War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  ONCE THE SOVIET UNION had successfully produced Tabun at Chemical Works No. 91 in Stalingrad, it moved on to the more challenging task of manufacturing Sarin on an industrial scale. One of the chemical engineers who was deeply involved in developing the Sarin production process was Boris Libman. Although only twenty-seven years old when he joined the development team at Stalingrad, he had already overcome a lifetime’s worth of adversity.

  Born in 1922 to affluent Jewish parents in the Latvian capital of Riga, Boris had grown up during the brief period between the wars when Latvia and the other Baltic republics were independent and relatively prosperous. In 1940 the Red Army invaded Latvia; it was subsequently incorporated into the Soviet Union and the Soviet authorities confiscated the Libman family’s land and assets. Conscripted into the Red Army, Boris was wounded in a battle with the Germans near the Latvian border. After a year of rehabilitation, he was sent back to the front. During a major military operation south of Leningrad, he was severely injured and left for dead, but once again he miraculously survived his wounds.

  After his recovery, Libman received an honorable discharge as a disabled veteran and sought to resume his studies. He sent a letter to the Leningrad authorities requesting permission to study at the Moscow Institute of Chemistry. A few weeks later he received an official reply denying his request on the grounds that “Boris Libman” had been killed in action; the authorities apparently believed that he was trying to impersonate a fallen soldier. After much effort, Libman managed to persuade the officials of his true identity. He then began his studies in the military division of the Moscow Institute, where he obtained a candidate’s degree (equivalent to a master’s) in chemical engineering. A firm believer in the Communist Party, he wanted to do his part to contribute to the nation’s defense.

  In 1949, Libman was hired by Professor Soborovsky at the Stalingrad branch of Scientific Research Institute No. 42 (known by its Russian acronym NII-42) to assist with the development of an industrial-scale manufacturing process for Sarin. The Soviets had decided to adapt the German DMHP process, which involved the production of dichlor as an intermediate. Soborovsky and Libman began with laboratory studies and progressed to a pilot-scale facility, drawing on the knowledge of Dr. von Bock and the other captive German scientists from Dyhernfurth. Because the Germans had no love for their Soviet hosts, they provided information only grudgingly and often deliberately tried to mislead. Although Libman spoke fluent German, he pretended not to understand the language so that he could eavesdrop on the private conversations of the Dyhernfurth scientists and glean useful tidbits. Once the Soviet engineers had extracted as much information from the Germans as they could, Bock and his colleagues were sent back to West Germany in 1954.

  In May 1952, the Soviet Council of Ministers and the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a secret resolution authorizing the construction of a full-scale Sarin production facility at Chemical Works No. 91, with a planned capacity of 2,000 metric tons of agent per month. To implement this resolution, the engineers at Stalingrad faced a daunting series of bureaucratic hurdles. Importing foreign-made production equipment required the approval of the Council of Ministers, which was granted only if the requester could prove that an item could not be manufactured in the Soviet Union. Although much of the production apparatus for the Sarin plant had been confiscated from Dyhernfurth, some items had to be built from scratch, a difficult and time-consuming process. The first challenge was to obtain corrosion-resistant titanium and high-nickel steel, which were generally reserved for more favored industries, such as nuclear power, aircraft, and submarines. Because specialized materials were in short supply, Soborovsky had to persuade a committee reporting to the Council of Ministers that no substitutes were possible, a task that took several months.

  Once the materials had been secured, it was necessary to negotiate with the equipment manufacturers. The state-owned factories often insisted that a certain piece of apparatus could not be made with the available machine tools and demanded modifications in the design. Although Soborovsky tried to resist such demands, in the end he always had to compromise. Another anomaly of the Soviet centrally planned economy was that the price of machinery was determined strictly by weight, giving manufacturers no incentive to produce small lots of high-quality items. Instead they preferred to make large orders of simple, heavy equipment that could be produced easily and with high labor productivity. For this reason, Soborovsky had great difficulty obtaining specialized pieces of chemical production apparatus. Even when he got his way, he had to order larger quantities than he really needed.

