Chemical Weapons and Other WMDs in Pop Culture

NEIL GUSSMAN

Chemical Reactions

Nerve gas and other unconventional weapons.

Nerve gas is becoming the weapon of choice for tv doomsday scenarios. In last year's season of 24, for example, Russian terrorists steal twenty canisters of a made-for-tv nerve gas and threaten to kill tens of thousands of people. They do manage to kill about 100 people, despite the best efforts of series hero Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland).

Watching season five of 24 makes it clear why we should be afraid of gas, particularly nerve gas, although this terrifying weapon was cleaned up and tamed for tv. The "Weaponized Centox" featured on 24 kills its victims with the lethal efficiency of real-world nerve gas—vx, Tabun, Sarin, and so on—but unlike other actual nerve gases, Centox then conveniently disappears.1 Real nerve gas poses a huge decontamination problem. It sticks to walls and wings, cars and computers, and it is just as deadly on the skin as in the air. When the tv nerve gas Centox is released within CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) headquarters in Los Angeles, the gas quickly kills nearly half of the staff, but those who make it to sealed rooms and survive simply return to their workstations and resume the high-tech fight against determined terrorists inside and outside the government.

Personally, I would not want to be tapping on a keyboard and drinking coffee in a room that had held a lethal dose of nerve gas just a few minutes before. But if TV gets the details wrong, it gets the terror right. Closed, crowded places make tempting targets for terrorists. The 24 terrorists attack a mall, offices, and attempt to attack thousands of homes through the natural gas system.

If you are interested in the history of the most deadly class of chemicals used in warfare, War of Nerves by Jonathan B. Tucker recounts many tales of developing, producing, and deploying chemical weapons, with a particular focus—as the title suggests—on nerve gas. The author of previous books on smallpox and leukemia and editor of a volume on chemical and biological warfare, Tucker takes the reader from the German laboratory where the first nerve agent was developed right up to the present.

So absorbing is Tucker's chronicle that you may lose track of time while learning how an errant U.S. Army test of vx nerve gas killed thousands of sheep in Utah in the 1960s. Lest you think this is exaggeration, I asked my 15-year-old daughter, Lisa, to read chapter 16 while we were on a rather long drive to a mall. When we arrived, she had two pages left and wanted to finish the chapter rather than run straight in to Abercrombie & Fitch. Chapter 16 describes the life of the man responsible for the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack that left twelve dead and hundreds injured. Most histories of chemical warfare would not slow a teenager on the way to a clothes store.

In his dramatic style, Tucker occasionally reaches beyond knowable facts to get inside the mind of his subjects. He says that Dr. Gerhard Schrader, in his lab at I.G. Farben, "[a]s always, felt a pleasant tingle of anticipation as a new substance emerged from the synthetic process." At the time, December 23, 1936, Dr. Schrader was working in a lab decorated with "a large framed photograph of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in heroic profile." A man in these circumstances could have experienced a tingle for any number of reasons: chemistry, Christmas, or Hitler's portrait. But Tucker doesn't hesitate to read minds.

Aside from this quibble, the stories Tucker finds of ordinary people are both delightful and chilling. Delightful because they are well told and give the reader some insight into the kind of person who would develop or mass-produce weapons of mass destruction. Chilling because his subjects focus on the problem at hand—making thousands of tons of nerve gas, for example—with no apparent qualm. It's the job. They do it.

My favorite of Tucker's tales is the story of Boris Libman, a native of Latvia who could have walked straight out of the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Born in 1922, Libman was just 18 when the invading Russians confiscated his family's land and property and drafted him into the Soviet Army. He was seriously wounded early in the war, returned to duty after a long recovery, and was again badly wounded, the second time left for dead. He survived the war and applied to study at the Moscow Institute for Chemistry tuition-free as an honorably discharged disabled veteran. Libman was turned down because he was officially dead. He managed to prove he was alive, attended university, and became quite a talented chemical engineer. He supervised production of thousands of tons of nerve gas on impossible schedules for many years. In trying to do his best for the Soviet Union, he made an error with a containment pond for toxic wastes. A storm caused a flood, the pond burst its dike, and tons of toxic waste poured into the Volga River. Months later the delayed effects of the spill killed millions of fish for 50 miles downriver. Libman was blamed and sent to a labor camp to appease an outraged public. But as it turned out, no one else could run the nerve gas plant, and Libman was quietly released and returned to work after one year.

