What do Knute Rockne, Notre Dame's famed football coach, and Lewisite, a chemical warfare agent dubbed "the dew of death", have in common? Both owe their discovery to Father Julius Arthur Nieuwland.¹ Rockne's legacy lives on in the Fighting Irish and their tradition of excellence on the gridiron. Lewisite, together with other arsenical- and mustard-type chemical warfare agents, provide a legacy that lives on, too, but with less cheerful consequences. The book Arsenic and Old Mustard: Chemical Problems of Old Arsenical and 'Mustard' Munitions makes clear the challenges faced in dealing with those consequences.

This book documents the proceedings of a workshop devoted to arsenical- and mustard-type chemical warfare agents and their associated munitions. The workshop, held in Poland in 1996, included nine lectures, eight posters, and three discussion groups; and the contents of all these are presented. Major support for the workshop came from the Scientific Affairs Division of NATO as part of on ongoing series of meetings, cooperative research projects, and related efforts dealing with problems leftover from the Cold War and, in the case of the arsenicals and mustards, from conflicts dating to World War I. These problems can be seen in contemporary accounts, including a January 1999 news report that the U.S. Department of Defense intends to survey Washington, DC, areas near both American University and the Catholic University of America (CUA), site of the original synthesis of Lewisite, for chemical warfare agents and other materials disposed at the end of World War I.²

The first nine chapters of the book present the workshop's lectures. Of these, readers interested in chemical weapon destruction might find especially useful the first chapter, in which Ron Mansley of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons presents a scholarly overview covering historical aspects of the arsenicals and mustards; their production and use; prospective destruction technologies; and international obligations attendant to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1997. Hermann Martens's presentation of German arsenical and mustard munitions and of technical approaches to their destruction is similarly detailed, thorough, and engaging. W. R. Cullen's chapter "Arsenic in the Environment" and Shigeru Maeda's chapter "Biotransformation of Arsenic in Freshwater Organisms" help place the problems associated with the arsenicals in their environmental context and, hence, should appeal to a large audiencenot merely those specialists dealing with chemical weapon destruction.

The reports of the three discussion groupsYperite,³ Arsenicals, and Recovered Munitionsprovide useful summaries of current knowledge and needs for additional research. The Arsenicals report observes that "destruction of arsenical agents appears to have received little attention." This situation may change if searches in Washington, DC, should uncover caches of old arsenicals at CUA and, especially, when the governments of the People's Republic of China and Japan agree on funding for destruction of the chemical munitions Japan caused to be abandoned on what is now the territory of the PRC. A conservative estimate is that there are 2,000,000 of these abandoned munitions, most of them being arsenicals and mustards.⁴

Notes and References

1. Nieuwland (1878-1936) hired Rockne in 1914 as a chemistry instructor. According to Father Nieuwland, Rockne owed much of his prowess as one of the greatest coaches of all time to his training in chemistry, which taught him the method of reasoning (Ind. Eng. Chem. New Ed., April 20, 1931). W. Lee Lewis, Lewisite's eponym, credits Nieuwland's unpublished dissertation as the source for his 1918 synthesis (Lewis, W. L.; Perkins, G. A. The beta-Chlorovinyl Chloroarsines; Ind. Eng. Chem. 1923, 15, 290-295). Lewisite itself is actually the group of mono-, di-, and tri-substituted 2-chloroethenyl derivatives of arsenic(III) chloride.

2. Vogel, S. Search to Resume near AU for WWI Chemicals; Washington Post, January 24, 1999, page C01.

3. Yperite is a trivial name for sulfur mustard or bis(2-chloroethyl) sulfide. The name honors Ypres, Belgium, where the Germans first used sulfur mustard as a chemical weapon on July 12, 1917.

4. Zhao, L. Two Scenes of Poisonous Shells Left Over by Japan in Dunhua, Jilin Province; presented at the Fifth International Symposium on Sino-Japan relations over the past 100 years, Changchun, PRC, September 23-29, 1998.