  The Sarin plant at Stalingrad started out as a copy of the one at Dyhernfurth, but for reasons of national pride Soborovsky and Libman tried to improve on the German production process. In so doing, they ran into serious technical problems that resulted in lengthy delays. To get the development effort back on track, NII-42 in Moscow sent to Stalingrad a brilliant chemical engineer named Simion Levovich Varshavsky, but it took him several years to work out all the complexities of the Sarin manufacturing process. Although the development had begun in 1948, it was not until 1959—more than a decade later—that Chemical Works No. 91 was churning out large amounts of Sarin with a satisfactory level of purity and stability.

  The Sarin production plant consisted of a main technical building and three annexes, including a filling line where the nerve agent was loaded into artillery and mortar shells, aerial bombs, missile warheads, and spray tanks. To manage the plant operations, the Soviet government recruited young male engineers over eighteen years of age from the institutes of technology in Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, which had special programs to train specialists in chemical weapons production. After World War II, women could not work in chemical weapons plants and were restricted to auxiliary operations or laboratory research.

  Chemical Works No. 91 was a dual-purpose industrial complex in which chemical weapons accounted for about 35 percent of production and commercial chemicals for about 65 percent. The Soviet authorities had decided to integrate military and civilian activities at the sprawling site along the Volga in order to generate needed income and create a legitimate cover story tht would mislead foreign intelligence services. Moreover, many of the raw materials and intermediate chemicals used to make organophosphate pesticides and fire retardants could also serve as precursors in the manufacture of nerve agents.

  Field trials of Sarin-filled munitions took place at the Central Military Chemical Testing Site (“Polygon”) of the Red Army near the town of Shikhany on the Volga, some twenty kilometers northwest of the city of Volsk. Formerly known as Tomka, it was where the Soviet Union and Germany had secretly collaborated on chemical weapons development and testing from 1928 to 1933. In 1937–38, the Soviets had enlarged the polygon to an area of 600 square kilometers, an effort requiring the evacuation of four large towns, and in 1941–42 it had been expanded further, to 1,000 square kilometers.

  By the early 1950s, the Shikhany proving ground comprised a large laboratory complex, workshops, garages, administration buildings, pilot production facilities, storage bunkers, a test range, housing for the commandant and the station personnel, barracks for visiting experimental teams, stalls for experimental animals, a chemical school, a military hospital, and an airfield with hangars. The permanent staff numbered about 100 military officers, 850 noncommissioned officers and enlisted men, and 250 civilian chemists, physicians, biologists, and engineers. Visiting teams of five officers and 200 soldiers often visited Shikhany to conduct open-air trials of chemical weapons.

  MEANWHILE, an accidental discovery in the course of industrial pesticide development opened the way to a new class of chemical nerve agents. In 1951, during the Korean War, U.S. Army personnel delousing North Korean refugees and prisoners of war found that the lice had become resistant to DDT, which had first been marketed in 1942 by the Swiss firm Geigy. On learning that the world’s best-selling insecticide was losing its effectiveness, the major chemical compa
nies saw a lucrative market opportunity and launched an intensive effort to develop a substitute. One of these firms was Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), which had been formed in 1926 by the merger of four of Britain’s largest chemical concerns.

  In 1952, Dr. Ranajit Ghosh, a chemist of East Indian ancestry working in ICI’s Plant Protection Laboratory, and his colleague J. F. Newman synthesized a new organophosphate compound containing sulfur and nitrogen that was later marketed under the trade name Amiton. Although it proved to be a potent insecticide, particularly against the red spider mites that infest fruit trees, Amiton had the drawback of being a potent cholinesterase inhibitor that was quite toxic to humans. In early 1953, a Porton scientist presented toxicology data on Amiton and related compounds to a tripartite meeting of American, Canadian, and British military scientists.

  As often happens in science, chemists in other countries independently developed compounds that were structurally related to Amiton. One of those scientists was Gerhard Schrader, then working at Bayer in Leverkusen. He and his colleagues Ernst Schegk and Hanshelmut Schlör developed a new family of insecticides that had a basic molecular structure similar to that of Amiton and were effective against flies, mites, and leaf lice.

