War of Nerves

Home > Other > War of Nerves > Page 22
War of Nerves Page 22

by Jonathan Tucker


  COLD WAR anxieties drove Moscow as well as Washington to upgrade its chemical arsenal. In a speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Soviet Deputy Minister of Defense Marshal Georgii Zhukov warned that the imperialists were likely to employ chemical weapons in an attack, creating the need for an effective retaliatory capability. The Soviets were also increasingly concerned about the Communist behemoth to the east. After an ideological split developed between the Soviet Union and Red China in 1960, Moscow moved to modernize its chemical warfare capability in order to offset the numerical superiority of the Chinese People’s Army in the event of a Chinese invasion of Siberia or Central Asia.

  At NII-42 in Moscow, Simion Varshavsky directed the research-and-development department, which employed more than 250 scientists. Under his leadership, teams of military chemists developed a series of nerve agents with improved toxicity, stability, and persistence, and synthesized small amounts for testing and evaluation. Nevertheless, the generals of the Soviet Chemical Troops lacked confidence in their own scientists and preferred to acquire the same agents and munitions as the United States, to which they attributed superior technical capabilities. During the late 1950s, for example, an espionage operation by Soviet military intelligence obtained the secret chemical formula of VX. The Soviet leadership ordered NII-42 to put its own research on hold and focus its efforts on reproducing the American nerve agent.

  Over the next few years, Sergei Ivin, Leonid Soborovsky, and a female chemist named Ia Danilovna Shilakova jointly developed a synthetic method for an analogue of VX, which they termed R-33. The three scientists completed their work in 1963 and were later awarded a Lenin Prize for their achievement. Ivin, Soborovsky, and Shilakova initially claimed to have replicated VX, but their version of the molecule differed from the original in several important respects. Although R-33 had the same number of atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen, they were in a different three-dimensional arrangement. For example, whereas VX had a two-carbon (ethyl) group linked to the central phosphorus through an oxygen atom, the Soviet version had a four-carbon (isobutyl) group in that position. These structural differences gave rise to a distinct set of chemical, physical, and toxicological properties.

  The usual explanation for the discrepancies between VX and R-33 is that Soviet military intelligence had obtained the chemical formula of the American nerve agent but not a diagram of its molecular structure, leading Soviet chemists to guess wrongly about its three-dimensional configuration. A more likely hypothesis is that the Soviets knew the correct structure of VX but were incapable of manufacturing it with their available chemical technology. Because the U.S. transester process was very demanding technically, the Soviets chose instead to synthesize a structural variant of VX using a different method: reacting phosphorus trichloride with two chemicals (aminomercaptan and chloroester) in a chloroform solvent. Although the Soviet production method was less complex, it had the serious drawback that R-33 had to be purified from a large volume of contaminated solvent, an extremely hazardous process. Ironically, toxicological studies later showed that R-33 “aged” cholinesterase—inhibited the enzyme irreversibly—much faster than VX, making the Soviet V agent more lethal and less treatable than the American one. A third hypothesis is that the Soviets deliberately developed a novel analogue of VX in the belief that U.S. field detector-alarms for V agents would not recognize the chemical spectrum of R-33.

  At the same time that the Soviets were developing R-33, they began work on a manufacturing process for Soman. In 1960, Soviet military intelligence concluded incorrectly that the United States intended to mass-produce Soman, leading the Kremlin to follow suit. Boris Libman, who in 1958 had been promoted to chief engineer at Chemical Works No. 91, oversaw the development of the Soman manufacturing process. The most challenging step was the synthesis of pinacolyl alcohol, a key ingredient. Working under Libman, an electrochemical engineer named Andrei Petrovich Tomilov devised a production method for pinacolyl alcohol involving five stages of electrolysis, for which he and his coworkers later won a Lenin Prize. In May 1964, the Central Committee approved the construction of a Soman production facility at Volgograd, but numerous technical and organizational hurdles delayed the start of production. (The name “Stalingrad” had been changed to “Volgograd” by the Twenty-second Party Congress in November 1961. Subsequently, Chemical Works No. 91 was renamed the S. M. Kirov Chemical Works, or “Khimprom.”)

