War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  When Algeria finally gained its independence in 1962, it was expected that France would abandon B2-Namous. However, the Évian Accords that Paris concluded with the new Algerian government allowed France to retain its nuclear weapons testing sites and support bases in the country for another five years, until 1967. Under this agreement, B2-Namous was considered as an annex of the French nuclear testing complex.

  SHORTLY AFTER John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president of the United States in January 1961, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara established a senior interagency task group to review how the Pentagon was organized and the armed forces were structured and equipped. This policy review was broad in scope, involving approximately 150 sequentially numbered studies prepared by the national security bureaucracy. Project 112 examined the utility of chemical and biological weapons for U.S. strategic and limited warfare in view of the military threat posed by the Soviet Union and Red China.

  The Project 112 study concluded that with Moscow’s acquisition of a potent nuclear arsenal, the United States could no longer rely exclusively on the threat of massive nuclear retaliation to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe or Japan. Instead, it would be necessary to invest more heavily in chemical and biological weapons to bolster U.S. conventional forces and provide an alternative to all-out nuclear war. Chemical weapons offered a number of military advantages: they were relatively cheap to produce, the scale of their use could be tailored to a limited conflict, and they could be designed to incapacitate rather than kill. Ironically, the fact that chemical arms were less destructive than nuclear or biological weapons made them more attractive for limited warfare. According to a 1962 study by the Joint Planning Staff, the use of nerve agents offered a promising means of delaying the enemy’s advance without resorting to tactical nuclear weapons and risking escalation to an all-out thermonuclear exchange. This strategic concept, known as “graduated deterrence,” would buttress the credibility of the nuclear balance of terror and, if deterrence failed, help keep the battle under control and gain time for negotiations. In response to this assessment, the annual budget of the Army Chemical Corps nearly tripled between 1961 and 1964, including funds for VX production.

  The Project 112 Task Group issued six recommendations to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including the need to “immediately evaluate and modify operational plans, as necessary, to provide for the specific employment of chemical and biological weapons.” Furthermore, the group advised that “stockpiles of modern munitions should be strategically positioned to support these operational plans as soon as possible.” Responding to this directive, the Pentagon negotiated storage rights for U.S. chemical weapons in West Germany, France, and Italy at munitions depots controlled by the European Command.

  On December 17, 1962, General Maxwell Taylor, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a memorandum to Defense Secretary McNamara noting that a token retaliatory stockpile of chemical weapons had been based since 1959 in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) under the control of the Seventh Army. This stockpile, consisting of artillery shells filled with mustard and Sarin, and bulk containers containing 12 tons of Sarin, had initially been stored at the Rhein Ordnance Depot in Kirchheimboladen and later transferred to a depot at Gerbach in southwestern Germany. Although the U.S. government had possibly notified Chancellor Konrad Adenauer at the time of the original deployment, the existence of U.S. chemical weapons in West Germany remained a closely guarded secret. General Taylor noted, “The storage of these munitions has never been the subject of formal US/FRG negotiations. It is considered desirable, therefore, that storage rights for these munitions be more firmly established by their inclusion in the proposed US/FRG negotiations.”

  The Project 112 study also found that the U.S. armed forces lacked adequate knowledge of the military effects of nerve agents under realistic field conditions, including the operational challenges of decontaminating vehicles and personnel in various climates and terrain. Accordingly, the study recommended an extensive program of field trials to assess the United States’ vulnerability to chemical attack and to test defensive equipment, procedures, and tactics. This recommendation led to the establishment in June 1962 of the Deseret Test Center to coordinate the field-testing program. Jointly staffed and funded by the four armed services, the center was based at Fort Douglas, Utah, and drew on the facilities and personnel of Dugway Proving Ground, about sixty miles away.

