He will practise against thee by poison.
"As You Like It"
For centuries, communities from Europe to Asia died in agony in huge numbers when their bread became polluted by virulent fungus poisons. Soviet scientists isolated these poisons in the 1930s, and have since been mass-producing them as a means of mass murder.
Most of the advanced nations, it is true, either manufacture or carry out research into chemical weaponry. But the Soviet Union and its allies have outstripped all others in the intensity of their devotion to the development and use of poison.
What are these substances? The most lethal toxins used in modern warfare are still the hideous natural poisons that one associates with the Dark Ages, rather than any synthetic material created in the laboratory.
Democratic countries have been pitifully slow to recognize and counteract the advances which Eastern dictatorships have made in this field. It comes as a dark surprise to today's Western mind that the technological societies of the Communist bloc are but a veneer on a base of mediaeval barbarism, in which poisons extracted from herbs, fungi, snakes, amphibians, and fishes are often the most favored way of getting rid of an enemy.
It was in this tradition that the Soviet Union began its 1980 invasion of Afghanistan with the most terrible arsenal of offensive chemical weapons used by any army in history. Countless Moslem rebels died in convulsions from attacks by clouds of "yellow rain".
Nor should there be too much surprise at the manner of their death. To quote from an excellent book on chemical warfare, "the Red Army demonstrates a military psychology that makes it possible to use war poisons without hesitation, as simply another weapon." [Yellow Rain: A Journey through the terror of Chemical Warfare, Sterling Seagrave (M. Evans and Co., New York).]
Let us look at the history of one such poison: ergot, a fungus toxin which has been known for nearly 3,000 years. An Assyrian tablet of 600 BC first mentions it as a noxious pustule found on ears of grain. It probably caused the plague which nearly destroyed Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars, when starving people were forced to eat bad bread. It caused mayhem in Duisberg, Germany, in 857 AD, and in wide areas of France in 943.
A French chronicler of that year speaks of people "shrieking and writhing, rolling like wheels, foaming in epileptic convulsions, their limbs turning black and bursting open." Then he explains: "The bread of the people of Limoges became transformed upon their tables. When it was cut it proved to be wet, and the inside poured out as a black, sticky substance."
The cause of these horrors which became endemic among the ignorant peasantry was bad harvesting and grain storage, that permitted fungal growths on bread. Ergot, and similar fungal poisons, specially treated in Soviet laboratories, are nowadays used against rebel villages in Laos and Afghanistan, as Mr. Seagrave's book reveals in detail.
For mass killings or for individual murder, the ancient poisons are proving most efficacious. The Bulgarian exile Georgi Markov, hated in Sofia for his BBC broadcasts, was murdered in London in 1978 by an agent using an umbrella tipped with ricin, from the castor bean, which the murderer had boasted in a telephone threat to Markov "is a poison the West cannot detect or treat."
The greatest danger of all is that some group of ill-intentioned people might seek to combine the ancient poisons with the techniques of modern science to create a new weapon of unprecedented frightfulness.
It could happen like this. Genetic engineering, the laboratory manufacture of microbes through the alteration of genes, promises much for better medicines. But this hopeful new technology could be perverted to make a "monster microbe" that would colonize the human intestine with "pili," or tentacles, with which to adhere to its walls. For such a poison, there might be neither treatment nor antidote, and anti-bodies would accept it as being normal. A vial of it dropped in the water supply of a few major cities could, within days, produce a catastrophe to rival the Black Death.
One scientist who has warned of just such a danger is Professor Donald B. Louria, of the New Jersey Medical School. Explaining his worst fears, Professor Louria has said: "One microbiologist with whom I discussed this scenario said it could not happen because the experimenters themselves could not avoid becoming victims.
"But this is nonsense. They could immunize themselves against pili before the toxins were added, so that the bacteria could not take hold in their intestinal tracts. I believe there are those among us on this planet so venal, so committed to achieving power, or simply so mentally warped, that they would do exactly as I have outlined."
One doesn't have to be a geographical genius to predict just who these people might be. That is, if they thought they could get away with it.