More than ten million poison gas' shells, mortar bombs, etc., lie hidden in Europe, many of them relics from World War I. Some were fired and failed to detonate, others were abandoned in old ammunition dumps. Most retain their load of chemical warfare (CW) agents. They are turned up daily in the course of farming and construction. Many European nations have permanent departments concerned with their collection and destruction. Old munitions, when discovered, are usually heavily corroded and difficult to identify. Is it a CW munition? Or an explosive? If CW, what agent does it contain? Once identified, one has to select a destruction method. Some of the methods that have been proposed are less than perfect, and are often complicated by the presence of extraneous chemicals, either mixed with the CW agents during manufacture or formed over decades in the ground. Of particular interest are the insiders' reports on the German CW programmes of both World Wars, and the current status of Russian chemical armaments.

Enzymes in Action is a timely survey of a modern development in organic chemistry. It is clear that bioreagents demand that organic chemists think in a different way. If they do so, they will open up new avenues of exciting, new chemistry that will permit problems to be solved in an elegant way. The first section covers the concepts necessary to understand enzymes in molecular operations. The second section covers heteroatom enzyme chemistry, with considerable attention being given to the use of enzymes in the detoxification of chemical warfare agents and their application in environmental problems. The final section highlights the strategic use of enzymes in organic chemistry. It is clear that the term green chemistry' is appropriate, since enzyme mediated processes occur under mild, environmentally benign conditions, and enzymes enable chemists to perform new chemical operations that would otherwise be difficult to achieve at all.

More than ten million poison gas' shells, mortar bombs, etc., lie hidden in Europe, many of them relics from World War I. Some were fired and failed to detonate, others were abandoned in old ammunition dumps. Most retain their load of chemical warfare (CW) agents. They are turned up daily in the course of farming and construction. Many European nations have permanent departments concerned with their collection and destruction. Old munitions, when discovered, are usually heavily corroded and difficult to identify. Is it a CW munition? Or an explosive? If CW, what agent does it contain? Once identified, one has to select a destruction method. Some of the methods that have been proposed are less than perfect, and are often complicated by the presence of extraneous chemicals, either mixed with the CW agents during manufacture or formed over decades in the ground. Of particular interest are the insiders' reports on the German CW programmes of both World Wars, and the current status of Russian chemical armaments.