Callinicus: A Defense of Chemical Warfare

by J.B.S. Haldane

Ironically, considering current Middle East problems, it was a Syrian named Callinicus who allegedly was the first to use chemical warfare. Born in AD 673, he combined naphtha, pitch, sulfur, saltpeter and other toxins to produce Greek fire, a sort of Byzantine smoke bomb. A product of the Dragon School and of Eton and Oxford, Haldane saw combat in World War I and observed little difference in dying from gangrene in a field hospital, being blinded and rendered deaf by an explosion, or dying from poison gas. Why one horrible death or incapacitation should be preferable to another was highly debatable to him when he wrote his book and remains contentious today. When the book first appeared in 1925, a troubled reviewer in The Spectator remarked, “He asks us to consider a war with armies of the present size in which the opposing sides were drawn up ten deep and were engaged in hacking at each other with swords. The casualties and the agonies of pain would be far heavier than with our modern weapons.” Certainly given all the current discussion of chemical warfare, Haldane’s point is worth considering.

118 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane was a British geneticist, biometrician, physiologist, and popularizer of science who opened new paths of research in population genetics and evolution.

Son of the noted physiologist John Scott Haldane, he began studying science as assistant to his father at the age of eight and later received formal education in the classics at Eton College and at New College, Oxford (M.A., 1914). After World War I he served as a fellow of New College and then taught at the University of Cambridge (1922–32), the University of California, Berkeley (1932), and the University of London (1933–57).

In the 1930s Haldane became a Marxist. He joined the British Communist Party and assumed editorship of the party’s London paper, the Daily Worker. Later, he became disillusioned with the official party line and with the rise of the controversial Soviet biologist Trofim D. Lysenko. In 1957 Haldane moved to India, where he took citizenship and headed the government Genetics and Biometry Laboratory in Orissa.

Haldane, R.A. Fisher, and Sewall Wright, in separate mathematical arguments based on analyses of mutation rates, population size, patterns of reproduction, and other factors, related Darwinian evolutionary theory and Gregor Mendel’s concepts of heredity. Haldane also contributed to the theory of enzyme action and to studies in human physiology. He possessed a combination of analytic powers, literary abilities, a wide range of knowledge, and a force of personality that produced numerous discoveries in several scientific fields and proved stimulating to an entire generation of research workers.

Reviews

[Timothy Morrison]

THE public mind has to a large extent reacted against the opinions impressed on it during the war by official propaganda. Some of these have been overcome by counter-propaganda in the Press and on the platform; others have been dropped because they led to effects which, though admirable during a war, were undesirable in peace-time. But, as chemical warfare will not assume importance until the outbreak of the next serious war, and figures on the programme of no party, people still think about it as they were told to think by the newspapers during the Great War.