War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  In December 1952, British military planners estimated that because of the diluting effects of wind, weather, and terrain, it would be necessary to disperse about one metric ton of Sarin per square kilometer to inflict 25 percent casualties on unmasked enemy troops. Calculated in terms of munitions, delivering a ton of Sarin would require about 300 heavy (155 mm) artillery shells or about seven 500-pound bombs. Accordingly, an adequate war reserve of Sarin-filled weapons would consist of 7,600 cluster bombs and 10,000 aerial bombs. Producing a stockpile of that size would require a full-scale plant with an output of fifty metric tons of Sarin per week. At that rate, meeting the British military requirement would take about a year of sustained production, after which the plant could be placed in “mothballs” until the outbreak of war required its remobilization.

  In 1953, however, technical problems and financial pressures caused the British government to rethink the planned construction of a full-scale Sarin plant at Nancekuke. With the end of the Korean War and the easing of international tensions, chemical weapons were no longer considered an urgent defense priority, and the plans were put on hold. Apart from the high cost of the plant, the delays in development meant that the Royal Air Force would not be able to procure a stockpile of Sarin-filled bombs until 1955 or later.

  At this juncture, the United States offered some assistance. Washington had a clear interest in helping its closest ally to acquire a more modern chemical arsenal, bolstering deterrence of the Soviet Union. The U.S. government proposed to sell Britain a stockpile of bombs containing 2,500 tons of Sarin—equivalent to a one-month war reserve—at a cost of $10 million, on the condition that the British would replace the stocks when they began manufacturing their own. By purchasing the American weapons, the RAF would be able to acquire an operational nerve agent capability years earlier than would otherwise be possible. In April 1953, the British Ministry of Defence expressed interest in the American offer and inquired whether the U.S. Air Force could provide the bulk of the weapons in the form of cluster bombs standardized to British requirements.

  By September 1953, however, the U.S. government had begun to distance itself from the proposed deal. One reason was that the Chemical Corps was having trouble getting the dichlor production facility at Muscle Shoals to work properly and had therefore fallen far behind its own Sarin production schedule. According to a memorandum by K. N. Crawford, the chairman of the British Chemical Warfare Sub-Committee,

  So far little progress seems to have been made in our approaches to the Americans, and I personally feel that there is small chance of a favourable solution to the problem on these lines. The American development of a satisfactory production process has met a very sticky passage and I have good reason to believe that they are looking to us to prove our own superior production process. In addition, the transport of this highly dangerous material from America presents major difficulties and will undoubtedly be an expensive business. . . .

  It therefore seems to me that a firm decision is needed in principle whether we must have these chemical weapons in our armoury or not. Doubts have been expressed whether we should spend large sums of money on weapons which we are pledged by international convention not to use in war. I cannot, however, conceive that in a major war where atomic weapons are used, such a weapon as nerve gas would remain excluded for long. It seems to me that the important thing to decide is whether nerve gas weapons are likely to prove a sufficiently powerful adjunct to the equipment of the Army and the Tactical Air Force to be worth the expenditure involved.

  On March 1, 1954, Lieutenant Colonel C. A. Morgan, Jr., an official at Edgewood Arsenal (temporarily renamed the U.S. Army Chemical Center), wrote a memo pointing out the drawbacks of supplying 2,500 tons of Sarin to Britain immediately. At the current rate of production, fulfilling the British order would delay meeting the U.S. stockpile requirement for another six months. Morgan also estimated that the cost of 2,500 tons of Sarin would be $20 million, rather than the $10 million that Washington had quoted. The higher figure was in line with the price paid by the U.S. Navy of $4.00 per pound. In April 1954, the British Cabinet’s Defence Committee finally dropped the idea of purchasing a war reserve of Sarinfilled bombs from the United States and instead authorized the construction of a full-scale production facility at Nancekuke. Until that factory went on line, the Sarin pilot plant, which had begun operation in January, would produce enough agent for field trials.

