The Science of Stephen King

What was the chemical spill Stephen King was referring to? The Dugway sheep incident took place in 1968 in Utah when six thousand sheep were killed due to chemical and biological weapons testing. The Dugway Proving Ground had been testing nerve agents in the days prior. One test involved the firing of a chemical artillery shell, another the burning of 160 gallons of nerve agent in an open-air pit, and a jet aircraft spraying nerve agent in a target area.2 Although the sheep were grazing twenty-seven miles west of the testing area, over six thousand died as a result of the nerve agent. Answers about the incident aren’t definitive, but some people believe a malfunction of a nozzle could explain what happened.

The Dugway Proving Ground is a US Army facility established to test biological and chemical weapons.

Scythian archers infected their arrows by dipping them in decomposing bodies or in blood mixed with manure as far back as 400 BC.3

Biological warfare is another theme that inspired Stephen King to write The Stand. Although it seems like a modern-day invention, biological warfare is not a new tactic. One of the first recorded instances of this type of warfare took place in 1155 when Emperor Barbarossa poisoned a water well with human bodies in Tortona, Italy. In 1346, Mongols catapulted bodies of plague victims over the city walls of Caffa in the Crimean Peninsula. The Spanish mixed wine with blood of leprosy patients to sell to their French foes in Italy in 1495 while the Polish fired saliva they took from rabid dogs at their enemies in 1650. In the United States, the British distributed blankets from smallpox patients to indigenous people in 1763 to try to get them to spread the disease unknowingly. The effectiveness of this last example is unknown, but experts speculate it wasn’t successful because smallpox is spread more efficiently through the respiratory system. In 1797, Napoleon flooded the plains around Mantua, Italy, to try to spread malaria and in 1863, Confederates sold clothing from yellow fever and smallpox patients to Union troops in the United States to spread disease.

More recent biological weapons include the development and deployment of anthrax and sarin gas. Anthrax inhalation is often fatal. Initial signs and symptoms of inhalation of anthrax include flu-like symptoms, shortness of breath, nausea, coughing up blood, fever, and possible meningitis. In 2001, twenty-two people got anthrax through letters that were sent through the mail and five of them died. Sarin gas was initially developed in 1938 in Germany as a pesticide. According to Dr. Lewis Nelson from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School:

Sarin targets an enzyme within the body’s neuromuscular junctions, where nerves meet muscles. Usually, this enzyme deactivates the nerve-signaling molecule acetylcholine. But sarin stops this deactivation by blocking the enzyme. Without the enzyme to switch it off, acetylcholine will repeatedly stimulate nerve cell receptors. This can lead acetylcholine to build up in the muscles, cause excessive twitching and then result in paralysis. If the muscles that control breathing become paralyzed, the person can die.4

Sarin gas was most recently used in the 2017 attacks in Syria resulting in the deaths of at least eighty-six people, including twenty-eight children.

According to a study published in theAmerican Journal of Medicine, researchers found that lifetime protection is obtained from just one vaccination, even when that vaccination occurred as much as eighty-eight years ago.5

The pandemic that wipes out nearly all of the human population in The Stand is far deadlier than any to hit the globe so far. What exactly is a pandemic? The word pandemic comes from the Greek pandemos meaning “pertaining to all people.” Outbreaks of diseases that cross international borders are considered pandemics including cholera, bubonic plague, smallpox, and influenza. Smallpox, which has killed between three hundred to five hundred million people in its twelve-thousand-year existence, is one of the deadliest. Smallpox is a virus that begins with fever, aches and pains, and sometimes vomiting. A rash will appear that starts as small red spots on the tongue and in the mouth. Next, the rash will appear on the skin and will usually spread to all parts of the body within twenty-four hours. Thanks to the smallpox vaccination, the World Health Assembly declared the disease eradicated in 1980.