Fear of toxic gas and wild exaggeration of its dangers have their American roots in the debate over chemical warfare after World War I. In Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints (first published by Princeton University Press in 1968 and now reissued by Transaction with a new introduction by Jeanne Guillemin), Frederic J. Brown recalls the terror of gas during the years between the world wars. "Propagandists were totally irresponsible in their exaggerations of new weapons developments," Brown writes. He quotes H. G. Wells on the aftermath of a fictional chemical attack by aircraft using the Centox of the 1930s, what Wells called "Permanent Death Gas":

[the area attacked] was found to be littered with the remains not only of the human beings, cattle and dogs that strayed into it, but with the skeletons and scraps of skin and feathers of millions of mice, rats, birds and such like small creatures. In some places they lay nearly a metre deep.

Not quite "blood as deep as horses' bridles," but still a vision to warm the heart of apocalypse addicts.

Brown—Lieutenant General, retired, U.S. Army; he was a junior officer when he wrote the book—carefully recounts the military history of the use and, more significantly, the non-use of chemicals as weapons in both world wars and the period in between. Thorough and well documented, his book also captures the policy decisions and leaders' attitudes that kept chemical weapons, for the most part, off World War II battlefields.

Brown's book has the fat footnotes that have long been out of style even in scholarly publishing, but these footnotes are a delight for the reader who wants details. On page 18 is a three-paragraph, nearly full-page, small-type footnote describing President Woodrow Wilson's attitude toward gas warfare, with references to his biography and a meeting with the French commander at the battle of Ypres.

Sometimes the footnotes illuminate and enliven a rather dull passage. In a section on civil defense Brown says, "Since it has to be assumed that an enemy would use the most destructive mixture of weapons available, gas shelters had to be bomb- and fireproof as well as gasproof." Why is this true? Note 48 at the bottom of the page explains: "High explosives to penetrate collective shelters and homes, incendiaries to drive the population into the streets, gas to kill in the streets." Brown tends to the passive voice in the text but can be vivid in the notes.

While the combatants of World War I expected gas warfare in future conflicts, none of the combatants in World War II attacked each other with gas with the exception of limited use in China. The aversion to gas warfare stands in stark contrast to the other two weapons introduced in World War I: the tank and the bomber. When World War II began in September of 1939, the German tanks backed by bombers made short work of Poland. The following spring the same German juggernaut ripped through France, Belgium, and Holland and defeated every major allied combatant except the United Kingdom. In the Pacific, the Japanese showed how effective ship-based bombers could be, winning many victories against neighboring countries in the early years of the war and eventually bringing the U.S. into the war with the carrier-based bomber attack on Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

The bomber and the tank became indispensable weapons for the major combatants of World War II, but gas warfare did not. Brown says the first reason was revulsion by military professionals. A small group of senior officers strove to make chemical warfare integral to the plans of the U.S. military, but most professional officers wanted no part of warfare they saw variously as inhumane, cowardly, and out of their control. Gas is also more complicated to use than conventional weapons. Gas warfare creates a logistics burden all its own: using gas means providing protective equipment for all friendly soldiers operating in the area affected by gas. Gas munitions displace conventional rounds. The more gas rounds fired, the fewer explosive rounds that can be fired by the same gun. In the fast-moving battles of World War II, persistent gas would slow the successful attacker, forcing his soldiers to operate in an area they contaminated. And in the case of naval use of gas, there is a potential disaster in any ship having a magazine loaded with gas rounds. Any leak of toxic gas inside a ship leaves the entire crew in a contaminated container with little prospect of escape.

Brown shows how politics pushed the warring nations further away from the use of gas. First use by one army meant retaliation by the other. Germany and England bombed each other throughout most of the war. Even when one country was clearly winning, the other was able to retaliate. If one side used gas, the other would be sending gas back across the Channel in short order. Neither of these particularly vulnerable countries wanted to provoke gas warfare, nor did they want any of their allies to add gas to the mix of weapons. Also, the men at the head of the largest armies in the war were for their own reasons strongly opposed to gas warfare. Hitler was gassed during World War I and Brown shows that the German leader did not seriously consider using gas until the final days of the war. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was opposed to gas as a "barbarous and inhumane" weapon; he stated to the world in 1943 that the United States would not initiate gas warfare but would retaliate in kind if necessary.

