THE RETURN OF CHEMICAL WARFARE
Morrissey, David H.
The Return of Chemical Warfare What Raid does to roaches, nerve gas does to humans BY DAVID H. MORRISSEY At Antietam, one of General George B. McClellan's last Civil War battles, some 23,000...
...Indeed, on the Western Front the French had used tear gas against the Germans before the Germans responded with chlorine...
...Signatories are bound to refrain from the use of chemical weapons, or at the very least to use them only in retaliation...
...So little critical attention has been paid to what is going on in this latest arena for the arms race that it can be argued the members of Congress who approve the funds for the weapons still aren't sure what they are voting for...
...In one such test, which the Army for a year denied had even occurred, a misfiring David Morrissey is a reporter for TheAnnis-ton (Alabama) Star...
...Yet the Army today quietly maintains a dozen stockpiles of nerve and mustard gas...
...Estimates of chemical warfare casualties range from hundreds of thousands to more than a million...
...After Congress approved the initial funding for the binary nerve gas plant, the North Atlantic Assembly passed a resolution pointing out that "to date there has been no formal consultation among the NATO allies concerning the development and deployment of new offensive chemical weapons within the Alliance," and warning that/'proposals to deploy new offensive chemical weapons in Europe would provoke a strong public reaction among European public opinion...
...Both armies will then survive the attacks, for the most part, as the clouds of poison chemicals go drifting by...
...For the next thirteen years, until Nixon brought the no-first-use rule back to life in 1969, the American position on the use of chemical and biological warfare weapons was that we would use them at any time in a general war, providing clearance had first come from the President...
...The Return of Chemical Warfare What Raid does to roaches, nerve gas does to humans BY DAVID H. MORRISSEY At Antietam, one of General George B. McClellan's last Civil War battles, some 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded during a day-long struggle that ended in a draw...
...Senate with forty minutes of discussion and debate on an issue which is going to reverse the position of the past three Administrations...
...The mixing is triggered by the force of the firing and the spin of the shell, which rupture the separate containers holding the two chemicals...
...The short-shrifting brought this protest from Senator David Pryor of Arkansas: "Here we are . . . in the U.S...
...It was Roosevelt who enunciated the current policy, declaring that chemical weapons were "terrible and inhumane...
...Until recently, it was a branch of the military many assumed was heading the way of the horse cavalry, the M-l carbine, and the pegged-legged uniforms of the doughboys...
...In official shorthand they are nerve agents GB and VX and blister agents H, HD, and HT...
...So far, they're using only simulated nerve and mustard gas at McClellan, with an occasional gust of tear gas let loose for a touch of realism...
...That resolution ended with the Europeans urging the North Atlantic Council "to consult urgently on the role of offensive chemical warfare weapons in NATO strategy...
...There might be a nuclear exchange, the argument goes, but the fear of total annihilation will keep that exchange brief...
...The presence of crippled, screaming soldiers disrupted life in the trenches...
...In the last year, students from Australia, Portugal, West Germany, Thailand, Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and England trained at McClellan's Chemical School...
...and headache, confusion, drowsiness, coma, and convulsion...
...VX is another organophosphorous chemical, although significantly more powerful than GB...
...forces would never use such weapons—even in retaliation against an enemy that had exercised no such fore-bearance...
...If there is just a "limited" war, involving only chemical weapons, the civilians who have the misfortune to live in the war zone will probably be the major casualties...
...The real fighting will be done with conventional armaments, but on battlefields heavily contaminated with chemical and biological agents...
...Soviet troops reportedly train on battlefields contaminated by live nerve and blister gases...
...K In 1981, the new Reagan Administration called for, and Congress eventually funded, construction of a "binary" nerve gas factory at Pine Bluff, Arkansas...
...After Pryor's protest the Senate agreed to give the matter twenty minutes of additional debate—and then it said yes to the Pine Bluff money bill...
...As Europeans are becoming increasingly aware, the largest death count in a chemical conflict between the Soviets and the United States will be among civilians...
...As one Army publication laconically reports, the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning are, "in normal order of appearance, running nose...
...Soldiers fighting in protective clothing and masks tire quickly," an Army manual says says...
...But time and elections apparently embolden the scorned...
...But by the late 1960s, chemical warfare seemed to be on the skids...
...Where all this will lead is still uncertain...
...Most of the trainees assigned to the chemical school at McClellan are taught two basic skills: how to detoxify soldiers and equipment contaminated by chemical, nuclear, or biological agents, and how to function for long periods inside the hot, awkward, bulky gas masks and body protective gear that keep them safe...
...The factory, for which $20 million has been appropriated, will be the first in more than a decade to produce nerve gas in this country...
...Soviet authorities conducted repeated vaccinations of the populace, explaining at first that nothing was wrong, and later that a 'mistake' had occurred...
...Sensing the public mood, President Nixon in 1969 announced a no-first-use chemical warfare policy for the United States...
...Most Americans, if they have an impression of chemical warfare at all, probably remember scenes from old World War I movies...
...twitching, jerking, and staggering...
...The Chemical School has to accept the students sent to McClellan, he adds...
...Expenditures which were unthinkable a few years ago will be devoted to bigger and more sophisticated chemical warfare munitions Exact casualty figures for the attack are not known...
...Heat exhaustion casualties increase...
...But actual use of chemical agents has been limited...
...Although as many as 1,000 residents of the suburbs may have perished, the epidemic was less severe than if the winds had been blowing toward the center of town...
...Today, however, the underlying assumption of the Army and the Fort McClel-lan chemical officers is that there will be another war, probably in Europe against the" Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies, involving the heavy use by both sides of chemical weapons...
...Contact with less than fatal amounts caused blindness lasting for days and skin burns that took weeks to heal...
...But the substances were so deadly they frightened even the Nazis...
