Fritz Haber: A Monster Who Fed the World

There is no doubt that if he had not solved the nitrogen-fixing problem, someone else would have, and it is certainly possible that someone else would have pushed the use of poison gas into practice. It is also generally simplistic to claim that any one thing greatly prolonged the war. 'Great men' and 'pivotal event' historiography is a simplistic way of looking at the past, but nevertheless, it is a simple historical fact that he was the person who did these two things, and the case for nitrogen-fixing extending the war is better than most other 'but for...' stories.

What the article takes pains to point out though was that despite competing gas technology, Haber not only invented but actively persuaded the German army to use it as an instrument of war. He did so in direct contravention not only to the rules of engagement at the time, but even the moral objections of his wife. This laid the groundwork for scientists in Nazi Germany to not only contribute their knowledge to war's death machine without remorse, but to feel compelled to do so as a moral good.

To put some of this into context, there were a lot of people saying that the world was going to run out of food soon and we couldn't sustain our growing population. It'd be as if someone today invented a solution to global warming, it was a problem everyone knew about and worried about to some extend.

It seems that he was lobbying hard for the use of the gas.

He did it though. Assuming that anyone else could have done it or would have done is a bit presumptuous.

Look at the history of sound recording[0] for example. You can see that the technology that made it possible existed for years and years before anyone attempted such a feat. Now imagine if the first one who decided to record audio never done it would you think that we will be where we are now because "For sure someone would have done it" argument? I highly doubt that.

What bugs me though is what are the things that could exist right now but are not because someone still didn't think about them.

This has nothing to do with Hollywood. Looking at it from that perspective is blind to history and human accomplishment. That's (part of) what our species... does. Is it a good or a bad thing? This would be a very different planet - perhaps without computers or centralized governments or much else, if societies did not place considerable blame or praise on individuals or small groups for large events or discoveries.

The story isn’t about ammonia; it’s about Haber.

"@but there is this Hollywood simplistic approach where one man is responsible for all things [..] I don't subscribe to this way of looking into historical figures"

I applaud you for that, this gives some hope that not all is lost. A real historian can only be someone who loves the truth ( .. more than his personal well-beign)

I second this recommendation.

It also covers Carl Bosch, who took Haber’s process and industrialized it at BASF. Haber got the process to work in a small bespoke quartz reactor, which obviously wouldn’t scale.

Thomas Hager wrote that book along with “The Demon under the Microscope”. Excellent works.

"Someone else would have found a way to bind nitrogen without him and so feed billions of people in the end."

The same logic that wipes out his achievement could also absolve him of his sin. Certainly someone else would have also invented chlorine gas.

Based on the little I've read of him I agree that he doesn't sound like a great guy (though I certainly don't know enough to really have an informed opinion). But, more generally, I oppose the notion that summarizing someone is as simple as a toggle switch between good and bad; I think that's too reductionist. Humans are (and the world is) more complicated than that.

> Yet, most of today's populus have barely enough to eat. So, ultimataly the problem remains unsolved, or it shifted even.

That is a distribution problem, though. Up to 50% of the food produced around the world never reaches a human stomach.

See: https://www.imeche.org/docs/default-source/default-document-...

> such unspeakable things that all the good stuff instantly fades

Well, in 50-100 years noone would really care about atrocities of ww2, just like almost noone cares about ww1 now, and literary noone about the atrocities of the wars before ww1.

But "the world-changing things" will stay, and the people who created these things will be remembered

> Yet, most of today's populus have barely enough to eat.

That's simply not true.

Global levels of hunger are at their lowest point in human history.

As of 2016 ~10% of the world's population is undernourished.

https://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-fa...

If you believe that "most of today's populus have barely enough to eat" there is a good chance you have a much more dismal view of the world than actually exists.

I'd recommend checking out http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

Those soldiers he killed were only there to kill Germans. Of course they were going to fight back. What difference does it make what weapon they use?

I think from his perspective he was just trying his best to help his country win the war. As did many of the US scientists involved in the Manhattan project. For both cases one can argue that their deeds brought great suffering to people. And in both cases you can make the point that a faster way to end a war might have saved thousands of others from the same fate.

I think you underestimate your capacity to commit a bad deed if you're in a situation to do so.

> Yet, most of today's populus have barely enough to eat

That is simply untrue. Not even close to to true. The world has grown from ~1 billion to ~7.5 billion, and we have reduced - in raw numbers - those in extreme poverty. A large part of that is down to Haber.

It’s by no way given that they would during WWI and maybe the war would have been a few years shorter without his explosives and gas.

And maybe a shorter war would havve led to less humiliation of Germany afterwards so that WWII wouldn’t have happened.

