The Chemists’ War | Hacker News Reader

The Chemists’ War

nytimes.com

70 pointselemeno29 comments

Great article - I’m fascinated by pollution for some reason.

I recently spent time living near Los Alamos, NM. The physicists and nuclear chemists surely outdid WW1 in their legacy of environmental devastation. Check out Acid Canyon, a popular recreation area in the middle of Los Alamos. If I recall, they opened this place to the public for recreation in 1962, then a few years later barrels containing plutonium waste surfaced after a heavy rain. Then they opened it again.

http://projects.wsj.com/waste-lands/site/4-acid-pueblo-canyo...

http://www.nuclearactive.org/docs/doublestandard.html

http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/los-alamos-...

I guess at some point they stopped dumping untreated liquid plutonium waste there. That was a good move. The wastewater facility for the entire Natl Lab for decades that processed all of the toxic chemical, metal and nuclear waste discharged the water untreated until the 60s. There are dozens of uninventoried dump sites and things like full closets in basements with uranium that nobody has looked at in a couple decades. Oh, and people who work there suggested to me that all the public info made available is falsified for one reason or another.

DP Rd and TA-21, site of first plutonium machining facility, and the wastewater ‘treatment’ (meaning untreated discharge) facility, is another interesting one. They’re currently environmentally remediating the area for homes.

We have Rocky Flats here in Denver. We have built giant neighborhoods in the shadow of that facility with a similar reckless history of nuclear and industrial waste related to nuclear weapons production.

Indeed, there are many such nuclear sites, particularly in the West.

The main dump for Los Alamos, TA-54, which has been in service 35-45 years, is 900 feet above the aquifer that serves Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and 2 miles from the Rio Grande. One of the dozens of disposal areas it contains includes a dump, MDA-C (it is it Area G?) that consists of 4 200 foot shafts, putting their large inventory of toxic and highly nuclear waste only 700 feet above NM’s drinking water table.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f23/RS1738_A...

Figure 8 shows at lower right the four negative pressure tents covering the shafts, which were visible from my backyard in White Rock.

Falsified ... into what? It's not clear to me what stance they held.

It wasn’t clear to me exactly what that meant, either. Reports made to environmental agencies may be falsified for national security, avoidance of public alarm, and cleanup-avoidance reasons. Many of the activities here are secret and classified, after all. My interpretation is that this would mean they have been altered to cover up alarming facts about pollution as well as to not inform rivals about weapons research activities.

The federal government has been battling the state about environmental cleanup for 40 years. For example, they wanted a permanent nuclear waste disposal site at Los Alamos - state of NM doesn’t agree.

The West Lake Landfill is another where a bunch of nuclear material was illegally dumped. A creek runs past it and the dump has had a subterranean fire burning for years in very close proximity to the estimated location of the nuclear waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lake_Landfill

While in college, one spring break 3 friends and I decided to cram into my small car and drive from Texas to the Grand Canyon. On the way we went through Los Alamos. At one point we were on or near the laboratory grounds and came across a sign that read something along the lines of "Dirt removal from canyon prohibited". I remember thinking it was so unusual that I took a picture of it (this was before digital photography, so you generally had to be more selective about what you chose to photograph).

Right by my house was an area used for bomb testing in the 50s and 60s - there are many pictures of the different types of live ordinance one could potentially encounter.

Down the street there’s an area very contaminated with chromium from a power plant, that the Feds claim magically stops right at the Pueblo line.

That and whatever you saw barely scratches the surface, no doubt. There are thousands of dump sites in Los Alamos. They didn’t even keep records of all of them or what was in any of them until recently.

Chemical weapons, beyond their psychological effect, were not a game changer for either side in WW1. Effective countermeasures were developed rather quickly and, in any case, a breakthrough effected by poison gas could not be easily exploited.

Although not mentioned in the article, the main contribution of chemists to WW1 was almost certainly the Haber-Bosch process [1]. It allowed Germany to produce ammo and explosives even while cut off from Chilean saltpeter [2] and also sustained its agriculture in the absence of fertilizer imports. Without the Haber-Bosch process Germany could have afforded only a very short war [3]. It's still immensely important today as it produces over half of the nutrient received by the world's crops [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-31090757

[3] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1920/02/03/118...

[4] http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-article-w...

Yup. In WWI the defender had railroads and telegraphs to let them contain a breakthrough but the attacker couldn't make use of either on the attack. By WWII we had trucks and radios, making breakthroughs much more meaningful.

For an interesting take on this, I'd recommend reading The Alchemy of Air.

It's not specifically about either of the world wars. It's about the work that led to the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process that makes it possible to produce ammonia by extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere.

This was a hugely valuable discovery - and the companies that formed as a result ended up having a significant impact on both wars.

The book talks about how the German chemical industry formed, how the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process affected the industry, how Fritz Haber helped lead Germany's chemical weapons development during WW1, and how the major chemical companies were eventually merged to form IG Farben, which was responsible for some pretty horrible things during WW2.

> how the major chemical companies were eventually merged to form IG Farben

... and how it seamlessly became Bayer after the war, with same folks running it. Acquired by Monsanto this year, what else to say

There were a few well known companies that were merged into IG Farben, and they were split back out after the war.

Several of them still exist and are very well known. There were also spinoffs and mergers that happened later, and bit sand pieces of some very large chemical and pharmaceutical companies can trace parts of their lineage back to IG Farben.

The summary on Wikipedia covers it pretty decently.

Bayer aquired Monsanto, not the other way round. But yeah, these two companies truely are a fit made... well not heaven but maybe the hotter counter part of it.

Please don't knock Bayer.

Those are the chaps, after all, that developed (and trademarked) Heroin.

As a cough medicine for children.

(I really hope that this doesn't need a <sarcasm> tag)

>seamlessly became Bayer after the war, with same folks running it

Well, there was the war crimes trial for executives in IG Farben, as well as for other industrialists. Not exactly seemless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben_Trial

>Of the 24 defendants arraigned, 13 were found guilty on one or the other counts of the indictment and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one and one half to eight years, including time already served; 10 defendants were acquitted of all charges.

That's only a little stiffer than what happens to a US company when the SEC discovers fraud.

The SEC has no authority to prosecute criminal complaints and cannot put anyone in jail.

they certainly can and have referred their cases to law enforcement agencies for criminal investigation

Wow I had no idea that chemical weapons were tested in the suburbs of DC, wild.

I’m kind of surprised that the article didn’t talk about the zone rouge in France. If you haven’t heard of it it’s worth checking out. Basically it’s whole regions of France that were contaminated by munitions and chemicals in WW1. The area is uninhabitable and some regions are devoid of life. It should be a memorial to the folly of men and the devastation of war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge

> Wow I had no idea that chemical weapons were tested in the suburbs of DC, wild.

Wait until you learn that biological weapons studies were done on people of San Francisco, without them knowing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray

What is worse is the time bomb of chemical and even conventional weapons dumped into the oceans of the world. this of course only includes those we know about

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/decaying-weapo...

I was talking just about that the other day with my wife, and remarked that oceans are large - they can probably eat that exposure without much consequence. But the Allies also dumped those weapons into Baltic Sea, where it now poses a danger to the ecosystem (and consequently, the economy of my country and our neighbours).

On the German Islands in the North Sea there are still employees of the "Kampfmittelräumdienst" - bomb disposal squads walking up and down the coast line looking for stuff that gets washed ashore. Especially problematic are incendiary bombs where the content reacts with air like white phosphorus. People pick them up thinking it to be amber pieces and put them into their pockets and end up with horrible burns in the hospital.

That's a little different. They thought the bacteria was harmless and were trying to study distribution, not effects. In hindsight we know it caused negative effects so we consider it stupid.

In comparison, testing actual chemical weapons that are supposed to be harmful in proximity to and upwind of a city is stupid in foresight and hindsight.

I attended American University back in the mid-'90s. It was kind of mind-blowing to see buildings in the neighborhood routinely cordoned off with stern warnings that cleanup of chemical weapons detritus from the World War I days of "Camp American University" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_American_University) were underway in them. It gave me a vivid sense for how the scars of war can linger for decades, even in places far away from the actual battlefronts.

There's a good article from an AU student publication about the government's wartime use of the campus here: http://www.amwordmag.com/article/2015/12/a-hidden-history

It taught me something even I hadn't heard before: that the campus student union building where I'd spent so many happy undergraduate days, Mary Graydon Center, was first constructed by the government as the "Chemical Warfare Service Building."

The Frederick, Maryland campus of the National Cancer Institute used to be the site of biological weapons research in the 1950s and 1960s and until 2003 there was a building that was off limits because it was contaminated with anthrax spores. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_470

Nice read, in the UK there's an island off the coast of Scotland called Gruinard Isle which was contaminated with Anthrax for the best part of 40 years, until it was cleaned up in the 80s.

Still wouldn't fancy walking around it.

> Are you 100% American?

US government bonds, the kryptonite of any foreign spy!

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