Professor of poison
QUESTION Was there a plan to infect Germany with botulism during World War II?
FREDERICK Alexander Lindemann, 1st Viscount cherwell (1886-1957) was a German-born British physicist known popularly as ‘the Prof’.
Lord cherwell established a statistical unit in the War Office to enable the cabinet to make swift, decisive decisions. Winston churchill valued his ability to ‘decipher the signals from the experts on the far horizons and explain to me in lucid, homely terms what the issues were’.
According to General Hastings ismay, churchill’s top military assistant, cherwell attended meetings of the War cabinet, accompanied the Prime Minister to conferences with roosevelt and Stalin, had access to sensitive intelligence and regularly dined with the PM.
Part of his role was to ensure innovative military ideas were swiftly made operational. To that end, he was in overall control of Ministry of defence 1 (Md1), also known as churchill’s Toyshop, a group of young scientists working on innovative weapons such as hollow charge weapons and the sticky bomb.
While biological weapons were banned under a 1925 Geneva protocol, Britain did not abandon research into them.
in december 1941, the Government began testing the effect of anthrax on sheep on the Scottish island of Gruinard. in 1944, cherwell recommended to churchill that ‘ N- bombs’ ( anthrax bombs) should be made available as a retaliatory measure.
There were particular concerns at the time that the Germans would drop anthrax bombs using V1 rockets.
He wrote to churchill: ‘This appears to be a weapon of appalling potentiality; almost nothing more formidable, because infinitely easier to make, than tube alloy [the codename for atomic weapons].
‘it seems most urgent to explore and even prepare the counter-measures, if any there be, but in the meantime it seems to me we cannot afford not to have N-bombs in our armoury.’
cherwell further suggested turning neutral countries against the Germans. He developed a plan to introduce botulin clandestinely into the canned fish Sweden supplied to Germany. According to Harold Macmillan’s War diaries, he had told one of churchill’s secretaries: ‘A small amount of [botulin] would be enough to destroy all of mankind.’
Alex Rosewall, Chichester, W. Sussex.
QUESTION As the Sun burns gas, is it getting smaller?
STRICTLY speaking, the Sun doesn’t burn gas, it fuses hydrogen plasma to make helium. Like other stars, the Sun is in balance between the force of gravity trying to pull it in and the outward force of what is effectively an ongoing giant nuclear explosion.
Over time, this balance changes. The Sun loses 700 million tons of mass per second as matter is converted to energy, but this is a minuscule loss of one-fourteenth of a millionth of a millionth of 1 per cent of its huge mass per year.
Mass is converted to energy because the helium fused from two hydrogen atoms has a slightly smaller mass than the original hydrogen atoms. The Sun is around 25 per cent helium and 74 per cent hydrogen, with most of the other 1 per cent being oxygen and carbon.
As it eventually begins to run out of hydrogen, in around five billion years’ time, it will have contracted by a tiny amount and lost mass, so the earth will orbit slightly further out. However, it will then become hotter as it starts to fuse helium into heavier elements.
The Sun will expand into a red giant, probably engulfing the earth and certainly baking it to the point where the atmosphere and oceans are boiled away.
it could become so large that its surface extends towards the present orbit of Mars. Fusion will continue until it runs out of fuel so there is no force to combat the inward pull of gravity.
As its outer layers collapse, a sudden surge in pressure at the core will produce a nova explosion, leaving a tiny, intensely hot, white dwarf core, not much bigger than earth, but with maybe half the mass of the Sun, which will slowly cool over further billions of years to an extremely dense, inert black dwarf, composed mainly of iron.
The Sun lacks enough mass to create a neutron star or black hole on collapse.
The singed core remnant of earth, if it hasn’t been entirely boiled away in the red giant phase, orbits this dwarf until the end of time, or until a collision with some other stellar body.
Dr Hillary J. Shaw, Newport, Shrops.
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