“IN NO FUTURE WAR will the military be able to ignore poison gas. It is a higher form of killing”. Thus, spoke Professor Fritz Harber, pioneer of gas warfare, on receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1919. Harris and Paxman have put together a well-documented and very readable history of chemical and biological warfare. From the use of Chlorine by the Germans in April 1915 to the development of nerve agents in 1936, the use of biological agents by Japan in China to the allegations of mycotoxin use by the Vietnamese in Laos, the authors have highlighted the reasons that these weapons continue to be developed and used.
This book is a must for any personal military medicine library. Unfortunately, the book is now out of print and the only hope of acquiring a copy is through a good secondhand bookshop. It is worth the search.