Toxic by Dan Kaszeta

After seeing the title and blurb of this book, readers may be surprised that the prologue is devoted to Sir Robert Christison, physician to Queen Victoria. The doctor, a trail-blazing toxicologist, had been intrigued by missionaries returning from Africa and telling of “trial by ordeal” using the calabar bean: the accused, if innocent, vomited the poison, but if guilty they absorbed the poison, frothed at the mouth, had a seizure and died.

Christison’s words on a calabar bean death in his lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1855, says Dan Kaszeta, could be describing the fate “of a Syrian victim of a sarin attack in 2013” – nerve agent poisoning.

The naturally occurring chemical in the bean can also be used to treat medical conditions, but the development of pesticides by Nazi Germany produced related synthetic chemicals which, it was realised, could be used in weaponry. In 1945, the victorious Allies discovered the records, laboratories and factories behind these developments and, as they did with rocket scientists, debriefed the German experts before taking some back to their domestic chemical weapon research centres.

During the Cold War the foes consolidated the Nazis’ work, particularly on the more lethal sarin, but each nation was guilty of scandals and errors. At Porton Down in 1953, the Ministry of Defence exposed a group of young servicemen to sarin. One of them, Ronald Maddison, died within minutes.

Toxic, then, details the last 100 years of nerve agent history, taking in Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in the war with Iran, the 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway which killed 13 people and Assad’s use of sarin on his own people in Syria. Kaszeta has a difficult theme but he avoids both jargon and the intricacies of science.