  In addition to Deseret and Dugway, the individual services each established their own chemical weapons testing sites. The Army conducted nerve agent trials in the hot desert at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, the tropical jungle at Fort Clayton in the Panama Canal Zone, and the frozen arctic at Fort Greely in Alaska. The Air Force’s main testing site for chemical munitions was Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and the Navy’s main testing facility was the Naval Weapons Test Station at China Lake, California.

  ALTHOUGH RUMORS circulated for years among the residents of Newport, Indiana, about the mysterious Army installation at the Wabash River site, its purpose remained secret until May 1962, when Mearlin Sims, the FMC plant manager, disclosed at a monthly meeting of the Clinton Chamber of Commerce that the Newport facility was producing a powerful chemical warfare agent that was lethal in tiny amounts. Sims’s statement, the first official acknowledgment of VX production, was reported in a short news item in the Terre Haute Star.

  The VX production complex was located three miles south of Newport on State Highway 63, an area of rolling hills, woods, and farms. Protecting the installation from intruders were security checkpoints, heavily armed guards, and a high fence topped with barbed wire that partially concealed rows of weathered yellow barracks. Inside the fence, the sprawling facility consisted of a series of chemical plants containing some forty miles of pipes, furnaces, pumps, mixing tanks, and reaction vessels. The last step in the production process, in which QL was combined with powdered sulfur to yield VX, took place inside a three-story, windowless concrete blockhouse that was hermetically sealed to prevent leaks. Because the QL-sulfur reaction required cooling but no final distillation step, the plant used a continuous rather than batch process to improve productivity and enhance the purity of the final product. On the ground floor of the blockhouse, technicians wearing white jackets, pants, and gloves sat at an eight-foot control panel covered with gauges, recording graphs, and colored warning lights.

  The workforce at the Newport plant numbered about 400 people, reaching as high as 550 during periods of peak production. Despite the extreme hazards involved, FMC Corporation had no trouble recruiting workers because of the lack of job opportunities in the economically depressed region. Most of the technicians and laborers came from Vermillion County, where the town of Newport was based, and the adjacent Parke County. Successful applicants had to be in excellent health and pass an FBI security background investigation and a battery of psychological tests.

  Although the VX plant was fully automated, every ninety minutes inspectors donned gas masks and full-body rubberized suits to check the equipment inside the blockhouse and take samples from the production line. After each inspection, the technicians were required to take a hot shower—a total of three per day—to remove any toxic residues, and they underwent frequent blood tests to monitor their cholinesterase levels. Ten percent of the operating budget of the Newport plant went to safety measures, including a fully equipped hospital with a nine-person staff that was ready at all hours to treat an accidental exposure. The environmental controls at Newport were also superior to those at Rocky Mountain Arsenal: the butane solvent from the reaction sequence was flared, and the liquid wastes were pumped into a 5,500-foot-deep well.

  The Newport Army Ammunition Plant in Newport, Indiana, produced the nerve agent VX from 1961 to 1968.

  Two extraction columns from the former Dana Heavy Water Plant were incorporated into the VX production facility at Newport.

  After VX emerged from the manufacturing process, the oily, supertoxic liquid was pumped to an elongat
ed one-story building, where an automatic filling line loaded the agent into bombs, artillery shells, mines, and rockets. As a conveyor belt carried the munitions through an airtight metal cabinet, a series of machines loaded them with VX, added an overlay of helium gas, welded the filling port shut, and checked for leaks. If helium was detected leaking from a shell, an alarm bell rang, lights flashed, and the defective round was splashed with purple paint, pulled off the assembly line, and eventually destroyed. Finally, the shells were X-rayed to measure their contents, and their outer surfaces were decontaminated and dried. Technicians standing outside the closed filling lines monitored the automatic loading and sealing operations. They did not wear gas masks but kept them close at hand in case of emergency.

