Fritz Haber and Zyklon
“Technological triumphalism” is a term that occasionally surfaces, encapsulating the belief in human capacity to resolve almost any issue through the innovative use of technology. While technological progress has led to pivotal breakthroughs, such as rational pharmaceuticals, aerospace and the transistor, it has also given rise to the means to magnify age-old human tendencies towards destructive behaviors. As our tools and methods evolve with technological advancements, so too do our desires and avarice, often intensified by the fresh opportunities these new technologies bring to the table.
As an example of technology bursting on the scene producing both good and bad consequences, consider the Haber-Bosch process for the industrial manufacture of ammonia, NH3. The Haber-Bosch process has been called the most important chemical process in the world. An industrial product like ammonia can split into several streams. On the plus side, cheap and available liquid or gaseous ammonia for fertilizing crops was a boon for mankind in terms of increased food production. As a chemical feedstock, the combination of ammonia and its oxidation product, nitric acid, led to the economic production of the solid fertilizer ammonium nitrate.
Another and wholly different product stream involving the oxidation of ammonia (Ostwald Process) is nitric acid production. Nitric acid is required for the manufacture of materials including high explosive nitrate esters like nitroglycerine and nitroaromatics like TNT, picric acid and a great many other explosives. Explosives are neither inherently good nor bad- their merits rest on the shoulders of the users. When used for construction or mining, explosives are a positive force in civilization. However, they cast a long, dark shadow when used to destroy and kill.
Fritz Haber: Ammonia and Zyklon
A good example of unanticipated consequences of a technology uptick is in the story of the German chemist Fritz Haber. Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his part in the invention of the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia. It is estimated that 1/3 of global food production relies on the use of ammonia from the Haber-Bosch process or some improved version. Haber has been widely praised for his part in the invention of catalytic ammonia production using atmospheric nitrogen. These are important developments, but … [Wikipedia]
As a German nationalist, Haber was also known for his considerable contributions to German chemical warfare through WWI. Early on, Haber suggested chlorine as an improved chemical weapon over tear gas during WWI and was later involved in the development of Zyklon B as a fumigant, pesticide and later a weapon of mass murder.
There is contradictory information as to who actually developed Zyklon B. One source claims the inventor was Bruno Tesch, Gerhard Peters and Walter Heerdt while another claims Haber developed it. The composition and story of Zyklon B is subject to confusion in a Google search. The actual contributions of Tesch and Heerdt to the production of Zyklon B was to produce sealed cannisters of HCN adsorbed onto a sorbent like diatomaceous earth along with a cautionary eye irritant to signal the presence of the HCN in the air. The early use of Zyklon B was to delouse clothing, ships, warehouses and trains. The Nazis began using Zyklon B to murder human beings in the concentration camps beginning in 1942 as well as delouse their clothing to stop the spread of typhus.
The identification of Zyklon, Zyklon A and Zyklon B is a bit confusing. Zyklon was originally developed as a pesticide. When exposed to moisture it hydrolyzed to form hydrogen cyanide which was the active toxicant. Lachrymatory warning additives were blended in to alert those exposed. Eventually, the Nazis requested that the warning additive be removed since it spooked the prisoners.
Tesch and Stabenow founded Tesch & Stabenow in Hamburg in 1924. The next year they became the sole distributors of Zyklon, manufactured by its patent holder, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlings-bekämpfung mbH (German Corporation for Pest Control), shortened to Degesch. Tesch & Stabenow was the exclusive reseller of the “Zyklon” which was produced by Degesch (founded 1919) whose director was Fritz Haber.
Tesch & Stabenow was founded in 1919 as a subsidiary of Degussa with its first director, Fritz Haber. Later, in 1936, Degesch was owned by its parent company Degussa along with IG Farben and Th. Goldschmidt AG (now Evonik). The company was said to be extremely profitable from 1938 to 1943 with sales of Zyklon B to the German government and Schutzstaffel (also known as the SS). After the war, Bruno Tesch, co-founder and owner of Tesch & Stabenow, and “director Karl Weinbacher were convicted and sentenced to death by a British tribunal and executed in Hamelin Prison on 16 May 1946.”
The only practical difference between the three Zyklon products was that Zyklon B contained and delivered HCN directly while Zyklon/Zyklon A requires water to decompose it, releasing HCN.
Cyanide
The history and chemical manufacture of all the various cyanides is rich in diversity. The word ‘cyanide’ is usually reserved for ionic compounds or hydrogen cyanide, HCN, or those that release cyanide anion readily.
The cyanide group, :Carbon-triple bond-Nitrogen:, is a functional group found in many natural sources.
The cyanide group, -CN, on an organic molecule is usually bound more strongly by covalent bonding though not often connected directly to a carbonyl group (C=O) where it is susceptible to loss as with Zyklon/Zyklon A. It is the connection of the cyanide group to an ester carbonyl group that is behind the ability of Zyklon/Zyklon A to release free cyanide. In Zyklon/Zyklon A, the carbonyl group (C=O) is subject to aqueous hydrolysis producing CO2, CH3OH and HCN.
The word ‘cyanide’ is probably best limited to situations where the anion, :CN–, is present as a discrete chemical species. Common cyanides in use today are potassium cyanide, KCN and sodium cyanide, NaCN. KCN in water is commonly used in gold mining to selectively extract gold as a soluble cyanide complex, replacing the hazardous mercury amalgamation method. When covalently bonded to an organic molecule or to a polymer like polyacrylonitrile, the cyanide functional group is strongly bound. When CN is a feature of an organic substance where it is covalently bound to a carbon atom, it is referred to as a ‘cyano’ group, ‘nitrilo’ or ‘nitrile’ group. These words signify that the CN group is not present as a discrete anion but rather is tightly bound to an organic framework. This is less likely to spook the general public.
A swerve into the weeds with acrylates
It is said that neither Fritz Haber nor Carl Bosch were fans of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930’s. Haber claims to have done his WWI gas warfare work for Kaiser Wilhelm as a German patriot. Intimidated by German laws aimed at Jews and Jewish colleagues, Haber (a Jew converted to Catholicism) left Germany in late 1933 for a position as director of what is now the Weizman Institute in what was at that time Mandatory Palestine. He died in the city of Basel, Switzerland, while enroute to Palestine at age 65.
Haber’s work in chemical weaponry included the use of chlorine gas which was chosen for its density and would sink and collect in enemy trenches. Chemical warfare in WWI began with an idea from volunteer driver and physical chemist Walther Nernst (yes, that Nernst) who suggested in 1914 the release of tear gas at the front. This release was observed by Fritz Haber who recommended chlorine instead and later supervised Germany’s first release of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres in WWI. Well known German scientists involved in the development of chemical weapons included chemist Fritz Haber, chemist Otto Hahn, physicist James Franck and physicist Gustav Herz. Of the 5 scientists, Nernst included, all would receive a Nobel Prize in their lifetimes.
‘Haber defended gas warfare against accusations that it was inhumane, saying that death was death, by whatever means it was inflicted and referred to history: “The disapproval that the knight had for the man with the firearm is repeated in the soldier who shoots with steel bullets towards the man who confronts him with chemical weapons. […] The gas weapons are not at all more cruel than the flying iron pieces; on the contrary, the fraction of fatal gas diseases is comparatively smaller, the mutilations are missing”.’ Source: Wikipedia.
I don’t mean to demonize German scientists specifically since the 20th century was peppered with engineers & scientists from many countries who engaged in weapons of mass destruction research & development, both in the private and government sectors. Naively and from afar to nonscientists it might seem like scientists are a benevolent brotherhood or sisterhood of “do-gooders” bent on the application of science for the benefit of mankind. To be sure, all whom I have known understand the importance of basic science to society at large and are of high moral character, mostly. Note, though, that the phrase “do-gooder” is actually an insult. According to Dictionary.com it means “a well-intentioned but naive and often ineffectual social or political reformer.”
Even Yugoslavia’s Tito had chemical weapons and a nuclear weapons project out of fear of an attack by the Soviets. In the end the project amounted to little more than some research institutes to support the nuclear project. Eventually Tito cancelled the project. Yugoslavia did have its own deposits of uranium ore and developed a method of extracting uranium concentrates from it. In October, 1958, they had a nuclear criticality event within a teaching reactor of their own design.
It is hard for me to grasp that chemical weapons are a notch of evil above other conventional arms. Bullets fired from military-style small arms can kill instantly, slowly or cause survivable mutilation. High explosive charges from artillery, missiles, hand grenades or land mines can kill instantly, slowly or cause survivable mutilation. Is this somehow preferable to a chemical attack? Chemicals too can kill quickly, slowly or cause survivable mutilation. These chemical weapons can be either a gas or an aerosol which can deposit on surfaces and retain toxicity for some period of time. Both gases and aerosols can drift with the wind making them trickier to ‘aim’ and are subject to dilution by cloud or gaseous dispersion. Many have suggested that chemical warfare is more useful for its ability to terrorize a population than to kill.
