Glycerine and explosives: the whales killed for the nitroglycerine of two wars

During the First World War, the British government classified whale oil among the products critical to national defence. This was neither to light the trenches nor to feed the troops. It was to make explosives.

From blubber to nitroglycerine

The link turns on a molecule that is always left out of the list of whale products: glycerol.

Every animal or vegetable fat is an assembly of three fatty acids attached to a glycerol backbone. When that fat is saponified, that is, reacted with a base to produce soap, the fatty acids go into the soap and the glycerol remains. It was therefore not a production target but a by-product, recovered and refined.

Nitrated glycerol gives nitroglycerine, the basis of Alfred Nobel’s dynamite and, above all, mixed with nitrocellulose, of the smokeless powders that propel the shells and bullets of all modern artillery. British cordite contained about 58% of it in its original formulation.

In other words, every tonne of whale oil turned into soap released enough to supply a munitions factory.

Why the whale and not something else

The question is a fair one, since any fatty substance yields glycerol. The answer is geopolitical.

The main pre-war sources of fat were tropical oilseeds, groundnut, palm and copra, carried along sea routes that the blockade and submarine warfare made uncertain. Domestic tallow was not enough. Whales, by contrast, were taken in the South Atlantic and the Antarctic, aboard ships one controlled oneself, and a single season brought back tens of thousands of tonnes.

The consequence for price was direct. Both wars sent the price of whale oil soaring, which made profitable expeditions that would otherwise have been marginal. Our page on whale oil traces the rest of this economy.

A dual-use industry

It is worth measuring what this changes in the usual account of whaling.

The same South Georgia station, the same factory ship, the same carcass produced margarine for civilians and glycerol for shells at the same time. The two markets were not competing but complementary, one taking up the fatty acids, the other the residue. This is a dual-use supply chain in the strict sense, and the strategic interest of states sustained whaling well beyond what food demand alone would have justified.

It also explains why the whaling nations defended their fleets so insistently between the wars. A whaling fleet was a strategic reserve of fat, available in the event of conflict, in the same way as a stock of petroleum.

The end of the dependence

Two developments undid this link after 1945.

Petrochemistry first: from the 1940s and 1950s, glycerol has been synthesised industrially from propylene, without passing through any fat at all. Then the chemistry of propellants, which has moved gradually away from nitroglycerine-based powders for the most modern military uses.

The military outlet for whale oil therefore disappeared before the food outlet, and well before the 1986 moratorium. It is one more case, in this history, where the whale was saved by an industrial substitute rather than by a political decision. Our whaling statistics show that the peaks in catches coincide closely with these periods of high demand.

This page is part of our dossier on whale products.