  In the packing area at the end of the production line, workers painted and stenciled the finished munitions, weighed them for firing calculations, and stacked them on wooden pallets for shipment to Army storage depots. The weapons loaded with VX included two types of artillery shells (155 mm and 8-inch), M55 artillery rockets, land mines, and spray tanks holding 1,300 pounds of agent. Over the lifetime of the plant, nearly 1,000 TMU-28B spray tanks were filled with VX and shipped by air for storage at Tooele Army Depot in Utah. The Navy and the Marine Corps also developed a spray tank called the Aero 14B for the A-4 aircraft that was designed to be loaded on the flight line with a field filling machine.

  The Newport VX plant operated on a round-the-clock manufacturing schedule for three years, but its output fell sharply after 1963 and continued at a low rate until 1968, when the facility was shut down. By that time, it had produced a total of 5,000 tons of VX. During the Vietnam War, the increased demand for high-explosive artillery shells led to a shortage of munitions. As a result, a large fraction of the VX produced at Newport was never filled into shells but was stored in bulk on the plant grounds in 10,000-gallon storage tanks and one-ton carbonized steel containers. Because of the extremely low volatility of VX, this type of aboveground storage was not considered a safety hazard at the time. Eventually, the “temporary” storage of bulk VX became permanent.

  This elongated building at the Newport Army Ammunition Plant contained filling lines for loading VX into a variety of munitions.

  VX filling lines for 8-inch and 155 mm shells.

  Filling line for loading spray tanks with VX nerve agent.

  In the “pack-out” room at the Newport Army Ammunition Plant, VX-filled artillery shells were loaded onto pallets for shipment to U.S. chemical weapon depots.

  Aboveground storage tanks for bulk VX at the Newport Army Ammunition Plant. A shortage of munitions during the Vietnam War caused large amounts of bulk nerve agent to be stored on the facility grounds.

  DURING THE EARLY 1960S, Edgewood Arsenal took a second look at binary chemical weapons technology. Although the Weapons Research team had completed the initial proof-of-concept studies on a binary VX bomb in the mid-1950s, this work stayed on the shelf until a young engineer named William C. Dee joined the technical staff. Because his father had been a pipe fitter at Edgewood, Dee had heard about the arsenal throughout his childhood. As a student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he studied chemical engineering and worked at Edgewood during the summers in the Air Munitions development group, gaining valuable hands-on experience. The only drawback of the job was that it required a security clearance, which meant waiting for a few tedious weeks after the end of classes for his background investigation to be completed. When Dee finished his engineering degree in 1959, the chemical industry was in the depths of a recession. Although he received job offers from a few companies, none was particularly attractive. He therefore accepted a position at Edgewood that was low-paying but promised interesting work, planning to stay for a year or two until a good opportunity opened up in private industry. As it happened, he ended up spending his entire career at the arsenal because of a series of promotions, the technical challenge of the work, and the generous federal pension program.

  Soon after Dee arrived at Edgewood, Charles Walker, the chief of the air munitions branch in the Munitions Division, called him into his office and handed him a stack of old research reports from the binary program. “I always thought this was a good idea,” he said. “See if you can do something with it.” Dee studied the reports and concluded that the binary concept was technically promising, but because the Army continued to deny the need for such weapons, no development funds were available.

  In 1960, however, the Pentagon ordered the four armed services to accelerate their development of chemical arms. The Navy was worried about the hazards associated with storing and handling chemical weapons on board aircraft carriers, where even a small leak from a nerve agent bomb stored in the ammunition hold would pose a grave threat to the crew. Using carrier-based aircraft to deliver unitary chemical munitions would therefore require installing an ammunition magazine on each carrier that was hermetically sealed or equipped with special air filters, at an additional cost of about $1 million per ship. As an alternative, the Navy expressed interest in an inherently safe chemical weapon design. Seizing this opportunity, Dee and his colleagues met at the Pentagon with Navy officials, who agreed to provide funds for the development of a 500-pound VX bomb using binary technology.

