Jonathan B. Tucker - War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to the following individuals who reviewed part or all of the draft manuscript and provided valuable comments: Gordon Burck, Dawson Cagle, William C. Dee, Sigmund R. Eckhaus, John A. Gilbert, Olivier Lepick, David E. Kaplan, Ron G. Manley, Robert P. Mikulak, Vil Mirzayanov, Michael Moodie, John Ellis van Courtland Moon, Colonel Jonathan Newmark, Julian Perry Robinson, Barbara Seiders, Ralf Trapp, Mark L. Wheelis, and Jonathan Winer. Any errors of omission or commission that remain are clearly my responsibility.

Julian Perry Robinson deserves special thanks for making available his unparalleled archive of news clippings at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.

Jeffrey K. Smart, the Chief Historian at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, was extremely helpful in identifying U.S. government documents relevant to the history of the U.S. nerve agent program. Deborah A. Dennis, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Officer in the Office of the Chief Counsel at the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, efficiently expedited the process of review, redaction, and public release of formerly classified U.S. government documents.

Sigmund Eckhaus generously granted me access to his collection of historical photographs, many of which are reproduced in this volume.

I am also grateful to the staffs of the U.S. National Archives and the Military History Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for help with archival research.

Finally, my sincere thanks for support and encouragement go to Victoria Wilson; her assistant, Zachary Wagman; Martha Kaplan, my literary agent; and my parents, Deborah and Leonard Tucker.

Jonathan B. Tucker
Washington, D.C.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

5 Soldier during a chemical defense training exercise (United States Army)

43 Otto Ambros (National Archives)

98 The principal officers of IG Farben on trial at Nuremberg (National Archives)

100 Chief prosecutor Telford Taylor at Nuremberg (AP/Wide World Photos)

104 Edgewood Arsenal in the late 1950s (United States Army)

114 Dr. Walther Schieber (National Archives)

131 The Phosphate Development Works at Muscle Shoals, Alabama (Sigmund R.Eckhaus)

131 Production plant for phosphorous trichloride at Muscle Shoals (Sigmund R.Eckhaus)

132 Plant for the Step 1 process in dichlor production at Muscle Shoals (Sigmund R.Eckhaus)

136 North Plants complex at Rocky Mountain Arsenal (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

137 Blockhouse containing the final steps of the Sarin production process at Rocky Mountain Arsenal (United States Army)

137 Soldiers guarding Sarin-filled containers at Rocky Mountain Arsenal (SigmundR. Eckhaus)

140 An M34 aircraft-delivered cluster bomb (United States Army)

141 A 155 mm artillery shell loaded with Sarin (United States Army)

148 Ronald Maddison (AP/Wide World Photos)

163 Soldier self-injecting nerve-agent antidote (United States Army)

166 An M55 rocket being test-fired (United States Army)

167 An Honest John rocket being test-fired (United States Army)

168 The Honest John warhead contained 356 spherical aluminum bomblets filled with liquid Sarin (United States Army)

168 Cutaway of an M139 Sarin bomblet (United States Army)

169 Full-scale model of the M139 Sarin bomblet (AP/Wide World Photos)

173 Aerial view of the Newport Army Ammunition Plant (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

173 Close-up of the Newport Army Ammunition Plant (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

175 The building containing filling lines at Newport Army Ammunition Plant (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

175 VX filling lines for 8-inch and 155 mm shells at the Newport Army Ammunition Plant (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

176 Filling line for loading spray tanks with VX nerve agent at the Newport Army Ammunition Plant (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

176 VX-filled artillery shells being loaded for shipment at the Newport Army Ammunition Plant (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

177 Aboveground storage tanks for bulk VX at the Newport Army Ammunition Plant (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

198 Open-air burning pits at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

209 Thousands of sheep being buried in trenches in Skull Valley, Utah (UnitedStates Army)

219 Loading of leaking M55 rockets onto a Liberty ship during Operation CHASE (United States Army)

219 Scuttling of an Operation CHASE ship (United States Army)

221 Aerial view of Johnston Island (Sigmund R. Eckhaus)

222 Shipment of chemical weapons to Johnston Island during Operation Red Hat (United States Army)

225 Mock-up of the M687 binary Sarin artillery shell (United States Army)

247 Mock-up of the Bigeye VX bomb (United States Department of Defense)

275 Open house at the Military Chemical Testing Site in Shikhany, Russia (Sovfoto)

276 Soviet technicians demonstrating the operation of a mobile chemical-weapons-destruction unit (Sovfoto)

278 The DF manufacturing plant at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas (United StatesArmy)

283 Civilian victims in Halabja (AP/Wide World Photos)

307 Soldiers undergoing chemical defense training in Saudi Arabia, November 1990 (AP/Wide World Photos)

310 Khamisiyah Ammunition Storage Complex with destroyed bunker (AP/WideWorld Photos)

313 U.N. weapons experts sealing leaking rockets (AP/Wide World Photos)

327 Shoko Asahara (AP/Wide World Photos)

334 The main compound of the Aum Shinrikyo cult with Satian 7 in foreground (Kyodo News)

355 Chemical weapons destruction facility on Johnston Island (United States Army)

356 Chemical weapons storage igloo (AP/Wide World Photos)

360 The wreckage of the El Al Boeing 747 cargo plane near Amsterdam (AP/WideWorld Photos)

366 Ruins of the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory in Khartoum (AP/Wide WorldPhotos)

371 Kofi Annan and Dominique de Villepin at the United Nations Security Council during Colin Powells address in February 2003 (AP/Wide World Photos)

378 OPCW headquarters at The Hague (OPCW)

379 OPCW inspectors counting artillery shells (OPCW)

381 Russian military officer with a Scud missile warhead at Shchuchye (AP/WideWorld Photos)

383 U.S. Army workers preparing M55 rockets to be destroyed (AP/Wide World Photos)

PROLOGUE

LIVE-AGENT TRAINING

THE U.S. ARMY Chemical School at Fort Leonard Wood, near the edge of the Ozark Mountains in south-central Missouri, trains thousands of soldiers, sailors, and marines each year in the art and science of chemical warfare defense. Students enrolled in the Chemical Officer Basic Course learn to detect and identify the various types of chemical warfare agents, to don and seal a gas mask in seconds, to treat chemical casualties with injections of antidotes, and to decontaminate vehicles. The climax of the twenty-week course is a live-agent exercise in which a group of trainees, wearing full-body protective suits and masks, perform tasks inside a sealed chamber containing lethal concentrations of nerve agents, the deadliest class of chemical weapons.