Choose your poison – tear gas or sarin…
Given access to Porton Down, the government’s secret weapons facility, Michael Mosley agreed to see the effect of nerve agents for himself – with chilling results
Terror attacks in Europe mean the British security services will be on high alert this summer. Quietly supporting them will be scientists from Britain’s most controversial and secret military research centre, Porton Down.
Scientists from Porton were among the first to create biological weapons as well as one of the world’s most lethal chemical weapons. These days, their primary purpose is to support the military, but their focus is also on combating terrorism.
So I was thrilled and slightly apprehensive to be offered unprecedented access to film inside Porton Down – for a BBC Four documentary to be shown on Tuesday – including access to secret research being done in their most secure laboratories. I also agreed to put myself in the line of fire and act as a guinea pig, testing some non-lethal products developed at Porton.
On my first day of filming, as an aperitif, I was exposed to a chemical agent. Wearing a respirator, I was led into a small, air-tight room filled with swirling clouds of gas. I took off my mask and tried to talk. The first breath was fine. The next was like inhaling fire. I immediately began to cough and gag, and my only thought was to escape from there. I fled outside, leant against the fence and tried not to throw up. Welcome to Porton. Welcome to CS gas.
Porton Down, set in bucolic rolling Wiltshire countryside near Salisbury, was created 100 years ago in response to the German gas attacks of the First World War. Those attacks began in earnest in 1915 with the release of chlorine. As the soldiers inhaled the heavy grey-green cloud, it reacted with water in their lungs, producing hydrochloric acid. The burns caused suffocation and death – but the main effect was to induce terror.
Caught unprepared, Lord Kitchener, Britain’s Secretary of State for War, demanded an immediate response. The result was the setting up of a chemical weapons laboratory away from prying eyes. They called it the Experimental Research Ground, Porton.
At Porton, they rapidly developed and tested new chemical weapons in their own backyard – 7,000 acres of lush countryside. They built canisters full of poison gas that could be released by a timer; unless the wind turned, you were relatively safe.
The gas attacks of the Great War killed thousands and injured many more. In response, in 1925, the major world powers signed the Geneva Protocol, which banned the use of chemical weapons. So I was surprised to find myself in one of Porton’s particularly secure labs watching a chemist called Marcus show me the mustard gas that he’d recently made.
As he explained, the reason it became known as mustard gas is because the soldiers who first inhaled it in the trenches described it as smelling like mustard or garlic. He didn’t invite me to have a sniff.
We were wearing plenty of