As the D-Day anniversary approaches, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, Frank J Dinan, has revealed what could have happened if Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had used the deadly nerve gas Tabun.
According to Professor Dinan, had Hitler used Tabun, the Allies could have been forced back into the sea with enormous casualties.
He further goes on to say that the political repercussions of a D-Day defeat for U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and commander-in-chief Dwight Eisenhower, the three men most responsible for the Normandy landings would have been devastating.
He also believed the war would have been prolonged and could have resulted in the Allies using their still developing atomic bombs against Germany rather than Japan.
Seeing Tabun’s effectiveness as a weapon and the lack of an Allied response, Hitler certainly would have used it against the Russians.
The Tabun story began on December 23, 1936, when a single drop of that newly-made chemical fell to the floor of a laboratory in Germany.
The two men working there immediately suffered diminished vision, labored breathing and a loss of muscle control.
Ironically, Tabun was made to be an insecticide that was toxic to insects but harmless to humans.
The Nazis government required that all discoveries of potential military value be passed along to them.
The men’s employer, the giant IG Farben Corporation, complied, and its representatives were soon called to Berlin to discuss Tabun with the military.
Demonstrations of Tabun’s lethal effects at extraordinarily low concentrations made its potential as a devastating weapon obvious. Everything about Tabun was immediately classified as top secret and few were aware of its existence.
A weapon oriented Tabun research program began and construction of a plant designed for its production soon started. By mid 1943 thousands of tons of Tabun had been produced, loaded into artillery shells and bombs that were moved to storage sites throughout Germany.
The secrecy that surrounded Tabun was so effective that the Allies had no hint of its existence and had no comparable weapons to retaliate with if the Nazis used it.
Nerve agents such as Tabun, are among the deadliest chemicals ever devised and are now classified as weapons of mass destruction by the United Nations.