High explosives are point sources of shock waves followed quickly by sharp flying metal fragments. Like all point sources of dispersing energy, the intensity of the shock falls off as some kind of inverse square law and fragments soon fall to the ground. The bullet or the artillery shell are projectiles that can be aimed, often with great precision, and deliver their kinetic energy or explosive charge to a distant location. This applies equally to cruise missiles, drones, jet fighter ordnance and other flying mayhem.
All of the weaponry mentioned above are the result of the application of chemical energy.
Rest stop along the highway of knowledge
At some point for all of us whose areas of specialty may overlap with weapons technology, we have to decide how we will confront it. We can pitch in to defense R&D and make a contribution or we can contribute to civilization in other ways. For myself, I chose to work on improving life through chemistry. Others can find better ways to destroy things.
For me, military aircraft are a guilty pleasure. I am absolutely in awe of the technology and the people who build and get them into the air. The stratospheric art of aerospace engineering is endlessly fascinating. Still, they are weapons platforms that exist solely for the purpose of killing and serving devastation. I understand the necessity of countries acquiring such deadly flying machinery. The monster Putin has provided the latest reminder of the importance of military readiness.
High explosives as a paradigm shift
The research and development of nitrate esters like nitroglycerine in the 1830’s and later nitroaromatics like nitrobenzene, picric acid and trinitrotoluene (TNT) rapidly led to the sometimes-inadvertent discovery of their detonability. The discovery led to the creation of a new class of explosives, marking a significant shift from the relatively slow burning of gunpowder to the high velocity detonation of “high explosives” such as picric acid or RDX. Unlike gunpowder, which needed to be confined to produce an explosion, the introduction of detonable nitroaromatic and nitrate ester explosives resulted in a large increase in the sudden release of energy. The availability of a relatively safe and easily produced explosive like TNT facilitates the leap of thought to the realm of armaments, especially when the explosive could yield considerable profits.
Sustainability
Ask yourself this- will your descendants in the year 2124 share in the creature comforts coming from the extravagant use of resources that we have? Doesn’t the word “sustainability” include the needs of 4-5 generations down the line?
There are wants and there are needs. For some of us in the 21st century, our needs are more than satisfied along with surplus income to satisfy many of our wants. Will our descendants a century from now even have enough resources to meet their needs after our continuing wanton and extravagant consumption of resources of the last 150 years? Our technology stemming from the earth’s economically attainable resources has done much to soften the jagged edges of nature’s continual attempts to kill us. After each wave of nature’s threats to life itself, survivors get back up only to face yet more natural disasters, starvation and disease. This is where someone usually offers the phrase “survival of the fittest”, though I would add ” … and the luckiest”.
What will descendants in 100 or 200 years require to fend off the harshness of nature and our fellow man? Pharmaceuticals? Medical science? Fuels for heat and transportation? Will citizens in the 22nd century have enough helium for the operation of magnetic resonance imagers or quantum computers? Will there be enough economic raw materials for batteries? Will there be operable infrastructure for electric power generation and distribution? Lots of questions that are easy to ask but hard to answer.
>>> If you are immune from concern for future generations, then this essay is a waste of your time.<<<
Come to think about it, does anyone worry this far in advance? The tiny piece of the future called “next year” is as much as most of us can handle. Is the world a much smaller place than it used to be or is the scale just better understood?
A plug for climate change
Even the sky is smaller than we think. At 18,000 feet the atmospheric pressure drops to half that at sea level. This means that half of the molecules in the atmosphere are at or below 18,000 feet. This altitude, the 500 millibar line, isn’t so far away from the surface. From the 58 Fourteeners in Colorado, it is only 4000 ft up. Not that far. Our breathable, inhabitable atmosphere is actually quite thin. The Earth’s atmosphere tapers off into the vacuum of space over say 100 km, the Kármán line. While this is more of a regulatory than a physical boundary between the atmosphere and space, the bulk of the atmosphere is well below this altitude. With this in mind, perhaps it seems more plausible that humans could adversely affect the atmosphere.
The lowest distinct layer of the atmosphere is the troposphere beginning as the planetary boundary layer. This is where most weather happens. In the troposphere, the atmospheric temperature begins to drop by 9.8 °C per kilometer or 5.8 oF per 1000 ft of altitude. This is called the dry adiabatic lapse rate. (With increasing altitude the temperature gradient decreases to about 2 oC per kilometer at ~30,000 ft in the mid-latitudes where the tropopause is found. The tropopause is where the lapse rate reaches a minimum then the temperature remains relatively constant with altitude. This is the stratosphere.)
