Fuzz by Mary Roach

Author:Mary Roach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Warfare and pest control long strolled hand in hand. Both, after all, seek to destroy grouped adversaries as efficiently as possible. Up until the nuclear era, any newfangled deadliness trained upon human enemies also tended to be tried out on enemies of the furred and feathered variety. A United Nations summary of control efforts used on the African quelea (or “locust bird”), for example, reads like a timeline of military weaponry: “guns, explosives, flame throwers, jellied gasoline, and contact poisons.”

During World War II, the chemical warfare people and the agripest control people were united by a common foe: the brown rat. Aka the Norway rat, aka the sewer rat, aka—quoting a Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory press release—“Hitler’s ace agent in this country.” Supply routes for the raw materials for existing rat poisons had been cut off during the war, and rats were living high: “… sabotaging factories, destroying food needed for our allies, and spreading disease among our armed forces.” This was not the first time rodents had been portrayed as enemy sympathizers. Posters for a California ground squirrel eradication campaign during World War I featured squirrels in tiny spiked German helmets. “Mrs. Squirrel” has been decorated with the Iron Cross, one of the highest military honors of the German Empire, which she wears as a necklace.

In June 1942, an unusual wartime alliance was forged. Division 9 (chemical weapons) of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development joined forces with the Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory (now the NWRC) in a quest for new rat poisons. The former suggested promising toxins from the arsenal, and the latter tried them out on traitorous vertebrates. Ricin, under the code name “compound W,”¶ was a candidate, as was sarin. The standout rodenticide, first tested in June 1944, was a phytotoxin the Division 9 people referred to as 1080. It was cheap and quickly lethal to rats.

Long before the ministries of war and agriculture got wind of it, 1080 had been used in rural Africa, in its natural plant form. Then, too, both rodents and humans were potential targets. Because the toxin imparts almost no detectable taste, the aggressor would simply crush the plant and drop it down the enemy’s well. While I might question the efficacy of the raw plant material, the lethality of the toxin eventually isolated—a fluoroacetate given the code name TWS—is well documented.

TWS was accidently discovered by a team of Polish chemists who later shared it with Allied intelligence. According to a declassified Division 9 memo dated April 20, 1945, a related fluoroacetate was under consideration as a “contaminant for water supplies” but never used. Personnel quoted in the memo had been shown footage of poisoned dogs and deemed it “an extremely revolting spectacle.” (1080 is 17 to 35 times more deadly to dogs than it is to rats.) Both felt strongly that an agent causing death in this “horrible” manner “could not possibly be used by any civilized nation against an enemy even of the most highly depraved type.

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