No matter how absurd wars may be, like the one in Ukraine right now, they continue to cast an irresistible spell on men -especially men-. What’s more: although a war economy punishes the common people and sends young people to the front lines to die, at the same time it gives wings to scientists who work on projects, sometimes totally insane, whose purpose is none other than the annihilation of the world. enemy. Unfortunately, the secondary effects of their spawn end up harming all of humanity and our battered planet Earth.
The rules of the art of war, if they can be called that, changed abruptly on April 22, 1915, near the Belgian town of Ypres, when the Germans were thrown out, thus contravening the Hague Convention that they had signed in 1899, toxic gases against the entrenched French and British troops.
It was an invention of the German scientist Fritz Haber, which consisted of launching chlorine gas against the enemy, with devastating effects. A few years before the outbreak of the war, Haber had already managed to convert nitrogen into ammonium, which gave rise to synthetic fertilizers, without which, it has been calculated, half of the current world population would not exist. One of lime and one of sand.
After chlorine gas would come others even more deadly. The era of chemical warfare had been born. When the Armistice was signed in November 1918, more than 150 tons of lewisite, another very deadly gas, crossed the Atlantic bound for Europe from the United States. In 1919 Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize.
And it is that scientific advances usually have two sides: one bright and beneficial for humanity, and the other dark, destructive, as we see with the example of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb, which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, might begin a long period of peace, especially between the two main warring powers, the United States and the USSR.
Since then, there have been moments of very high tension in various parts of the world, but not even Putin has dared to push the button; nor the drunken Nixon or the madman Trump. Both India and Pakistan have nuclear arsenals, as do Israel, France and the United Kingdom. North Korea seems to exist, if nothing else, thanks to its destructive weapons.
Pesticides have also played a prominent role in the drama of our planet that could end in tragedy at any moment. Does anyone remember mad cows? DDT? Thousands of human guinea pigs -and millions of animals- mistreated in scientific experiments with little ethical justification?
Chemical advances are on the way to destroying more and more insects that, we already knew, are essential for the pollination of so many plants. Plastic has invaded the seas. Glaciers and poles, north and south, melt. Global warming advances at a forced march. Our home is going to hell.
As if the disastrous geopolitical situation, runaway inflation, the death throes of the pandemic, the irruption of artificial intelligence, the dementia of too many leaders, with each passing day we find out about some new scientific advance that although they sell it to us like salvation, they can hardly hide their dark face.
If we want to continue with our way of life, we need energy, water and food for the more than eight billion human beings that populate our planet. And let alone animals and vegetation! For now, as we are seeing throughout this summer, we are stuck between the war in Ukraine, wildfires everywhere, political chaos – and pettiness – and Oppenheimer and Barbie.
