The book traces the fascinating, if appalling, history of state-sponsored research into central nervous system (CNS)-acting chemicals.
During the cold war and after, the US, Soviet Union and China all “actively sought” to develop CNS-acting weapons, said Crowley. Their purpose was to cause prolonged incapacitation to people, including “loss of consciousness or sedation or hallucination or incoherence or paralysis and disorientation”.
The only time a CNS-acting weapon was used at scale was by the Russian Federation in 2002 to end the Moscow theatre siege. Security forces used fentanyl derivatives to end the siege, in which armed Chechen militants had taken 900 theatregoers hostage.
Most of the hostages were freed, but more than 120 died from the effects of the chemical agents and an undetermined number suffered long-term damage or died prematurely.
Since then, research has made significant advances. The academics argue that the ability exists to create much more “sophisticated and targeted” weapons that would once have been unimaginable.