> Yet, most of today's populus have barely enough to eat.

But today, this is a political problem, not a scientific one. After all, the world produces more than enough food for everyone.

Well, good thing is we're all getting an object lesson right now. Watch North Korea and the U.S. interact.

That is how war happens. Leaders who for various reasons taunt and provoke each other, implementing what to either populace seems a reasonable policy. (NK would like to be able to defend against the US, so they get nukes. The US would like to not be nuked, so they agitate strongly against them). Alas, these policies are in conflict, so tensions rise.

At some point, a small event - a misunderstanding, a border skirmish, etc - happens. In the context of already ratcheted up tensions, it spirals out of control because everybody feels the need to react quickly, before the other side escalates.

Nobody says "over my dead body". Everybody takes the next step, a step that's entirely reasonable from their perspective, but opens up "reasonable" steps for the other side. The core problem is that neither side considers the needs of the other side.

Peace requires active communication to constantly de-escalate and compromise, from both sides. An interest in a common good. War is what happens when you lose that and move to self-interest.

If you ever get to go to to the south-west of Belgium and visit Ypres, there is an absolutely fantastic exhibit on the Great War in the Cloth Hall. The first part of it describes the late 1800s extreme nationalism and build-up to the war with very harrowing finality and a sense that the ball that caused the war had started rolling decades before its outbreak and was unstoppable by the turn of the century. I had a genuine sense of helplessness in the face of that as I finished that stage of the exhibit and went into the part regarding the period of the war itself.

It is probably one of the most memorable (in the literal sense of the term) exhibits regarding the War that I've seen. I absolutely recommend it.

Highly recommend you check out The Great War series on Youtube. Even if you just watch the prologue to the war videos, very informative on how WW1 got kicked off.

Short answer: nationalism and a lot of treaties and grudges from past wars.

> how war happens

Orwell captured one way total war can happen: a powerful small group of people gains control of a propaganda apparatus, and uses control of messaging to divide a country, or turn a country against a demonized minority group or external rival.

That happened with Mao, with Hitler, with Stalin, with Mussolini. Today’s challenge is ensuring that the propaganda arms created by Murdoch and Mercer and Koch don’t do that to America.

"I don’t really understand how and why war happens."

I think we don't really know. We know that greed plays a role, but it is not always the case of someone stronger attacking someone weaker.

In Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, this is shortly discussed. IIRC he says that no reason put forward as an explanation for war can be conclusively proven from the available data (he mentions some war databases containing over 20k conflicts of more than 100 people each).

So, I think, unfortunately, conflict is like rain. You know that condensation is the cause, yet you can't really predict when and with what intensity it will happen. But you know it will.

I think generally, long wars are a mistake.

My hypothesis. Party A wants Thing from party B. Moreover, party A things they could take it by force. Even if party B things they couldn't defend Thing, they can't just give it, because that sets a wrong precedent. Party B relies on being able to exact a very high toll should party A try to get thing.

Rationally, you don't declare a war you don't expect to win. So, in the above scenario, when part A declares war, they expect that party B cannot exact a high enough toll for Thing. When they do, it was a mistake.

The alternative are wars for 'moral' reasons, which are mostly about retribution or saving face. This is essentially how the murder of a prince lead escalated to a war that became WW1.

> I don’t really understand how and why war happens.

The error you are making is that you are thinking in terms of groups or states.

Think of these people as individuals. Quite simply, some individual people wanted war to fulfill their political/personal ambitions and think war can make them happen. They really don't care much about the people who die. Its quite as simple as that.

So the army marches because from their perspective a legit government said, because it is in the interest of the country, plus they get payed.

The defenders are just defending their home country because they don't want to see it destroyed.

WW1 is really that simple.

Not only humanity itself. Feeding the world and letting humans grow from ~1 billion to ~8 billion certainly endangered/made many species go extinct. There is no such thing as a free meal, really.

OP here. Wow thanks for all the replies and views on why war happens.

I guess you could always explain any war by listing all the events that came righ before, but I don’t think that answers another question, which is this:

Why is it “ok” for governments to hire huge groups of people to murder other people, when murder is not ok in other settings? This is an obvious legal and moral contradiction right?

In the case of World War I, Otto von Bismarck put together an interlocking set of alliances to forge the German Empire. Unfortunately, Wilhelm II was not as capable (I'm being nice--Wilhelm II was an idiot), and didn't know how to manage this properly.

It is, of course, possible that even Bismarck could not have continued to manage them given the strains of nationalism that he set in motion. However, Bismarck was very motivated to maintain the peace rather than motivated to engage in war and that served Germany very well for a remarkably long time.

Even worse, Bismarck understood about not letting things get out of hand. He was quoted in 1898--"One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans"