefited from
closer consideration of the moral implications of his work.
The German “Devil’s chemists” and the leaders of Dow represent chemical firms engaged in
supplying goods in support of their nations war aims who became aware that their efforts
might be contributing to the harm of civilians. The Zyklon B supplier Bruno Tesch and his
assistants continued in knowing complicity, motivated by self-interest and likely fear. In
continuing their shipments, they betrayed a terrible but still somewhat understandable level of
moral indifference. In contrast, the chemist-managers in charge of I.G. Farben’s Buna
Rubber factory at Auschwitz represented the depths of depravity to which an overemphasis
on narrow technical specialization and avoidance of moral issues can lead. There is no
evidence they deliberately sought to advance Hitler’s Final Solution. Instead, the I.G. Farben
managers merely intensified and partly funded the process as they continued to search for
ever more efficient ways to squeeze the maximum amount of work from slave laborers before
their consumption in the crematoria at Birkenau. In Farben, one sees human beings reduced
to the status of reagents, something to be consumed so that a desired product can be made
– an act of breathtaking moral horror that represents perhaps the ultimate indictment of the
“just a chemist” defense. In contrast, America’s Dow Chemical directly confronted the moral
21
implications of their role as a supplier of the napalm used in Vietnam. While Dow’s stance
arguably rested on questionable assumptions and publicly provoked more protest than
agreement, its leaders showed a salutary willingness to confront ethical issues and take
unpopular stands in support of what they felt was right. As such, they demonstrated that it is
both possible and fruitful for chemists to engage in moral reasoning when confronted with
issues of justice and injustice related to the chemical enterprise.
References
We wish to thank Dr. Marianne Robbins for helpful conversations and comments on this
paper.
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23
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Fieser at least knew of these tests but it isn't clear that he directly participated.
83
M. Davis, "Berlin's Skeleton in Utah's Closet," Grand Street no. 69 (1999), 92-100; M. Davis, "Assault on
"German Village"," Der Spiegel no. 41 (1999).
84
B. B. Fall. Street without joy; Indochina at war, 1946-54. (Harrisburg, Pa.,, Stackpole Co., 1961).
85
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.; M. Lumsden. Incendiary weapons, A SIPRI monograph.
(Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1975).
86
B. Fall, "This Isn't Munich, It's Spain." Ramparts 23-24.
87
J. W. Mountcastle. Flame on! : U.S. incendiary weapons, 1918-1945. (Shippensburg, PA, White Mane, 1999).
88
"Korean Christians are Troubled in Spirit," The Christian Century no. 69 (1952), 1515.
89
The most notable examples were found in Ramparts magazine although mainstream newspapers also
provided some coverage. Most notably, Ramparts ran a highly graphic article on "The Children of Vietnam" in
its January 1967 issue after it had earlier claimed that 3-400,000 civilians were likely killed by US bombs. See
W. F. Pepper, "The Children of Vietnam." Ramparts Magazine January 1967 45-68; J. F. Colaianni, "Napalm: A
Small Town Diary." Ramparts Magazine August 1966 46-50.
90
E. N. Brandt. Growth company : Dow Chemical's first century. (East Lansing, Michigan State University Press,
1997).
91
T. Wells. The war within : America's battle over Vietnam 1st Owl Book ed. (New York, Henry Holt, 1996).
92
D. Whitehead. The Dow story; the history of the Dow Chemical Company 1st ed. (New York,, McGraw-Hill,
1968).
93
E. N. Brandt; C. A. Gerstacker. Chairman of the board : a biography of Carl A. Gerstacker. (East Lansing,
Michigan State University Press, 2003).
94
H. H. Doan, "Why Does Dow Chemical Make Napalm?" Wall Street Journal December 8, 1967
95
S. Friedman. 1973. ""This Napalm Business"." In In the Name of Profit, edited by Obst, D., 115-136. New York:
Doubleday and Company.
96
Quoted in Whitehead, 1968, pg. 268.
97
P. Ramsey. The just war : force and political responsibility. (Lanham, MD, University Press of America, 1983).
98
Richard Fernandez, quoted in Wells, 1996, pg. 295.
99
S. S. Huxman; D. B. Bruce, "Toward a Dynamic Generic Framework of Apologie: A Case Study of Dow
Chemical, Vietnam, and the Napalm Controversy," Communication Studies no. 65 (1995), 57-72.
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