Dew of Death: The Story of Lewisite, America's World War I Weapon of Mass Destruction

3. The Hunt for a New King

3 The Hunt for a New King Lewis’s ¤rst military assignment was at the AUES, where he was ordered to study the corrosive action of gases on artillery shells so that more effective gas shells could be designed and built. However, he found the working conditions there so hazardous that he considered them intolerable. In an act illustrating that the scientists’ military commissions were more a convenient tool for the government to pay them than a true indication of their incorporation into the military, Lewis effectively went on strike: he simply refused to pursue any additional research until he and his men were given a safer working environment. Colonel James F. Norris, who directed both offensive and defensive chemical research at the AUES, responded not with a reprimand, but by telling him to have a “colored” truck driver take him, a load of chemicals, and his men to nearby CUA, where Organic Unit No. 3 had been established. Norris also made Lewis head of that unit. Lewis had no idea which chemicals he would need at CUA, so he took a little bit of everything in stock, including bottles of hydrochloric acid and ammonia, and a cage full of rats for testing the toxicity of any newly developed compounds. En route to CUA, the truck hit a rut; several bottles of the acid and ammonia broke, producing a cloud of nontoxic ammonium chloride. The driver, upon seeing the cloud, feared for his life and ran from the truck. He had to be caught and reassured that the gas was not dangerous before he would return. Eventually Lewis’s unit arrived at CUA and began analyzing the purity of mustard gas, perfecting a colorized detector for this gas (that is, a device that turns a speci¤c color when exposed to it), producing ricin (a toxin re¤ned from the castor bean plant seed) for possible use as a chemical warfare agent, and developing other new chemical agents. Lewis was painfully aware of the German successes with mustard gas, but he also knew of mustard’s de¤ciencies, such as the delay in its effects (which made mustard a better defensive than offensive weapon) and that it was not typically deadly. The Allies wanted a gas similar to mustard, but better for offense, and they wanted to develop a useful toxic gas before the Germans. Lewis was speci¤cally asked to develop a gas that would be (1) effective in small concentrations; (2) dif¤cult to protect against; (3) capable of injuring all parts of the body; (4) easily manufactured in large quantities; (5) cheap to produce; (6) composed of raw materials that were readily available in the United States; (7) easy and safe to transport; (8) stable and hard to detect; and, most importantly, (9) deadly. These nine attributes led Lewis and his group to examine the ancient poison arsenic as the base for a new agent. They were not the ¤rst to consider using arsenic as a chemical warfare agent in World War I. Both sides had previously experimented with arsenical agents, both as tiny particulates designed to cause sneezing and as a toxic liquid. But neither approach had proven particularly useful. The liquid arsenic compound tested (only by the British) was arsenic trichloride. However, arsenic trichloride has severe drawbacks, primarily that it is reactive and corrosive. Thus, it was almost as dangerous to the men handling it offensively as those on the receiving end. Furthermore, although very toxic when inhaled, it is not readily absorbed through the skin. Thus, gas masks and clothing offered good protection. Lewis and his crew needed to ¤nd something better. They thought and experimented and spent time in CUA’s extensive chemistry library on the 5. Organic Unit No. 3 chemists in uniform performing a drill in front of Maloney Hall at Catholic University of America, ca. 1918. Courtesy Philip Reiss. 20 Dew of Death second ®oor of Martin Maloney Hall, which was then a new and beautiful granite masonry building. The building still houses CUA’s chemistry department , and the ceilings of the basement laboratories (above the suspended ceilings of today) continue to shed even freshly applied paint because of the vapors absorbed from the work done there in 1918. On a shelf in the hall’s library stood Nieuwland’s thesis, “Some Reactions of Acetylene .” But none of Organic Unit No. 3’s staff looked at it, because...