  While building the electrolysis unit for the production of pinacolyl alcohol, Libman encountered numerous problems with shoddy manufacturing. He had ordered nickel cathodes for the electrolyzers from a Soviet company called Uralchimmash. When the cathodes arrived, he found that they had not been made of high-grade nickel, as specified in the contract, but from a low-quality alloy that was much harder to weld, causing many of the cathodes to leak. Libman sent the defective items back to the factory and insisted on receiving new ones, resulting in a six-month delay in production. Problems also arose with the procurement of corrosion-resistant production equipment. Although Plant No. 5 in the city of Sverdlovsk made silver-coated pipes and fittings, it was not capable of producing silver-clad reactors, heat exchangers, columns, or stills. Instead, these items were ordered from the Degussa company in West Germany. Later, the Komsomolets Machine Works in Tambov, Russia, mastered the production of silver-lined equipment, but Libman found that it was inferior in quality to the German apparatus that had been confiscated from Dyhernfurth in 1946. Because of the lengthy delays, Konstantin Alexeievich Guskov, the first deputy director for engineering at NII-42 in Moscow, was dispatched to Volgograd to fix the technical problems with the Soman plant. Under his effective oversight, large-scale production of Soman finally began in 1967 at Unit No. 30 at Khimprom, and the agent was loaded into munitions at Unit No. 60.

  The Soviet Union also developed a variety of weapon systems to deliver nerve agents, including Scud ballistic missiles, FROG unguided tactical rockets, artillery shells, multiple rocket launchers, aerial bombs, and chemical mines. Filled chemical weapons were stockpiled at several depots in Russia. In the event of war in central Europe, the Soviets would have used trains to transport empty chemical munitions and tank cars containing bulk nerve agent to army and division levels in its Warsaw Pact allies East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. There the munitions would have been filled with agent and kept under the strict command and control of the Red Army. Some evidence also suggests that the Soviets forward-deployed a small stockpile of filled chemical munitions in East Germany to counterbalance the U.S. chemical stocks in West Germany.

  Beginning in 1963, Warsaw Pact battle plans for war against NATO called for the surprise, massive use of chemical weapons on the battlefield to inflict large-scale casualties and demoralize the enemy. Because nerve agents harmed only living beings, such munitions would have been employed instead of tactical nuclear weapons in areas where material damage to buildings and infrastructure was to be avoided. The Soviet military subjected nerve agents to the same strict political controls as those for nuclear arms, so that a decision to authorize a chemical attack would have been made at the highest levels. All information related to Soviet offensive chemical warfare plans was tightly held, using special code words that were changed every six months.

  DURING THE 1960S, the U.S. intelligence community conducted a series of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) of Soviet chemical warfare capabilities. These highly classified studies were prepared by the CW/BW Intelligence Committee (CBIC) of the U.S. Intelligence Board. Chaired by the Director of Central Intelligence, CBIC included representatives from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). According to its critics, CBIC tended to exaggerate the Soviet chemical threat because it was staffed by “true believers,” most of them reserve officers in the Chemical Corps who had grown up professionally in the U.S. chemical warfare program.

  To pr
epare estimates of the Soviet chemical weapons stockpile, CBIC analysts relied heavily on the “Hirsch report,” a detailed overview of Soviet chemical warfare activities and facilities that had been prepared shortly after World War II by Dr. Walter Hirsch, a former chief of the chemical warfare section of the German Army Ordnance Office. CBIC analysts also used overhead reconnaissance photographs of suspected Soviet chemical weapons storage bunkers taken by high-flying U-2 aircraft and orbiting satellites. Such bunkers were generally identified by means of telltale “signatures,” such as roof ventilation systems or the presence of decontamination trucks.