Brown's main narrative closes at the end of World War II. He shows that gas was never seriously considered as an alternative to the use of the atomic bomb or invasion of the Japanese mainland. In his conclusion Brown judges that the circumstances which prevented the use of chemical warfare in World War II still obtained in 1968. The professional military was largely opposed to the use of chemical warfare, and the main antagonists of the postwar period—the United States and the Soviet Union— both had many allies who would not want gas or nuclear weapons used on their soil.

Quite rightly, Brown took a measure of comfort in reflecting that the restraints which existed in World War II continued in the Cold War era. Alas, this modest reassurance does not carry over to our own day. Terrorists are not soldiers. As their name suggests, their purpose is to inflict terror on the civilian population, while at the same time they can trust traditional Western reticence not to respond with indiscriminate murder in retaliation.

For readers who would like to see Brown's book come to life, at least in fiction, I recommend Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising. This 20-year-old best seller describes a conventional war in Western Europe in the late 20th century in which neither side uses chemical or nuclear weapons. The reasons could have been lifted straight from Chemical Warfare. The soldiers on both sides of the conflict share the attitude toward gas and nuclear weapons that Brown describes. And in a prescient prologue, Clancy's World War III begins with Arab terrorists blowing up a Soviet refinery, causing a crippling fuel shortage.

If I found the hopeful note in Brown's conclusion tied closely to the circumstances of the Cold War, I found some practical hope in Tucker's book. His long descriptions of the problems encountered by Saddam's chemists in the Iran-Iraq war—along with the troubles encountered by the cult that attacked the Tokyo subway—show how difficult it is to make nerve gas. The ingredients are corrosive and dangerous. The equipment required to make it is specialized and difficult to obtain. Even the most talented chemists and chemical engineers Tucker introduces in the book faced huge difficulties producing nerve gas—and in many cases failed partially or completely. Even for those with millions and millions of dollars to spend, nerve gas synthesis is very, very difficult. Luckily for us, no weapon in the real world is as easy to use or works quite as well as its fictional counterpart.

Neil Gussman writes a column on the history of chemistry for Chemical Engineering Progress magazine.

1. "Weaponized" means put in a bomb, artillery shell, mine, or other system for use. In 24, the nerve agent was loaded into pressurized cylinders that were intended for release in ventilation systems. Why the U.S. government would weaponize nerve gas in a form most useful for theft and use by terrorists rather than for the battlefield is a question only the show's writers can answer.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culturemagazine.

Nylon and Bombs, How DuPont Made Nylon and Nukes in the mid 20th Century

I wrote this article eleven years ago and it is now behind a pay wall.  I had not shared it back then. The book is very good and tells a fascinating tale of how DuPont Corp. got so deeply involved in creating America's nuclear arsenal.

BRIGITTE VAN TIGGELEN AND NEIL GUSSMAN

Technology in Translation

The story of DuPont, first in French, then in English.

Translation is not a transfer of meaning from one language to another, but a dialogue between two languages. —Richard Pevear

People of every nation are learning English. The language of the once-global island empire and its former colonies has conquered the worlds of technology, commerce, and popular culture. Bankers, pilots, commodity traders, film stars, and ship's captains have to know the language of Shakespeare, Lincoln, Churchill, and Yogi Berra. But the conquest is not complete. History, literature, and lab reports still first appear in French, Russian, German, Mandarin, Japanese, Serbo-Croat, Greek, and Hebrew. Authors who want their books and research to reach a global audience will eventually have to translate those results into English. Right at the moment when a scholar who writes in French or Farsi wants to reach the world, a long negotiation begins. For the French author of a recent history of DuPont and chemical engineering, that negotiation led to a book in English very different from the original in French.

We all know that some names and some subjects simply sell books. The reverse can also be true. Certain words can cut the sales of a book. Have you ever read a popular book on science that included differential equation in its title? For those few of you who have searched Amazon or your local bookstore for a page-turner on pipes and valves, the words "chemical engineering" do not appear in the titles of books on the popular science shelves. The 24 books Amazon.com lists from the search string "chemical engineering" include only handbooks and textbooks.

