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8 World War II: The Gas War That Never Happened During the World War II years the War Department was charged with the role of producing lewisite; but a civilian agency, the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), was formed in June 1940 to develop and improve military weapons, including poison gases. This agency was responsible for the great improvements in radar made by American engineers during the war and for the development of the atomic bomb. The NDRC’s Division B (Bombs, Fuels, Gases, and Chemical Problems) investigated issues pertaining to chemical weapons, and one of its major emphases (CWS project 3) was to improve ways of synthesizing organic arsenic compounds. Who was initially in charge of Division B? None other than James B. Conant, who had directed Willoughby’s lewisite factory during the First World War. Further, in 1942, the NDRC was reorganized into twenty-three divisions, with Conant appointed overall chairman. After his demobilization following World War I, Conant had returned to Harvard, where he became an assistant professor of chemistry on September 1, 1919. Conant’s chemical brilliance ®ourished there; he rapidly achieved an international reputation in organic chemistry and won every major chemistry award short of the Nobel Prize. By 1927 he had completed his academic progression from assistant professor to associate professor to professor. During this ascent to chemical fame, Conant visited the chemistry departments of the major European universities. In 1925 his travels led to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physikalische Chemie in Dahlem, a Berlin suburb, at which he paid his respects to Fritz Haber, who had fathered chemical warfare during the First World War. A very cordial meeting thus occurred between two individuals who had each sought,just eight years earlier, more effective chemical ways to enable his country to massacre the other’s young men by the millions. Did lewisite arise in their conversation ? Haber’s scienti¤c group had investigated lewisite for potential use in World War I but had concluded that its toxic effects were less than those of mustard. Maybe Haber shared this information with Conant, al- though it is more likely that neither felt at liberty to discuss their efforts during the war. Conant continued his academic progression, becoming chairman of Harvard’s Department of Chemistry in 1930. In 1933, six months after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President of the United States, a search committee at Harvard recommended to the Board of Overseers that Conant be approved as the twenty-third president of the university. Conant worked diligently as Harvard’s president, but as the situation in Europe deteriorated , his attention became more focused on the role that science would inevitably play in the war he knew was coming. His name reached the White House as one who would not hesitate to speak out against isolationism . Thus was Conant recruited to join the newly formed NDRC. As chairman of the NDRC Conant led a scienti¤c mission to England, traveling through U-boat infested waters to London, which was under daily aerial bombardment. Among his many meetings in London, two are particularly relevant to the story of lewisite. In one meeting he met with British chemists working on lewisite, presumably at the British chemical warfare establishment at Porton Down, and learned of a new manufacturing technique using mercury chloride as a catalyst, instead of aluminum chloride. It was at the other, with Winston Churchill, that he made his unusual , somewhat sel¤sh request that bene¤ted Harvard, the institution to which he was still loyal; he asked Churchill to release Denny-Brown from his military obligation. His request was honored and helped propel DennyBrown into international prominence, based partly on his use of British Anti-Lewisite (BAL) to treat patients with Wilson’s disease. Upon returning from England, Conant’s role as NDRC chairman required that he begin investigating nuclear research because of the belief among military and civilian scientists that this line of inquiry, which became known as the Manhattan Project, could produce a massively powerful bomb. The urgency of the Manhattan Project was heightened when it was learned that Germany, too, was working on such a weapon. Accordingly , this project consumed Conant’s attention for the rest of the war. He made frequent trips to laboratories and universities in the United States to recruit nuclear scientists, and he set policy as to which scienti¤c paths to the bomb’s development would be followed. In essence, he had to determine which nuclear “horse...

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