  Once the project had been approved, Dee and an assistant tried to replicate the earlier experiments by Tarnove, Bowman, and Sichel, who had sought to determine the optimal mixing rate of the two VX precursors, powdered sulfur and liquid transester (QL). Dee followed the standard chemical engineering practice of building a small model system that could later be scaled up to a full-size prototype. To that end, he built a two-liter horizontal reactor that was shaped like a miniature bomb. He then designed a research plan calling for twenty experiments, which he believed would be sufficient to define all the relevant parameters.

  At first, however, Dee was unable to get the binary system developed by the Weapons Research team to work at all. The earlier group had used a propellant to fire a few grams of particulate sulfur directly into the QL solution, triggering the spontaneous chemical reaction that yielded VX. In Dee’s hands, however, the two precursors simply failed to react. He suspected that the source of the problem was the propellant gases being injected into the QL along with the powdered sulfur, since it was known that water vapor could impede the reaction at high temperatures. To solve this problem, Dee contracted with a firm called Aircraft Armaments to develop a telecartridge, an injection device that deflected the hot propellant gases so they did not enter the reaction chamber. Although the telecartridge worked as intended, the binary components still failed to react. Dee racked his brain to understand why and finally realized that he was using a different physical form of sulfur from that employed in the original experiments. When Dee made this change, the reaction worked perfectly, going to completion in about five seconds and generating VX and a great deal of heat.

  The initial research plan of twenty experiments proved to be a gross underestimate, however. Over the period of a year, Dee and his small development team did a series of trials with the 2-liter reactor and then scaled up to a 10-gallon reactor and a huge 50-gallon reactor (to simulate an aircraft spray tank) before settling on a 20-gallon reactor, equivalent in liquid capacity to a 500-pound bomb. These experiments were conducted in a reinforced test chamber that had been designed for the explosion of chemical bombs and could be easily drained and decontaminated. Wearing a protective rubber suit and an M9 gas mask, Dee and a technician took turns testing the various reaction parameters. The laboratory was not air-conditioned, and on humid summer days the protective rubber suit became unbearably hot; when Dee removed his boots, sweat poured out. They performed one experiment per day, three days a week, and had to wait a few days for the analytical results because the instruments available at the time were fairly primitive.

  Dee found that to scale up the binary reaction to the 20-gallon reactor, it was necessary to install propellers inside the vessel that agitated the liquid QL at the same time that
a set of large telecartridges in the rear fired powdered sulfur into the mix. Although mechanically complex, this system generated VX with a purity of 90 percent or more. By 1963, the Edgewood team had developed a binary VX bomb that was dubbed the “Bigeye.” Dee built six full-size prototypes, which were shipped from Edgewood to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah for testing in a series of open-air trials. At Dugway’s Granite Mountain test site, the prototype binary bombs were suspended on cables from a metal frame and detonated over a sampling grid. Each set of trials lasted one or two weeks, during which the scientists stayed in barracks near Granite Mountain because the dirt roads were too poor for them to commute daily from the main post.

  In the initial design for the Bigeye, the VX produced by the binary reaction was dispersed with an explosive burster charge. During the trials at Dugway, however, about one in every three prototypes “flashed” after dissemination, meaning that the cloud of VX droplets ignited into a fireball that consumed most of the lethal agent. To solve this problem, the engineering team switched to a system in which the bomb expelled a pressurized spray of VX as it glided to earth, spreading a rain of lethal droplets over a third of a square mile.

  One of the questions studied during the outdoor trials at Dugway was what would happen if a Navy carrier pilot could not release an activated Bigeye from the wing of his aircraft during a bombing run. In that case, the bomb might explode on the wing, contaminating the aircraft with VX. Even if the Bigeye did not go off, it would be too dangerous to land on the carrier deck with the live bomb still attached. The pilot would either have to jettison the bomb rack or, as a last resort, eject from the aircraft and let it crash into the sea. Dee finally decided to avoid these contingencies by designing the Bigeye so that the fuse became primed only after the bomb had been released from the aircraft.