  Also in 1952, Lars-Erik Tammelin, a chemist at the Swedish Institute of Chemical Defense, discovered a class of sulfur-containing molecules with potent anticholinesterase activity that came to be known as the “Tammelin esters.” Although considerably more toxic than Tabun or Sarin, these compounds appeared to be too unstable for military use. Accordingly, in 1957 the Swedish government allowed Tammelin to publish his findings in the journal Acta Chemica Scandinavica.

  EVEN AS THE new generation of nerve agents was emerging from the laboratories, the British government intensified its research on the physiological effects of Sarin and the other G agents. This effort included extensive human experimentation under the Porton Down Volunteers Program, which dated back to 1916. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, British service members were encouraged to volunteer for nerve agent trials by the promise of extra pay and leave, yet they were not informed about the toxic effects of the chemicals being tested on them nor warned of the risk of lasting harm.

  The first nerve agent experiments on these “human guinea pigs” sought to determine the minimum dose of Sarin required to trigger miosis (pinpoint pupils) and the cumulative effects of low-level exposures. In 1950, Porton scientists began to test higher doses of Sarin on human subjects to measure the severity of initial symptoms, such as runny nose, headache, vomiting, miosis, and eye pain. A 1952 study sought to determine the effects of nerve agent on mental performance by exposing twenty airmen to Sarin vapor and then measuring how they performed on intelligence and aptitude tests. This experiment showed that low doses of nerve agents worsened visual coordination but had no effect on reasoning and intellectual ability.

  In May 1953, Porton scientists conducted a large trial on 396 men in order to estimate the dosage of Sarin and two other G-series nerve agents that, when applied to the skin, would cause incapacitation or death. The scientists planned to expose groups of volunteers to various sublethal amounts of the agents, measure the degree to which these exposures reduced the level of cholinesterase in the subjects’ blood, and then extrapolate from these data points to estimate the lethal dosage in man. Unfortunately, these experiments were based on the flawed assumption that a linear relationship existed between the depression of blood cholinesterase levels and the severity of clinical symptoms.

  One experiment in the series, conducted at Porton Down on May 6, 1953, aimed to determine the extent to which Sarin evaporated before it could penetrate the skin, including the effects of clothing on the rate of absorption. To maintain secrecy, the volunteers were misled into believing that they were helping to find a cure for the common cold. Ronald Maddison, a twenty-year-old Royal Signal Corps engineer from the town of Consett in County Durham, had decided to volunteer after seeing an advertisement stating that the study participants would not be harmed and would receive a payment of 15 shillings. Ronald planned to use the money to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend, Mary Pyle.

  Ronald Maddison, a twenty-year-old Royal Air Force engineer, died during a human trial of Sarin at the Porton Down chemical warfare establishment in England on May 6, 1953.

  In the research laboratory at Porton Down, Maddison and five other subjects were fitted with respirators and placed in a sealed gas chamber. The room was hot and airless, and the gas mask smelled strongly of rubber and created an unpleasant sense of claustrophobia. Beginning at 10:17 a.m., a technician deposited twenty drops, one at a time, on a swatch of material from an Army uniform that had been wrapped around each subject’s arm. Since a drop was equivalent to 10 milligrams of Sarin, twenty drops provided a cumulative dose of 200 milligrams. The subjects were then placed under observation for half an hour.

  Twenty minutes after receiving the drops of liquid on his arm, Maddison complained of feeling ill. Three minutes later, he slumped over and began to gasp audibly for breath. Concerned by this development, the scientists took the young man out of the chamber and removed his gas mask, but Maddison’s condition continued to worsen. He went deaf, started to wheeze as if suffering from a bad asthma attack, and suddenly fell to the floor and began to convulse. Finally recognizing the seriousness of the situation, the scientists injected Maddison with atropine and called for an ambulance.

