Word: cacodylic
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Chicago businessmen who attended their Executives Club luncheon at the Hotel Sherman last week expected their scientific guest to give them a bland, postprandial lecture on science's present accomplishments. He gave them instead a disturbing intimation of horrible death-by describing the effects of the gas cacodyl isocyanide...
...Cacodyl isocyanide, new, vicious compound of poisonous cyanogen, kills instantly. It would, he commented with juggernaut impassivity, "destroy armies as a man might snuff out a candle. . . . War, if it comes again, and is to be deadly, will never again be fought with shot & shell. It can't be, for it is too much cheaper to destroy life wholesale with this new gas. It may be manufactured at the rate of thousands of tons a day and it costs much less than powder & cannon, yet it will destroy armies more thoroughly, more effectively, and more cheaply...
Major General Amos Alfred Fries, who as Chief of the Chemical War Service should know most of such matters, treated Dr. Jones' alarums as rustlings from a mares' nest. The service, said he, had not asked that news of cacodyl isocyanide be squelched, for it knows nothing...
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