Disappearing Spoon Chapter 5 summary

Chemical warfare, in various forms and with varying degrees of effectiveness, has been present since the beginning of modern society. It can be traced all the way back to Sparta laying siege on Athens and throwing burning bundles of pitch, wood, and sulfur over the city walls in an attempt to smoke the Athenians out of their city. It failed, but was an early vision of later such attempts to use gas, smoke, and other chemicals during war. A major problem with these ideas that, through World War I, using gas was hardly efficient - it would usually blow away from its intended targets long before having any effect on them. A failed attempt on the part of the French during a battle in 1914 started a race in the development of chemical weapons. The Germans soon outstriped the rest of the world due to the development of a method by Fritz Haber to isolate nitrogen and create ammonia. Although, ironically, this became the precursor to all fertilizer, which he had absolutely no interest in. Their attempts to use NH3 also failed miserably but led to the creation of, first, bromine shells, that were also met with little success and next chlorine which began a chapter of a "ruthless" phase in history during which solider had to worry about chlorine based "green cross," "blue cross," and "yellow cross" (mustard gas), gases that wreaked havoc on the body's they came in contact with. Haber both won a Nobel prize and was imprisoned for being an international war criminal for the same discovery. Germany's next most feared weapon after its gases were the "Big Berthas" - massive siege guns. Yet, these guns could only be used for short periods of time as they soon essentially destroyed themselves from the extreme heat and force they generated. The Germans turned to molybdenum, which they had almost no supply of, to temper the metal with. Interestingly enough, the largest supply of molybdenum came from a mine in Colorado. This led to a complicated economic, political, and diplomatic exchange between the previous owner of the mine, a German company in New York and the US Government realizing what was happening to late to prevent any of it. The Nazi's next turned to tungsten to build missiles with incredibly hard tips. Learning from their molybdenum disaster, they tried to stockpile it before World War II. Portugal ended up being the main supplier of tungsten, to both sides in fact, and the price of tungsten went from $1,100 per ton in 1940 to $20,000 per ton just a year later. The next two elements instrumental to wars that are discussed are tantalum and niobium, both of which are used extensively in cell phone manufacturing, are mined almost exclusively in Africa, and were significant contributors to the tribal warfare continuing there today.