Over the last 200 years in the West at least, advances in medicine, electrical devices, motor vehicles, aerospace, nuclear energy, agriculture and warfare have contributed to what we both enjoy and despise in contemporary civilization. The evolving mastery of energy, chemistry and machines has replaced a great deal of sudden death, suffering and drudgery that was “normal” with a longer, healthier life free of many of the harmful and selective pressures of nature. Let’s be clear though, relieving people of drudgery can also mean that they may be involuntarily removed from their livelihoods.
It is quintessentially American to sing high praises to capitalism. It is even regarded as an essential element of patriotism by some. On the interwebs capitalism is defined as below-
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
As I began this post I was going to cynically suggest that capitalism is like a penis- has no brain. It only knows that it wants more. Well, wanting and acquiring more are brain functions, after all. Many questions stand out, but I’m asking this one today. How fully should essential resources be subject to raw capital markets? It has been said half in jest that capitalism is the worst economic system around, except for all of the others.
I begin with the assumption that it is wise that certain resources should be conserved. Should it necessarily be that a laissez faire approach be the highest and only path available? Must it necessarily be that, for the greater good, access to essential resources be controlled by those with the greatest wealth? And, who says that “the greater good” is everybody’s problem? People are naturally acquisitive, some much more than others. People naturally seek control of what they perceive as valuable. These attributes are part of what makes up greed.
Obvious stuff, right?
The narrow point I’d like to suggest is that laissez faire may not be fundamentally equipped to plan for the conservation and wise allocation of certain resources, at least as it is currently practiced in the US. Businesses can conserve scarce resources if they want by choosing and staying with high prices, thereby reducing consumption. However, this is not in the DNA of business leaders. The long-held metrics of good business leadership rest on the pillar of growth in market share and margins. Profitable growth is an important indicator of successful management and a key performance indicator for management.
Firstly, a broader adoption of resource conservation ideals is necessary. Previous generations have indeed practiced it, with the U.S. national park system serving as a notable example. However, the scarcity of elements like Helium, Neodymium, Dysprosium, and Indium, which are vital to industry and modern life, raises concerns. The reliance of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) operators on liquid helium for their superconducting magnets poses the question of whether such critical resources should be subject to the whims of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism. While some MRI operators utilize helium recovery systems, not all do, leading to further debate on whether the use of helium for party balloons should be permitted to continue, given its wasteful nature.
Ever since the European settlement of North America began, settlers have been staking off claims for all sorts of natural resources. Crop farmland, minerals, land for grazing, rights to water, oil and gas, patents, etc. Farmers in America as a rule care about conserving the viability of their topsoil and have in the past acted as a group to maintain it in good condition. But, agribusiness keeps making products available to maximize crop yields, forcing farmers to walk a narrower line with soil conservation. Soil amendments can be precisely engineered with micronutrients, nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers to reconstitute the soil to compensate for higher yields. Herbicides and pesticides are designed to control a wide variety of weeds, insect and nematode pests. Equipment manufacturers have pitched in with efficient, though expensive, machinery to help extract the last possible dollars’ worth of yield. Still other improvements are in the form of genetically modified organism (GMO) crops that have desirable traits allowing them to withstand herbicides (e.g., Roundup), drought or a variety of insect, bacterial, or fungal blights. The wrench in the gears here is that the merits of GMO have not been universally accepted.
Livestock production is an advanced technology using detailed knowledge of animal biology. It includes animal husbandry, nutrition, medicines, meat production, wool, dairy, gelatin, fats and oils, and pet food production. There has been no small amount of pushback on GMO-based foods in these areas, though. I don’t watch this in detail so I won’t comment on GMO.
The point of the above paragraphs is to highlight a particular trait of modern humans- we are demons for maximizing profits. It comes to us as naturally as falling down. And maximizing profits usually means that we maximize throughput and sales with ever greater economies of scale. Industry not only scales to meet current demand, but scales to meet greater future demand.
Extracting a resource to its exhaustion has been prevalent in history. The question is, is it inevitable or can or should it be throttled back?
Essentially everyone will likely have descendants living 100 years from now. Won’t they want the rich spread of comforts and consumer goods that we enjoy today? Today we are producing consumer goods that are not made for efficient economic resource recovery. Batteries of all sorts are complex in their construction and composition. Spent batteries may have residual charge left in them and have chemically hazardous components like lithium metal. New sources of lithium are opening up in various places in the world, but it is still a nonrenewable and scarce resource. This applies to cobalt as well.
Helium is another nonrenewable and scarce resource that in the US comes from a select few enriched natural gas wells. At present we have an ever-increasing volume of liquid helium consumption in superconducting magnets across the country that need to remain topped off. This helium is used in all of the many superconducting magnetic resonance imagers (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers in operation worldwide. Quantum computing will also consume considerable liquid helium as it scales up since temperatures below the helium boiling point of 4.22 Kelvin are required.