In fact, the publishing history on both sides of the Atlantic of a recent book on the history of chemical engineering at DuPont shows that those who market books believe "chemical engineering" in the title will kill a book's sales. The book, published in English in December of 2006, is titled Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America. First published in French in 2001, it is a solid, well-documented account of the rise of chemical engineering at DuPont. The author, Pap Ndiaye, shows how, beginning early in the 20th century, DuPont evolved from an artisan company with long apprenticeships in its factories to an engineering company living by the slide rule. Ndiaye gives the reader both the American and global context of the rise of chemical engineering as a profession.

If you are thinking a book like this should have a title such as Formula for Success: How Chemical Engineering Changed DuPont and the Chemical Enterprise, you would agree with the author but not with his publisher. Ndiaye had a working title that included the words "chemical engineering," but his French publisher convinced him to accept a more provocative title. The title of the French edition is Du nylon et des bombes: Du Pont de Nemours, le marché et l'État américain, 1900-1970. Translated literally, the title is Nylon and Bombs: DuPont de Nemours, the Market, and the American State. To complete the sales pitch, the black-and-white cover of the French edition features a photo from the late 1930s showing a group of pretty young women in nylons. Actually une bombe (feminine) in French is best translated as "sex bomb" in English: with pretty women in nylons in the picture, you have both kinds of bombs in the DuPont arsenal. The more sterile, stylized American cover uses bold colors and a collage not open to the charge of sexism.

The American edition retained the eye-catching title but made a subtle change in the subtitle that looks like a mistake. In French the masculine noun marché means "market." Drop the accent on the final "e" and the feminine noun marche has the meaning "walk, step, or march." Did Johns Hopkins University Press make an error, or see the switch of genders as an interesting pun? We?ll probably never know. When asked, the author was silent on the subject. The word "March" adds a military connotation in the English subtitle that is different from the French version, but since the main title is "Nylon and Bombs" it is a change in emphasis that the content allows.

Those who can read the book in both languages will find that the differences go well beyond the cover. The book is longer in French by almost a third. The main reason is cultural. This project represents years of study by Ndiaye at the Hagley Museum, keeper of many DuPont archives. It is his doctoral thesis edited for publication. In France, people buy and read doctoral theses on subjects they find interesting: you can find a Parisian reading a published thesis in history at her local café. Writing standards are very high in France, where a dissertation is expected to be readable and enjoyable as well as scholarly.

The American version is shorter in part because the publisher omitted the first chapter of the French edition, putting some of the information from it in the other six chapters and the balance in a "Note on Historiography" at the back of the book. American readers want to jump right into the narrative. But even apart from this editorial decision, Ndiaye says, the style of the American edition is very different from that of the original French.

This isn't surprising. French writers in general use longer sentences than their English-language counterparts. Moreover, the logical structure of the argument is carefully embedded in the French, whereas in English it is more often implied than made explicit. At the same time, however, the French also love playing with connotation and multiple layers of meaning. This is clear, for instance, in the very first pages of the introduction to the French edition, where a lyrical paragraph becomes almost an ode to nylon. A sentence that begins with an alliterative list of adjectives is cut in two in English, ending with an assertion of nylon's central place in Western culture in the past half century. In this sentence, the author uses the French verb tramer, which means to weave, to plot, and to engineer: a perfect word to express the cultural meaning of this man-made textile. The English passage sounds dull by comparison: "Nylon revolutionized the textile industry. It led to the creation of plastics, and became a part of our culture." Much of the fun with the language that can be found even in a French PhD thesis has disappeared from the English version of the book. But on the other hand, in several places the narrative has been clarified.

Did the well-told story in French survive in English? The short answer is yes. This year DuPont Corporation is five years into its third century. Founded in 1803, the company still bears the name of the French égré who founded it. And the oldest industrial company in America is well into another centennial transformation. In 2007, DuPont sold its last carpet fiber business, having already moved out of nuclear power engineering a good while before. DuPont is now a chemical company that pins much of its hope for the future on its stake in the rapidly growing biotech industry.

The company that E. I. DuPont founded shortly after America itself became a nation made gunpowder. In its first century of operation, DuPont plants had an enviable safety record with artisan skills passed from operator to operator. DuPont made explosives using processes and expertise learned on the job and passed through shop apprenticeship. DuPont's commitment to safety is legendary. The owner and the workers lived next to the DuPont plant. Clearly the incentives for strict attention to safety were high.