  To prepare an estimate of the Soviet stockpile, CBIC analysts calculated the interior volume of known and suspected chemical weapons bunkers, making assumptions about whether the agent was in bulk or weaponized form (which could result in a tenfold difference in weight) and how densely the munitions were stacked. Based on these assumptions, they estimated the tonnage of agent contained in each bunker. Summing the contents of all known and suspected bunkers, plus a “fudge factor,” led to a total of more than 150,000 agent tons of blister and nerve agents. Because of the uncertainties inherent in this methodology, some senior U.S. government officials believed that CBIC’s estimates of the Soviet chemical inventory were grossly inflated and viewed them with considerable skepticism. Nevertheless, advocates of chemical warfare, such as the Army Chemical Corps, frequently cited the CBIC figures when lobbying Congress for higher budgets and stockpile requirements.

  In early 1963, John Kerlin, an analyst with the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, was assigned a rotation in the Office of National Estimates, where he was given the task of updating the figures for the Soviet chemical arsenal. Because Kerlin was rigorous about defining analytical assumptions, his estimate of the Soviet chemical weapons stockpile was significantly lower than in previous years. The Chemical Corps and other interested parties were displeased by the lowball figure and harshly criticized Sherman Kent, the director of the Office of National Estimates. A few months after Kerlin issued his report, he died in his thirties of a heart attack, leaving a wife and children. Because Kerlin was no longer around to defend his methodology, the next CIA estimate of the Soviet chemical stockpile returned to the old, inflated figures.

  One Cold War scenario that particularly worried U.S. strategists was the possible Soviet use of nerve agents for covert operations against American and Canadian military personnel working for the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), which was responsible for the early detection and warning of a nuclear attack by Soviet strategic bombers (and later intercontinental ballistic missiles) flying over the North Pole. U.S. military planners feared that Soviet Spetsnatz special forces units might use nerve agents to kill the crews of the early-warning radar stations in Alaska and Greenland, thereby “blinding” NORAD and opening the way for a disarming nuclear first strike against U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases.

  On August 22, 1960, the commander in chief of NORAD wrote a memorandum to the Army Chief of Staff in which he laid out a requirement for “a system to detect and report enemy employment of biological and/or chemical agents which might affect air defense personnel and equipment from carrying out their assigned mission. This system must be capable of providing positive and timely detection of the agent or agents employed, and the instantaneous reporting of such employment to the NORAD Combat Operations Center for assessment and dissemination of appropriate information to air defense agencies in time to place into effect timely protective and defensive actions.” A few years later, in a book titled Tomorrow’s Weapons, Brigadier General Jack Rothschild, the former chief of research and development for the Chemical Corps, warned that the Soviets might use nerve agents for a “sabotage attack against our missile sites and SAC bases preceding a nuclear strike.” In response to these concerns, the Pentagon took steps to reduce the vulnerability of its nuclear weapons installations to covert chemical attack.

  IN MAY 1963, the British government again changed its chemical weapons policy. Reversing the 1956 decision to renounce an active chemical arsenal, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan decided that Britain should acquire a modest stockpile of nerve agents in order to have a retaliatory option in the event of a limited war in Europe between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. To this end, the Cabinet Defence Committee authorized Porton Down to launch a five-year exploratory program of offensive R&D and limited production. Porton scientists studied eight candidate V-series agents, including the Soviet R-33. At the end of this process, the British Ministry of Defence issued a military requirement calling for 22,000 Sarin-filled 105 mm artillery shells for the British Army and 320 VX-filled spray tanks for the Royal Navy and Air Force.