  FRANCE ALSO MOVED forward with nerve agent production. Chemical engineers at the Centre d’Études du Bouchet (CEB) built a pilot plant that, from 1950 to 1952, produced twenty metric tons of Tabun for testing purposes. Nerve agent trials continued at B2-Namous in Algeria and at three testing sites in metropolitan France: the Camp de Mourmelon near Reims, Cazaux in the Landes region south of Bourdeaux, and Bourges in central France.

  In November 1951, the General Staff of the French Army created a new Special Weapons Command [Commandement des Armes Spéciales], which was responsible for all matters relating to the acquisition and use of chemical, biological, and nuclear arms. Its first commander was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ailleret, a hero of the French resistance who had survived a period of imprisonment in Buchenwald concentration camp. To coordinate all chemical weapons research-and-development efforts, in August 1952 the French Army established the Commission for Chemical and Biological Studies and Experiments (Commission des Études et Expérimentations Chimiques et Bactériologiques) under the direction of the Special Weapons Command.

  In the early 1950s, chemists at the CEB succeeded in synthesizing Sarin. France also collaborated on nerve agent research and development with Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1956, however, the defense minister, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, launched the French nuclear weapons program, which soon siphoned resources away from chemical and biological weapons development. Members of the Commission for Chemical and Biological Studies and Experiments criticized the budget cuts, especially in view of the rapid advances being made in the chemical weapons field by both the Soviet Union and the United States.

  ALTHOUGH ICI MARKETED Amiton commercially in 1954, the new insecticide soon proved too dangerous for routine agricultural use. Not only was it a potent cholinesterase inhibitor that caused pinpoint pupils, shortness of breath, and other symptoms of organophosphate poisoning, but it was highly persistent in the environment and could readily enter the user’s bloodstream through the skin. In view of these “toxicological disadvantages,” ICI was forced to withdraw Amiton from the market. The same properties that deprived the insecticide of commercial value made it attractive for military use, however, and Porton Down put the compound and its structural relatives through a battery of tests. Because the members of the Amiton family were highly toxic and readily penetrated the skin— characteristics similar to those of snake venom—these compounds were named V agents, for “venomous.” From then on, all compounds of the Amiton class were identified with a two-letter code beginning with V, using the same convention developed earlier for the G-series agents. (Amiton itself, for example, was designated VG.)

  Preparations also continued in Britain for the production of Sarin at Nancekuke. In 1955, anticipating the construction of a full-scale manufacturing facility, the pilot plant was shut down after having produced some 20 metric tons of agent over two years of operation. Technicians decontaminated and mothballed the equipment to preserve the option of restarting it in the future. In 1956, however, the Cabinet Defence Committee abandoned its plan to mass-produce Sarin and, in a major shift in policy, renounced the possession of an active chemical weapons stockpile. (A decade earlier, London had decided to retain the existing stocks of mustard and phosgene weapons until nerve agents became available.) The considerations that led to this landmark decision were largely financial. As a party to the 1925 Geneva Protocol, Britain could not justify the expense of developing a means of warfare that it was legally prohibited from using except for retaliation. Having tested its first atomic bomb in 1952, the British government now
chose to rely on nuclear weapons to deter any Soviet use of chemical arms. As a consequence of this policy shift, a large fraction of the research staff at Nancekuke was laid off in 1957 and 1958.

  Even after Britain renounced the possession of an active chemical weapons stockpile in 1956, scientists at Porton Down remained involved in nerve agent research and development and continued to collaborate with their American and Canadian colleagues under the Tripartite Agreement and the U.S.-U.K. Mutual Weapons Development Program. The rationale was that the British government sought to retain the know-how to manufacture G and V agents, both to test defensive equipment and as an insurance policy should the nation’s defense ever require the acquisition of a nerve agent stockpile. Washington also remained an eager customer for British innovations in military chemical technology.

