The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [48]
Success would require the application of strategic technical, organizational and engineering genius on the part of Bosch that was at least the equal of Haber’s application of pure chemistry. Fortunately, BASF saw the potential of the new invention and put substantial resources at Bosch’s disposal. Within just four years he had ironed out serious problems—from exploding pressure vessels to the need to find a cheaper metal catalyst—and built a large-scale plant that, by October 1913, was producing 10 tonnes of ammonia per day. Bosch was undoubtedly motivated by the profitmaking potential of his new and quickly patented process. But like Haber, he also saw its application as being for the good of humanity. As Haber said later in his Nobel lecture,6 his concern was to avoid “a major emergency” in food supplies when the limited “supply of saltpetre nitrogen which Nature had deposited in the high-mountain deserts of Chile” began to run short. Now, he hoped that “improved nitrogen fertilization of the soil brings new nutritive riches to mankind and that the chemical industry comes to the aid of the farmer who, in the good earth, changes stones into bread.”
But the road to changing stones into bread was to be a rocky one, for clouds of war were gathering over Europe. In Germany, where Bosch was working, the Kaiser’s generals knew that an Allied naval blockade could easily deprive them of the imported Chilean nitrates that were essential for producing munitions. Bosch’s synthetic ammonia was to be expressly dual-purpose: Converted into ammonium sulfate it could fertilize German crops, but turned instead into ammonium nitrate it could also manufacture German bombs. Haber himself was one of the signatories to a patriotic declaration by German scientists that declared “the German army and the German people are one.”7 This patriotism would drive him into making some very damaging moral decisions over the years to come, ones that blacken his name to this day.
Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914 the feared Allied naval blockade materialized, and its effects were just as devastating as the German generals feared. With their oceanic supply lines to Chile cut off, the Kaiser would have run critically short of munitions as early as the spring of 1915. Instead, BASF and the Second Reich began a strong partnership. It was Bosch himself who suggested, following a French air raid on his west German plant, building a new, much larger-scale industrial operation deeper inside Germany. The War Ministry put up 12 million marks, and the new plant at Leuna began operation on April 27, 1917, producing more than 100,000 tonnes of nitrates annually.8 Thanks to the Haber-Bosch process, the carnage of the First World War was to continue for another year and a half before the German capitulation finally came.
But Fritz Haber’s personal responsibility for the atrocities of the First World War was unfortunately much greater than just his indirect contribution to securing German explosives supplies. In his patriotic fervor, Haber became head of Germany’s Chemical Warfare Service, turning his agile mind to the task of poisoning Allied troops with gas attacks. The first large-scale use of Haber’s chlorine gas, at 5 p.m. on April 22, 1915, on the Western Front at Ypres, nearly broke the French lines: As the curious yellow-green cloud engulfed them, panic-stricken French and Algerian troops—coughing up blood and choking to death in their hundreds—fled in disarray. Had the Germans been ready to follow up their success, the tide of war might have turned there and