FARMING & ARMING: Scholar's Research Tracks Fertilizer Link to Explosives

Nitrogen, Essential for Life, Also is Basis for Death-Dealing Weaponry

November 26, 2014
By: Dave Rogers

How do guns and butter go together?

In many ways too complex to understand without intense study. But new research through the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) in Philadelphia is making the connection more understandable.

Production of food and explosives have been symbiotically intertwined throughout history, as the history of The Dow Chemical Company of Midland has proven.

While researching my latest book, "The G-34 Paradox:Inside the Army's Secret Mustard Gas Project at Dow Chemical in World War I," I came across an article by Ernest Hemingway, the acclaimed novelist, who described the U.S. government's Alabama nitrates (fertilizer) plant as a "death factory."

Hemingway, whose gift for simplistic but stunningly accurate description of unfathomable concepts won him a Nobel Prize, nailed it.

After World War I, Hemingway wrote in the Toronto Star Weekly on 12 November 1921, the government's Muscle Shoals Nitrate Plant No. 1, that had manufactured ammonium nitrate for explosives, was converted from a "grim war plant" into "an aid to life."

The plant became a producer of commercial nitrogen, Hemingway wrote, "the element that must be given the soil in order to grow the crops that feed North America and the world."

The irony of this connection is exemplified by the fact, noted in The G-34 Paradox, that Fritz Haber, the World War I era German scientist who brewed the volatile mustard gas for the Kaiser's armies, after the war was awarded the Nobel Prize for his part in synthesizing nitrogen -- a fertilizer that enabled the lives of an estimated half the world's population.

Haber figured out how to pull nitrogen -- the essential element for both explosives and fertilizer -- out of the air.

In other words, the Nobel award to Haber recognized the ultimate paradox: the same process that was the vehicle for destruction through war explosives, also enabled the survival of half the humans in the world. Mind boggling? No doubt!

Haber's collaborator, German engineer Carl Bosch, whose work scaled up Haber's by producing liquid ammonia that yields nitrogen fertilizer, also won the Nobel Prize in 1921.

The Haber-Bosch process uses nitrogen and hydrogen to make ammonia for fertilizer, and -- ironically to say the least -- also explosives.

The G-34 Paradox, the book about Dow and World War I published by Historical Press L.L.C. of Bay City, tells how Case Institute professor Albert W. Smith produced the first U.S. mustard gas in 1918, and the tumultuous events of those days in Midland. The book is based on correspondence between the government and Dow archived at the CHF.

Timothy Johnson, graduate student in History at the University of Georgia, winner of a CHF fellowship, explains how his work will enable the academic world, and the public, to fathom the connection:

"My research examines how America became a nation fed and fueled by chemical fertilizers."

His dissertation topic is "Growth Industry: Unearthing The Origins Of Fertilizer-Fueled Agriculture In America, 1865-1950."

"Before the Civil War, American farmers relied on fresh soil and animal manure to feed their plants. Yet by the 1950s, Americans were enmeshed in a vast, energy-intensive system built by the fertilizer industry, state actors, and farmers.

"Farmers in the post-Civil War American South were the unlikely shock troops of this new fertilizer-fueled regime, but their tenuous position in the emerging global economy of nutrients created geopolitical challenges for the American state during the World Wars.

"Flawed assumptions about the connection between the manufacture of explosives and fertilizer led the federal government to go into the business of fertilizer research and development. This intrinsic scientific connection between the projects of arming and farming ultimately proved to be a boon to the burgeoning fertilizer industry, which kicked into gear after World War II.

"Moving beyond purely economic or technological explanations," Johnson writes, "my research uses the tools of cultural, environmental, and political history to examine a transformation in the way that humans feed and clothe themselves. Chemical fertilizers have remade the landscape, as well as how we perceive it."

In particular, CHF explains that the project examines how connections between explosives technologies and fertilizers drew the federal government into the fertilizer business and helped construct a "military-agricultural complex" by the early years of the Cold War.

Johnson holds the Allington Dissertation Fellowship from the CHF and his study project is backed by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation and a grant from the Harvard Center for History and Economics.

Nitrogen is used as a preferred alternative to carbon dioxide to pressurize kegs of some beers, particularly stouts and British ales, due to the smaller bubbles it produces, which make the dispensed beer smoother and headier.

Nitrogen occurs in all living organisms as a constituent element of amino acids (proteins), and nucleic acids DNA and RNA. Also many industrial compounds, such as ammonia, nitric acid, organic nitrates (propellants and explosives), and cyanides, contain nitrogen.

Elemental nitrogen is a colorless, odorless, tasteless and mostly inert diatomic gas constituting more than three quarters of the volume of Earth's atmosphere. Nitrogen creates a visible blue air glow seen in the polar aurora and in the re-entry glow of returning spacecraft.

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