  ON MARCH 15, 1956, President Eisenhower approved an amended decision memorandum on “Basic National Security Policy” that had been prepared by the staff of the National Security Council. Designated NSC-5602/1, this top secret document moved for the first time beyond the existing retaliation-only policy for chemical warfare. The operative paragraph 12 read: “To the extent that the military effectiveness of the armed forces will be enhanced by their use, the United States will be prepared to use chemical and bacteriological weapons in general war. The decision as to their use will be made by the President.” If time and circumstance allowed, the United States would consult with its allies before resorting to this option.

  The 1956 memorandum gave future U.S. presidents the flexibility either to employ chemical weapons strictly for retaliation or to initiate their use during a conventional war. Moreover, whereas President Roosevelt had publicly declared the retaliation-only policy, the new posture set out in NSC-5602/1 was classified. For Eisenhower, who remained personally committed to “no first use,” the purpose of the policy shift was to encourage research and development on chemical and biological weapons so as to ensure an adequate retaliatory capability. Nevertheless, by implementing the recommendations in the Stevenson report, the Army and the Air Force acquired the capability to employ chemical weapons early in an armed conflict.

  In the fall of 1956, a high-level civilian advisory panel headed by Otto N. Miller, a vice president of Standard Oil of California, recommended to Secretary of the Army Wilber M. Brucker that chemical weapons had a proper place in military planning and should be developed for “actual use” if necessary. Not long after the submission of the Miller report, the Department of Defense issued a top secret directive on October 6, 1956, stating that the military services should maintain a comprehensive research-and-development effort on chemical weapons, including field testing, with an emphasis on exploitation of the V-series agents and the “development of munitions that will achieve optimal large area dispersion and dissemination of nerve gases by aircraft and missiles scheduled to be available in 1960 and beyond.”

  The Army’s interest in the possible first use of chemical weapons was also reflected in a new edition of the Field Manual on the Law of Land Warfare, published in 1956 but not made public until 1959. The section on chemical warfare included the following categorical statement: “The United States is not a party to any treaty, now in force, that prohibits the use in warfare of toxic or nontoxic gases. The Geneva Protocol for the prohibition of the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases, and of bacteriological means of warfare, is not binding on this country.”

  In 1957, after three years of full-scale manufacturing activity, the U.S. military’s stockpile requirements for Sarin had finally been met. The production lines at Muscle Shoals and Rocky Mountain Arsenal were shut down in July and August, respectively, and both plants were placed in mothballs so that they could be restarted in the future should additional quantities of Sarin be required. In the meantime, the Army leased out part of Rocky Mountain Arsenal to the Shell Chemical Company for the production of the insecticides Aldrin and Dieldrin.

  Even after the large-scale manufacture of Sarin came to an end, the toxic legacy of the program remained. Because of the intense pressure at the height of the Cold War to turn out thousands of tons of Sarin “product,” little effort had been made to control pollution. Environmental laws were weak during the 1950s, and the Army and Shell Chemical exploited the secrecy surrounding the nerve agent program to cut corners even further. As a result, the toxic by-products of Sarin and pesticide production were simply buried in unlined pits on the grounds of Rocky Mountain Arsenal or pumped into “Basin F,” a ninety-three-acre artificial pond lined with asphalt and sand. It was assumed that evaporation would gradually decontaminate the foul-smelling, coffee-colored brew of toxic wastes.

  In fact, the environmental problems at the arsenal only worsened over time. Migrating waterfowl that had the misfortune to land on the wastewater pond were poisoned and died, and hazardous chemicals that had been buried in landfills seeped into the ground, contaminating water supplies outside the arsenal fence. Wells in south Adams County became tainted with methylphosphonic acid, a Sarin breakdown product. In one incident, a farmer sprayed fifty acres of sugar beets with toxic well water, killing his entire crop. By the late 1950s, the several hundred acres at the heart of Rocky Mountain Arsenal had acquired the dubious distinction of being the most polluted piece of real estate in America.

