Reid Kirby will be publishing his book in June. Follow him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rkirby/

Media Credits: ABC news. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-jA96JgD9U

In this episode Jessica Morris discusses her work on the evolution of British Gas Strategy during WW1.

In this episode I discuss operational aspects of the destruction of declared Syrian CW stocks - with Jerry Smith. Recorded November 2024.

You can check our more of Dr Zander's work over at The Trench – Challenging entrenched positions - Jean Pascal Zanders

The show notes will follow shortly on this episode on poisoning in the renaissance.

In this episode Nathan discusses WW2 ARP preparations for gas attacks on civilian centres.

Media source: Have Your Gas Masks With You (1941-1946) (youtube.com) I do not own the rights to this clip, used under fair usage.

In this bonus episode I am joined by Seth Carus, as we explore some of the earliest allegations of biological warfare- as well as the more recent modern developments, which transformed ancient fears, into Cold War era weapon systems.

Do check out these two studies, I think they are great:

Carus, W. Seth. "The history of biological weapons use: what we know and what we don't." Health security 13.4 (2015): 219-255.

Carus, W. Seth. "A century of biological-weapons programs (1915–2015): reviewing the evidence." The Nonproliferation Review 24.1-2 (2017): 129-153.

And also thanks to Adrienne Mayor, who drew my attention to this work on the Caffa siege, and recent work on the spread of the Black Death in the 14th century more broadly.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/711596

https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:50220/datastreams/CONTENT/content

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(20)30176-2/fulltext

N.B my remarks on the ability of scientists to produce anthrax spores for the German programme in WW1 reliably has sparked some discussion. And I will return to this. Essentially, it is not currently clear if either purified / extracted/dried spores were employed- or else some form of wet suspension. The latter, which would have likely contained a mix of (likely denatured) vegetative b. anthracis and spores. Or else some form of purified spore suspension. I know right?