| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Edmund Russell . War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. (Studies in Environment and History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xvii, 315. Cloth $54.95, paper $19.95.
Chemical weapons and pesticides: most readers would not recognize the sinister historical and contemporary connection between the two, except perhaps for those who know that Germany's vaunted G-nerve gases (tabun, sarin, soman) were inadvertently discovered by I. G. Farben chemist Gerhard Schrader during the late 1930s while he was searching for a more potent insect spray. Later, other members of the organophosphates family, VX and the carbamates, were developed under similar circumstances by Western and Soviet chemists during the 1950s, joining the G-gases as fearsome weapons that could be used against unsuspecting soldiers and civilians. Despite the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention this threat continues.	1
But Edmund Russell's definition of chemical weapons goes far beyond poison gas. During World War II, for instance, Allied incendiary bombs virtually obliterated Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, exceeding fatalities caused by the two atomic bomb attacks—a fact that scholars have rarely acknowledged, given their obsession with nuclear weapons. Russell also briefly traces the emergence of chemical herbicides, originally planned for use against Japanese targets but which gained particular notoriety during the 1960s, when U.S. Forces drenched Vietnam with Agent Orange. At the time, many scientists and environmentalists criticized the Pentagon's failure to clarify the "essential difference between something poisonous and something highly toxic" (p. 227), an omission that Rachel Carson pursued in her seminal study Silent Spring (1963) which "helped make pesticides into powerful symbols of dangerous modern technologies" (p. 222). High on Carson's list of problem substances was DDT (dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane), regarded by some as World War II's "greatest contribution to the future health of the world" (p. 155).	. . .

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