  After the Conservative Party was defeated in October 1964 and Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson took power, he slashed funding for British chemical rearmament. In July 1965, the British Chiefs of Staff conducted a policy review and concluded that the use of chemical weapons in a general war in Europe would not significantly influence the outcome of the battle or delay the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Even so, the generals continued to recommend the acquisition of a chemical weapons stockpile to deter the Warsaw Pact from employing such weapons in a limited war. In November 1965, the British government debated whether to manufacture Sarin and VX domestically or procure them from the United States. By 1968, however, the plan to acquire a nerve agent stockpile had been shelved indefinitely.

  Throughout the 1960s, Britain, Canada, and the United States continued to collaborate on V-agent research and development under the Tripartite Agreement, which was renamed the Tripartite Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP). In 1964, Australia began to participate in TTCP meetings under an army standardization agreement, and it became a formal member in July 1965. Thereafter, the name of the group was changed to “The Technical Cooperation Program,” while retaining the same acronym. New Zealand also joined the TTCP in October 1970.

  IN 1965, after seven years as chief engineer in Volgograd, Boris Libman suffered a major professional setback. For some time, the Khimprom plant had been discharging toxic wastes from Sarin and Soman production into a holding pond on the factory grounds known as the “White Sea,” where the chemicals were neutralized with sodium hydroxide. This method of neutralization turned out to be slow and ineffective, resulting in concentrations of toxic phosphonates—breakdown products of nerve agents—a hundred times higher than permitted. In early February 1965, flooding caused by melting snow caused a levee bordering the wastewater pond to collapse, allowing a large volume of toxic wastes to drain into the Volga River.

  The spill had no immediate environmental consequences, and the levee was repaired in a day and a half. Four months later, however, on June 15, tens of thousands of sturgeon in the Volga suddenly died and floated belly up, turning the river white for fifty miles downstream. A possible explanation for the delay between the toxic spill and the fish die-off is that it took four months for the chemicals to build up to lethal levels in the fishes’ tissues. Several years later, the Institute of the Soviet Fishing Industry was still finding traces of toxic phosphonates in sturgeon caught in the Caspian Sea.

  Responding to public outrage over the environmental disaster, Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin insisted that the managers of the Volgograd plant had to be punished as an example. Six officials were fined, but the harshest punishment was reserved for Chief Engineer Libman, then forty-three. On March 9, 1966, he was convicted of negligence, stripped of his Lenin Prize, fined 10,000 new rubles (the equivalent of two years’ salary), and sentenced to two years in a labor camp in the nearby city of Volsk. During his imprisonment, Libman worked during the day as the foreman of a construction crew that built houses and later at a chemical plant, returning to the prison at night. After serving one year of his two-year sentence, however, he was released because no one else was capable of overseeing Soman production at Volgograd.

  ON MAY 27, 1967, the governments of France and Algeria signed a secret framework agreement
prolonging France’s use of the chemical weapons testing site at B2-Namous for another five years, until 1972. Although the French Army had sent commissions of inquiry to several of France’s overseas territories to find a suitable replacement, these efforts had been unsuccessful. No substitute location had been found that offered climatic conditions similar to those of Central Europe. Additional problems were the exorbitant cost of building a new testing ground and the excessive distance of the candidate sites from metropolitan France. When it became clear that there was no alternative to retaining B2-Namous, the French government was prepared to pay almost any price the Algerians demanded.

  In exchange for the continued use of the chemical weapons testing site, France sold Algeria its nuclear testing installations and military equipment for 21 million francs—less than half the estimated value of 50 million francs. Moreover, the French government allowed Algerian chemical weapons specialists to attend the Military School for Special Weapons (École Militaire des Armes Spéciales) in Grenoble and to observe the open-air trials at B2-Namous, although the Algerians were given limited access to the resulting data. The Algerian government also demanded that all French personnel and matériel be transported directly by plane to the airfield at B2-Namous and that no uniformed French soldiers be present at the site. Accordingly, the French Ministry of Defense hired Thomson, a private defense contractor, to operate the base and liaise with the Algerian Army.

 

‹ Prev