As suggested above, today’s MR imagers can be equipped with helium boil off recovery devices that recondense helium venting out of the cryostat and direct it back into a reservoir. One company claims that their cold head condensers are so efficient that users do not even have to top off with helium for 7-10 years. That seems a bit too fantastic, but that has been claimed. Helium recovery is a good thing. Hopefully it is affordable for most consumers of MRI liquid helium.
In the history of mining in the US and elsewhere, it has been the practice of mine owners to maximize the “recovery” of ore when prices are high. Recovery always proceeds to the exhaustion of the economical ore or the exhaustion of financial backing of the mining company. Uneconomical ore will remain in the ground, possibly for recovery when prices are more favorable. It is much the same for oil and gas. As with everything, investors want to get in and get out quickly with the maximum return and minimum risk. They don’t want their investment dollars to sit in the ground waiting for the distant future in order to satisfy some pointy headed futurist and their concern for future generations.
It is not normally in the nature of for-profit corporate C-suite executives to aim for resource conservation. People answerable to a board of directors have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize wealth generation for the shareholders. The world of industry is the world of growth. The world of “let’s make enough to get by” is not the world of people who rise to the C-suite. Unfortunate but true.
What is needed in today’s world is the ability to conserve resources for our descendants. It requires caring for the future along with a good deal of self-control. Conservation means recycling and reduced consumption of goods. But it also means tempering expectations for extreme wealth generation, especially for those who aim for large scale production. While large scale production yields the economies of scale, it nevertheless means large scale consumption as well. In reality, this is contrary to the way most capitalism is currently practiced around the world.
Sustainability
The libertarian ideal of applying market control to everything is alleged to be sustainable because in appealing to everyone’s self-interest, future economic security is in everyone’s interest. If high consumption of scarce resources is not in our self-interest, then will the market find a way to prolong it? As prices rise in response to scarcity, consumption will drop. ECON-101 right? Well, what isn’t mentioned is that it’s today’s self-interest. What about the availability of scarce resources for future generations? Will the market provide for that?
What does “sustainability” really mean? Does it mean that today’s high consumption is sustained, or does it mean resource conservation by reduced consumption?
Is the goal of energy sustainability to maintain the present cost of consumption but through alternative means? Reduced consumption will occur when prices get high enough. As the cost of necessities rises, the cash available for the discretionary articles will dry up. How much of the economy is built on non-essential, discretionary goods and services? The question is, does diminished consumption have to be an economic hard landing or can it be softened a bit?
Where does technological triumphalism take us?
The generation and mastery of electric current has been one of the most consequential triumphs of human ingenuity of all time. It is hard to find manufactured goods that have not been touched by electric power somewhere in the long path from raw materials to finished article. As of the date of this writing, we are already down the timeline by many decades as far as the R&D into alternative electrification. What we are faced with is the need to continue rapid and large scaling-up of renewable electric power generation, transmission and storage for the anticipated growth in renewable electric power consumption for electric vehicles.
Our technological triumphalism has taken us to where we are today. The conveniences of contemporary life are noticed by every succeeding generation who, naturally, want it to continue. This necessitates that whole production and transportation apparatus for good and services already in place must continue. We have both efficient and inefficient processes in operation, so there is still room for more triumph. But eventually resources will become thin and scarcity of strategic minerals becomes rate limiting. Economies may or may not shift to bypass all scarcity of particular articles.
Perhaps a transition from technological triumphalism to minimalist triumphalism could take place. The main barrier there is to figure out how to make reduced consumption profitable. Yes, operate by a low volume, high margin business model. That already works for Rolls Royce, but what about cell phones and sofas?
Something else that stymies attempts at reduced consumption is price elasticity. This is where an increase in price fails to result in a drop in demand. Necessary or highly desirable goods and services may not drop in demand if the price increases at least to some level. As with the price of gasoline, people will grumble endlessly about gas prices as they stand there filling their tanks with expensive gasoline or diesel. Conservation of resources has to overcome the phenomenon of price elasticity in order to make a dent without shortages.
A meaningful and greater conservation of resources will require that people be satisfied with lesser quantities of many things. In history, people have faced a greatly diminished supply of many things, but not by choice. Economic depression, war and famine have imposed reduced consumption on whole populations and often for decades. When the restriction is released, people naturally return to consumption as high as they can afford.
The technological triumphalism reflex of civilization has allowed us to paint ourselves into a resource scarcity corner.