“Scientific warfare, once begun, has a life of its own.”

What an absolutely stomach churning horrific delight. I picked this book out of a pile of dusty used books both because it happened to have an attention grabbing cover—featuring an AK-47 wielding man covered by a gas mask and radiation suit—and because of its subject matter. I was drawn like an unsuspecting deep sea minnow into the strange chemical glow of the anglerfish’s lure.

I’m not sure what level of authorship I was expecting but what I found superseded anything I could’ve reasonably hoped for. A flip through the table of contents, notes, and index is enough to realize what a well-crafted artifact this book is. The research was originally undertaken with the idea of creating a BBC documentary of some sort. And indeed the quality of the authors’ sources makes me wish we had gotten one in tandem with the book. They include: an interview with a current director of Porton Down (Britain’s largest chemical warfare manufacturing facility since WWII), FOIA requests, books written by the people directly involved, testimonies to Nuremberg and senate committees, and my favorite, “author interviews with local sources.”

This is not your crazy uncle’s eyeball-in-crosshairs Web 1.0 manic conspiracy research project. This is intelligent people elbow-deep in the strange convoluted refuse pile that makes up real history.

And it’s a history that must be glanced at obliquely, a network of information that can only be gleaned in connections made after the fact, themes that must circle one’s head for years before their connectedness can either be ignored or stared straight into with a maniac intensity. We know these pieces on the chessboard. They make up a grammar that’s been farmed for our movies and books. But rarely are they rearranged in a coherent manner that can be read like a legible sentence.

There are the places. They are places that have been soaked in toxic infamy forever, pooling like the chemical agents that gave them their legacy. Ypres where scientists entered the history of warfare in a rolling green gas cloud in WWI. Porton Down where the British manufactured their weapons against humanity. Dyhernfurth where the Nazis synthesized the first nerve agents and won the Nobel Prize for doing so. Fort Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal and Pine Bluff and Dugway where the US created and continue to bolster their legacy of Geneva Protocol defiance while locals mistake their smoke stacks for gas chamber exhaust.

There are the operations. A vocabulary that is so drenched in irony that it seems there must be some collective narrator and author determining what to call them. Their names are pulled from narrative mythology and scientific fantasy with such specific prescience that metaphor seems to live and grow from them like spiraling vines. Operation Overlord. Operation Pandora. Operation Harness. Operation Hesperus. Operation Cauldron. Operation Ozone. And others that are perhaps more well-known purely for the insanity of their methods. Operation Bluebird. Operation Midnight Climax. Operation Paperclip. I apologize if these are spoilers for the book for anyone who is a well-known friend to conspiracy and its cultural signifiers.

And there are the corporations. Siemens-Schuster. Merck. ICI. Du Pont. Monsanto. IG Farben. Entities as immortal as the pesticide particles that they’ve used to poison the lands and soldiers of every battle in which they’ve stuck their noses. They divide under scrutiny like thermodynamic quanta into subsidiaries and holding companies and charity nonprofits, their names and components reorganizing under new archons of horror. Their machinery is temporarily repurposed while the public eye is on them, they fund communities and conduct publicly acceptable research long enough to avoid controversy. But they’re never far from their truest form as weapons manufacturers. Their motivations drip with oil and insecticide and rocket fuel that flows through their veins while they sit quiescent, ready to refit the valves, motors, and centrifuges that turn medicine into poison.

And, as if he’s been ritualistically summoned by these motifs, I must quote Thomas Pynchon—or at least, Pynchon’s words delivered by Walter Rathenau: “You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?” I don’t believe any book that I’ve read asks these questions more poignantly than A Higher Form of Killing. They are the keys to understanding the resonating and repeating history of the 20th century and the entire modern landscape of science and warfare.

The people of the world have watched this hubristic struggle for control through synthesis for over a century now. They’ve watched a space race fought by Nazi scientists who escaped hanging via quid pro quo agreements that have been whitewashed into vague arguments for using research results that we “found.” They’ve watched the CIA try to telepathically communicate with goats, astral project, consult witch doctors, practice voodoo, and sacrifice citizens and foreign diplomats at the altar of scientific progress and cybernetic control. They have been made insane pointing up at chemtrails and fluoride in the drinking water and any number of other clear symptoms of the impossible world into which they’ve been jettisoned. I beg for the world to empathize with them instead of deriding them as detached from reality. Reality is a more difficult thing to point to than any of us realize.

How could these cabalistic efforts of the powers that be result in anything other than a reality so cursed it would make Alastair Crowley blush? Certainly the modern civilian horrors of our world have been wrought by these military and industrial large scale tests. When I say anthrax who could think of anything other than Ted Kaczynski’s ironic deployment of the same biological weapon tested by the CIA in government buildings? When I say sarin gas who could help but think of the Tokyo subway gas attack, carried out by Aum Shinrikyo, a cult that represents Japan’s efforts to join the 20th century American CIA-backed theological wilderness of the Manson Family, Scientology, and Kool-Aid Acid Tested Free Love? And finally, how could I bring up LSD without evoking MKULTRA?

These odd rituals worked. But unfortunately the evils that they wrought were put into the hands of civilians and the flame they were given was fostered in the chemical factory vats of Hell rather than atop Mount Olympus. We bathe in their runoff everyday. Swallows fluttering in a marble birdbath less than a mile from Chernobyl.