When the profession of chemical engineering was born in the late 1800s, DuPont at first had no place for these new mavens of analysis. As the 20th century dawned, DuPont continued in its traditional powder-making business, but began to see promise in new processes and started a transformation that, by midcentury, made DuPont the leading employer of chemical engineers in America. In the 1950s, one in every ten chemical engineers in the United States worked for DuPont.

In 1903, DuPont kicked off its second century by opening the Experimental Station in Wilmington. The company planned to diversify into new markets away from their central explosives business. In 1904, DuPont entered the lacquers business; 1910 saw a foray into the synthetic leather market. In 1911, diversification plans got a boost when DuPont was forced to sell some of its explosive production assets. DuPont was so dominant in the gunpowder market that the (Teddy) Roosevelt Administration decided DuPont was a monopoly. From the divested factories, the Hercules and Atlas corporations were formed.

At the same time DuPont was changing, chemical engineers were banding together to form a professional organization. Established in 1908, the American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE) announced to the world that chemical engineering was joining mechanical and electrical engineering as a professional discipline. But respect and equality with sister professions would come only slowly. Electrical engineers were a category in the U.S. census beginning in 1910. Chemical engineers were not listed as a profession until 1940. Until that time, chemical engineering was a subcategory of mechanical engineering. And the founding of the AIChE was not without detractors. The American Chemical Society (ACS, founded 1876) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME, founded 1880) both opposed recognition of chemical engineering as a profession. But AIChE came into being despite opposition and grew slowly until chemical engineering employment both at DuPont and across America took off in the 1920s.

During this period, the DuPont commitment to engineering would grow as the company invested in ammonia production. While the main ingredient was free—nitrogen in the air—making ammonia required an enormous capital outlay. And though DuPont had some success increasing the ammonia business, high-pressure chemistry and ammonia were a drain on profits. With the Depression of the early 1930s, the ammonia operation struggled further. Then Wallace Carothers invented nylon. Large-scale manufacture of this new synthetic fiber required high-pressure precursors: hexanoic acid and haxamethylene diamine. Suddenly ammonia and high-pressure chemistry were vital to a fast growing market, and the long DuPont commitment to ammonia and high-pressure chemistry payed off in a big way.

Nylon took the fibers market by storm in the late 1930s, but far more ominous clouds gathered over the rest of the world. When the United States formally entered World War II in December 1941, DuPont was one of only a few chemical companies building its own plants, a major reason the Delaware-based manufacturer was chosen as the lead contractor for production of the atomic bomb. Ndiaye tells this story in considerable detail. He says that although the physicists were in charge at the beginning of the project, eventually their calculations had to be fleshed out in an actual production facility, and DuPont-led engineers took control. As Ndiaye observes, the engineers possessed "a thorough understanding of the blueprint, its special language, and the changes it called for. Here the translator has a strategic position: the apparent modesty of his role in reality conceals a transfer of power from the 'theoreticians' to the 'practitioners.'" Chemical engineers turned the ideas of the physicists into reality.

Nylon and Bombs continues the story of DuPont through its heyday in the 1950s into the early 1970s, when changes in the public perception of chemistry—in part resulting from environmental concerns and anti-war sentiment—damaged the image of the chemical enterprise. Nuclear power, which flourished in France, was increasingly on the defensive in the United States. Why the stark difference between the two countries? Not only words but also ways of seeing the world require translation, a risky but indispensable enterprise.

Brigitte Van Tiggelen is on the faculty of the Université catholique de Louvain and is the president of Mémosciences.
Neil Gussman is communications manager for the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

Meditation and Military Thinking

One of the very odd things about beginning meditation and yoga late in life is how they both tie back into and touch the life I lived before. 

Both practices are concerned with inner peace, which would not seem to connect with either my years as a soldier or my years as a competitor. 

But in the last year, the connections pop up in my practice of meditation and yoga, and I smile. 

In my beginner yoga classes we did several balance poses: tree, airplane, and others.  The key to doing these well is Drishti: focusing on a single point throughout the pose. 