  Alfred Thornhill, a nineteen-year-old national service trainee, had arrived at Porton Down a few days earlier for a month-long posting as an orderly with the base ambulance service. On the morning of May 6, 1953, he answered an emergency call to the research laboratory and witnessed a scene that would haunt him for the rest of his life. A young man about his age, in blue RAF trousers and a boiler suit, lay unconscious on the floor outside the gas chamber, his body thrashing with violent spasms while several scientists in white coats looked on helplessly. Although Thornhill had seen epileptic seizures before, the young man’s convulsions were much more violent, as if he were being electrocuted. The muscles under his skin were vibrating visibly and a thick foam, resembling frog spawn or tapioca, poured from his open mouth. Almost as terrifying was the look of panic in the scientists’ eyes.

  Thornhill and his fellow orderlies loaded the young man’s still-shaking body into the ambulance and sped to the medical unit at Porton, arriving shortly before 11:00 a.m. As Thornhill wheeled the gurney into the clinic, he could smell the sour odor of sweat and fear. The emergency unit had been cleared of other patients, and several doctors and scientists in white coats were waiting around the bed, looking pale and distraught. After the orderlies placed the inert body on the bed, a doctor injected more antidote into Maddison’s thigh and administered oxygen, but the young man’s heart had stopped beating and he had no pulse.

  Watching in horrified fascination, Thornhill saw a bluish tint appear at the young man’s exposed ankle and spread slowly up his white leg, as if a blue liquid were being poured into a glass. The Sarin overdose had constricted Maddison’s bronchial tubes and blocked the flow of air to his lungs, starving his brain and tissues of oxygen. As Thornhill stood gaping, a doctor filled a large syringe with adrenaline and plunged the needle into the young man’s chest in a desperate attempt to restart his heart. At that point, a nurse screamed at the orderlies to leave.

  The next morning, Thornhill was deeply saddened to learn that the unnamed patient had died. He was ordered to pick up the body at the Porton medical unit. When he arrived at the clinic, which reeked of disinfectant, a sullen doctor called him into an office, ordered him to sign a security form, and warned that if he ever spoke as much as a word about what he had seen, he would be put away for years. The doctor then ordered him to drive the body to the mortuary at Salisbury Hospital, taking a circuitous route along the back roads. Although troubled by the secrecy and intrigue surrounding the young man’s death, Thornhill was deeply cowed and decided to keep his mouth shut. Still, having recently beco
me engaged, he could not help wondering if the poor fellow had a wife or girlfriend, and if she would ever learn what had happened to him.

  The British Home Office ordered an inquest into Ronald Maddison’s death, which was kept secret on grounds of national security. Ten days after the fatal experiment, the inquest concluded that the subject’s death had been accidental (“misadventure”) and that the Ministry of Defence could not have predicted the fatal outcome. In fact, there was evidence to the contrary: a few days before Maddison’s death, another volunteer named John Kelly had nearly died during a similar experiment.

  Only one member of the Maddison family—the deceased’s father, John—was allowed to attend the official government inquest. The authorities swore him to secrecy and allowed him to say only that Ronald’s death had been “an unfortunate accident while on duty.” Maddison’s mother, Jane, and his four brothers and sisters received neither an explanation nor an apology for his death. For two years after the tragic incident, Porton Down suspended all testing of nerve agents on human subjects while an expert committee chaired by Professor E. D. Adrian, a physiologist at the University of Cambridge, developed a set of guidelines for human experimentation with nerve agents. From then on, trials were allowed to resume at lower doses.

  WHILE THE SARIN pilot plant at Nancekuke was under construction in the early 1950s, the British armed forces prepared a military requirement for a nerve agent stockpile that would help to offset the Soviet Union’s marked superiority in conventional armed forces in Europe. According to a memorandum by the British Chiefs of Staff, nerve agents were “likely to be particularly effective against armoured vehicles, since a nerve gas shell can produce death or severe disability to the crew of a tank without penetration of the armour. In addition, nerve gas weapons can fill an outstanding need for a land weapon for tactical use against the Russian Hordes.”