Lots of interesting articles in this week's C&EN:
- Cover article about new agriculture biotechnology by Melody Bomgartner.
- (I think the idea of robotic sub-farmers that look after individual plants is pretty cool, actually, but what are the economics of that?!?!)
- Glenn Hess covers a legislative attempt in Texas to limit storage of ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
- This article on (not really) flushable wet wipes by Jessica Morrison was both fascinating and icky. One presumes that, with the graying of America, this problem is only get bigger.
- I think it's interesting that BASF is selling its custom synthesis unit and some of its API facilities. Dunno why. (story by Rick Mullin)
- These letters to the editor on Sarah Everts' chemical weapons issue seem rather political, but I can't quite put my finger on it.
- Can the Hamburg firebombing during World War II really be seen as a consequence of chemical weapon use? I guess because there were incendiary devices amongst the bombloads dropped?
Seem political? Holy cow, the first one only comes short of blaming Israel for nerve gas attacks on civilians ("seems circumstantial" but going to go ahead and mention it anyway) and the second basically accuses the US of perpetrating the only atrocities of WWII (+ Korea + Vietnam).
ReplyDeleteIf there's a "blame the US/Israel/both" vibe around today these letters are as open about it as you can get. (Sorry if i'm being too "conservative" for you CJ!)
LOL, you have re-upped your membership in the Foreign Policy Hawk caucus of Chemjobber.
DeleteA little googling suggests these, like so many other Letters to the Editor, may be the products of retirees with a surfeit of time on their hands.
DeleteNapalm a chemical weapon? Then I guess TNT and RDX are chemical weapons as well.
ReplyDeleteNever let facts get in the way of a good story. Good grief. CE&N is circling the bowl for material.
Of course they are political. It always seems highly sanitized and morally unambiguous to blame Nazis or Fritz Haber from a century or half century ago for crimes committed using weapons of mass destruction. Far more difficult to come to terms with actions committed only twenty or thirty years ago under more ambiguous circumstances in which the separation between good and evil was much more problematic (it wasn't clean even back then, but the passage of time dulls the knife of subtle judgement). I agree though that calling incendiary bombs chemical weapons really erases the definitions.
ReplyDeleteOh yes please tell us more about our moral ambiguity, Wavefunction.
DeleteCongratulations. You have managed to be both morally ambiguous and racist in the same sentence.
Deletebad wolf, your response is remarkably uncivil and bringing up Wavefunction's ethnicity is really unworthy of you.
DeleteChemical warfare in WWII was started by one Frenchman named Victor Grignard, but spraying troops with ethyl bromoacetate and xylyl dibromide was not very efficient. Germans were more effective. In response to Germans chlorine attack, Grignard immediately started working on big scale production of phosgene. And so on.
DeleteNazis before WWII had very large stockpiles of Tabun, and they also built industrial manufacture of Sarin during the war, and Allies did not know about the existence of organophosphate nerve agents at that time. Hitler was not keen of using chemical poisons on Great Britain, also because of fear of retaliation. At the beginning he nursed dream of making separate peace with British (and hoped to avoid entry of US into war) and did not wish to escalate while he was victorious. And so on. And yes, there were some Indian volunteer units serving Nazis in occupied France....
sorry for typo, should have been WWI
DeleteMy response is uncivil? I see accusation of racism flying pretty fast there.
DeleteIf i'm going to get lectured by someone i like to know where they're coming from. However if we're happy to accuse each other and get lectured i'll just take a time-out, thanks.
"There were some Indian volunteer units serving Nazis in occupied France...."
ReplyDeleteRight. You mean in higher numbers than those volunteer units who fought the Nazis on the side of the British? I happen to know something about that because my grand-uncle died while serving as a doctor in the Pacific theater of war in Indochina in 1945. He was declared missing in action and his body was never recovered. There were about 2500 disaffected Indian soldiers who fought on the side of the Nazis, about 2.5 million who fought against them on the side of the British (at that point it was the largest volunteer army in history). It's absurd to cite meager Indian support of the Nazis which was propagated by a tiny fraction while ignoring the overwhelmingly larger number of Indian troops who fought in North Africa, Europe and most prominently in Indochina. In any case, this discussion has veered too far from the original topic because of a few comments which are quite uncalled for. Hope other discussions can stay on topic - reasonable people can agree to disagree, even on controversial topics, without name calling.