No problem for me.  From bike racing, when I am climbing a long hill needing to maintain 95% of max heart rate, but not more, I focus on a point as high as I can see on the climb. I am going there. All of my effort is to get there, as smoothly as I can.

From firing a rifle, being able to focus, to be firmly grounded, my breath in control, is Drishti and puts me on target. 

Today's meditation was on attention and awareness.  Awareness is being able to perceive what is in my environment. Attention is focusing on one particular thing in my environment, even for a moment.  When I am on guard or security duty, I maintain awareness of the area around me with all my senses. When I sense something that is a threat or out of place, I put all my attention on that spot, even for a moment. 

Two people read the same book, watch the same movie, walk the same street and have a very different experience.  Meditation and yoga give me a peaceful perception of some very hostile environments from my life. And I feel joy.

The Funeral Oration of Pericles

I am re-reading Pericles in a book titled "How to Think About War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy."

There is more to the book than the "Funeral Oration of Pericles" but re-reading that speech made me aware, yet again, of what it means to be a patriot.

Some excerpts:

Such was the end of these men; they were worthy of Athens, and the living need not desire to have a more heroic spirit, although they may pray for a less fatal issue. The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words. Any one can discourse to you for ever about the advantages of a brave defense, which you know already. 

[They] freely gave their lives to her as the fairest offering which they could present.  The sacrifice which they collectively made was individually repaid to them; for they received again each one for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all tombs, I speak not of that in which their remains are laid, but of that in which their glory survives, and is proclaimed always and on every fitting occasion both in word and deed. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, written not on stone but in the hearts of men. 

Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness. 

To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope.

To you who are the sons and brothers of the departed, I see that the struggle to emulate them will be an arduous one. For all men praise the dead, and, however preeminent your virtue may be, I do not say even to approach them, and avoid living their rivals and detractors, but when a man is out of the way, the honor and goodwill which he receives is unalloyed. 

For where the rewards of virtue are greatest, there the noblest citizens are enlisted in the service of the state. And now, when you have duly lamented, every one his own dead, you may depart.

Chinook Helicopter Lifting a 105mm Howitzer, Part 2

Seven more views of lifting a 105mm howitzer with a CH-47 Chinook helicopter.

A Chinook Helicopter Lifting a 105mm Howitzer, Part 1

This sequence is the end of the process. I will post some more with details of the hook up. Photos were taken at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pa.

 Hanging on the bottom of the forward door guiding the pilot.

The Price of Leadership: An excerpt from "Master and Commander"

In Patrick O’Brian’s book“Master and Commander” the sixth chapter begins with the ship’s doctor on land thinking about how men age.  After college, in my early 30s, I decided that the price of taking power was far too high, so I determined to be a journeyman at writing rather than a leader.  Dr. Mathurin’s reflections fit my own experience and make me glad of my choice.  Mathurin is thinking about what happens to men as they age and become absorbed by their profession and set on a path by the cumulative effect of their choices. He sees middle age, around 40, as where the line is crossed and is talking specifically about a mid-career Lieutenant, James Dillon:

“It appears to me a critical time for him…a time that will settle him in that particular course he will never leave again, but will persevere in for the rest of his life.  It has often seemed to me that towards this period [middle age] … men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck into them. Merriment, roaring high spirits before this: then some chance concatenation, or some hidden predilection (or rather inherent bias) working through, and the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove or channel), until he is lost in his mere character—persona—no longer human, but an accretion of qualities belonging to this character.  

James Dillon was a delightful being. Now he is closing in. It is odd—will I say hear-breaking?—how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is the great enemy—the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority. The senior post-captains here…Shriveled men (shriveled in essence: not, alas, in belly). Pomp, an unwholesome diet…pleasure…at too high a price, like lying with a peppered paramour. Yet Lord Nelson, by (Captain) Jack Aubrey’s account, is as direct and unaffected and amiable a man as could be wished. So, indeed, in most ways is Jack Aubrey himself; though a certain careless arrogancy of power appears at times. His cheerfulness at all events is still with him.  

How long will it last? What woman, political cause, disappointment, wound, disease, untoward child, defeat, what strange surprising accident will take it all away? But I am concerned for James Dillon: he is as mercurial as he ever was—moreso—only now it is all ten octaves lower and in a darker key; and sometimes I am afraid in a black humour he will do himself a mischief. – page 202-3.

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