  In 1961, the Army drilled a 12,000-foot well down to the hard rock underlying the sediment of the Denver basin and on March 8, 1962, began injecting liquid wastes. A month later, after four million gallons had been pumped underground, Denver experienced its first earthquake in eighty years. More toxic waste was forced down the hole in May and the next month a series of minor quakes occurred, some reaching 4 on the Richter scale. Although the pumping declined toward the end of 1962, it increased in March 1963—and again, the tremors followed with a one-month delay. Critics warned that the pumping had destabilized the geological strata under Denver, but it was not until February 1966 that the Army finally acknowledged the problem and halted the operation. Over the four-year period, the Army had injected a total of 163 million gallons underground and the Denver area had experienced some 1,500 tremors. Because some geologists feared that removing the wastes from the deep well might worsen the earthquake situation, they were simply left in place.

  Even as the Army struggled to deal with the toxic legacy of Sarin production, it moved forward with the development and production of the next generation of nerve agents: the V series. A new phase of the superpower chemical arms race was about to begin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  AGENT VENOMOUS

  DURING THE MID-1950S, the U.S. Army Chemical Center (formerly Edgewood Arsenal) synthesized approximately fifty V-series nerve agents— including those code-named “VE,” “VG,” “VM,” “VP,” “VR,” “VS,” and “VX”—and screened them for the best combination of militarily desirable characteristics, such as toxicity, stability in storage, persistence on the battlefield, and ease of manufacture. In February 1957, the Army Research and Development Command selected VX as the V agent on which to concentrate further work, including pilot-plant development and dissemination studies.

  Pure VX was an odorless liquid with a density slightly greater than that of water, a viscosity similar to that of 30-weight motor oil, and a color that varied from clear to amber depending on purity. In tests with experimental animals, VX proved to have a toxicity three times that of Sarin when inhaled and a thousand-fold greater when absorbed through the skin. Extrapolating these results to humans, it was estimated that less than ten milligrams of VX—a small drop of fluid on the skin—could kill a grown man in fifteen minutes. A liter of VX contained enough individual lethal doses, theoretically, to kill one million people.

  VX could be disseminated either as a fine airborne mist or a coarse spray of viscous droplets that clung to whatever they touched, contaminating equipment, buildings, vegetation, terrain, and unsheltered troops. As a result, both a gas mask and a full-body suit were needed to protect troops from VX contamination. T
he agent was also highly persistent: whereas a cloud of Sarin vapor would dissipate in fifteen minutes to an hour, depending on weather conditions, liquid VX sprayed on the ground would remain lethal for up to three weeks. It could therefore serve to contaminate large areas of the battlefield and channel enemy forces into “killing zones.” Airborne clouds of VX, consisting of droplets large enough to impinge on the skin but too small to settle out rapidly, could also penetrate buildings and field fortifications. These attributes suggested that VX would eventually replace mustard as the standard persistent agent in the U.S. chemical inventory.

  Scientists at the U.S. Army Chemical Center developed an industrial production process for VX. Led by Sigmund R. Eckhaus, Bernard Zeffert, and Jefferson C. Davis, Jr., a team of about thirty chemical engineers and Army draftees worked in shifts in Building 2345, a four-story structure that contained five large engineering bays. For safety reasons, the building incorporated a negative-pressure ventilation system and an air lock with decontamination showers that separated the “clean” areas from the “hot” areas where lethal chemicals were in use. Inside the engineering bays, the engineers worked under giant fume hoods fifteen feet high, equipped with powerful fans to remove the toxic gases.

  The Edgewood team developed a method for VX production called the “transester process.” It involved reacting phosphorus trichloride (PCl3) with methane gas (CH4) at high temperature to form the intermediate CH3PCl2, referred to by the code name “SW.” Because this compound reacted violently with water, caught fire in the presence of moist air, and was highly corrosive, it had to be synthesized inside a coil of high-nickel steel from which the oxygen had been purged and replaced with inert nitrogen gas. SW was then combined with ethanol in an inert gas blanket to form a “diester,” which underwent a third reaction to yield a liquid phosphorus intermediate known as “transester,” or “QL.” Finally, QL was mixed with powdered sulfur, reacting spontaneously to produce VX and a great deal of heat.