...What Raid does to roaches, nerve gas does to humans," an Army spokesman told me...
...Almost 100,000 of those were known deaths...
...Today, at the military installation bearing the Union general's name, soldiers train in the use of weapons which can, in a matter of minutes, do ten times the damage of the muskets and grapeshot of Antietam—and result, too, in the futility of stalemate...
...Vomiting, nausea, and fever were other common effects of exposure...
...Army documents written from this point of view stress the role of the school at McClellan, which is needed, one report says, to improve "the defensive training now given American soldiers so that they may better protect themselves and function in a war in which nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons might be used...
...The killing ground for this anticipated conventional war will be heavily populated central Europe...
...Notes one British chemical warfare researcher, "One-tenth of an ounce of Sarin dispersed in an average-sized room would be sufficient to kill half the people who remained in the room for one minute breathing at a normal rate...
...In 1922 and 1925, the great powers signed international agreements to ban chemical warfare, but the genie was out of the bottle...
...But Brigadier General Gerald Watson, the school's commandant, wants trainees to drill in the presence of live nerve and blister agents...
...Five substances make up the bulk of the stockpiles...
...The Soviets, who like the Americans captured tons of German nerve gas at the end of the war with Hitler, have integrated chemical warfare into their military strategy...
...The result was chaos, and fewer men left to shoulder rifles against those who had launched the attack...
...Since 1945, most major military powers have shown interest, occasionally intense interest, in chemical warfare...
...These twelve locations, which stretch from tiny Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean to ten sites in the United States and one in West Germany, store a total of 40,000 tons of chemical agents...
...tightness of the chest...
...These weapons of incredible deadliness were within their grasp...
...For one thing, McClellan trains foreign soldiers at the chemical warfare school, some from nations of uncertain scruples when it comes to a no-first-use policy...
...The devastation from chemical weapons used in World War I led to the universal revulsion against poison gas which followed that conflict...
...The emphasis,on these skills says much about what the Pentagon believes is the shape of things to come...
...The line between defensive and offensive training may often be blurred, but the distinction is taken seriously at McClellan...
...arsenal...
...If the school's plans unfold as expected, live agents will be used in training at the chemical school by 1984, McClellan sources say...
...The Army organized the conference, which is to be repeated annually, "to update commanders and their representatives on the status of the Army's chemical warfare program and to acquaint them with facilities and services available at the school...
...The United States seems bent on making its chemical warfare capability second to none...
...The U.S...
...All this takes a toll, of course...
...The other substances, H, HD, and HT, are varieties of blister or, more popularly, "mustard" gas...
...The better we train American and NATO troops—Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops are presumably already familiar with chemical weapons defense—the fewer casualties either military force will suffer...
...At McClellan, troops are trained for just such a possibility...
...GB, also known as Sarin, was first developed in Nazi Germany before World War II...
...Chemical warfare research and development continued, and in 1958 a new and even more powerful nerve agent developed by the British, known as VX, was put into production for the U.S...
...On that spring afternoon German troops near Ypres released hundreds of thousands of pounds of chlorine gas from pressurized canisters...
...strategists speculate the Soviet chemical and biological warfare stockpile was produced largely because of the condition in which the Soviets found themselves at the end of World War II...
...Quietly, and unknown to many Americans, the United States is today embarking on a chemical rearmament jag of unprecedented scale...
...In the face of the American nuclear monopoly, runs this line of thought, the Soviet leadership saw chemical and biological warfare as a "poor man's A-bomb...
...The prospect of chemical warfare disarmament seems as remote as nuclear disarmament...
...Tons of the gases were produced and stockpiled...
...By the summer of 1945, the Soviets had a shattered economy, a devastated country, and only a faint chance of producing nuclear weapons any time soon...
...Army Chemical School...
...GB and VX nerve agents will be used, as well as HD mustard agent...
...The Germans, however, failed to realize what they had visited upon the Allies, i.e., a massive four-mile hole in their lines...
...Binary" munitions are made up of two relatively safe chemicals which, when mixed in the business end of an artillery round, form nerve gas...
...In 1973, the Army's chemical school was "disestablished" and its functions scattered under several different commands...
...Their use "has been outlawed by the general opinion of civilized mankind," Roosevelt said...
...Evacuation tied up several soldiers for each wounded man...
...The chemical transmitter used in the process builds up, and the body poisons itself...
...Few at McClellan will admit, however, that because of the prodding of Chemical Corps officers in 1956, the United States secretly turned away from the Roosevelt policy...
...According to intelligence reports, several Soviet soldiers die each year in accidents during such training...
...I state categorically that we shall under no circumstances resort to the use of such weapons unless they are first used by our enemies...
...Winds blew the anthrax cloud south, starting from the location of Compound 19 at the town's outskirts...
...CHASE, an acronym for "Cut Holes and Sink 'em," was the Army's alarmingly simple way of disposing of aging chemical ordnance, much of it in the form of artillery shells filled with potent nerve gas...
...More time is required to get the job done if resources remain constant...
...By the end of the war, some 3,000 substances had been examined for use as chemical warfare agents and 125,000 tons of poison gas dispersed...
...It is possible that chemical warfare, once its true nature is recognized, will trigger an "anti-chemical" movement, just as the last thirty-six years of nuclear weapons have triggered an international movement against those munitions...
...it is today the principal nerve agent in American stockpiles...
...The entire course can be incredibly swift...
...Consider the following: f After six years of disfavor, the Army Chemical School was formally reconstituted at Fort McClellan in 1979...
...Representatives from thirty-six states, Puerto Rico, and "every major Army command in the United States, Europe, Alaska, Hawaii, Korea, and Panama" attended, the release continued...
...Hence the name...
...Healing was slow because mustard gas retards the ability of the blood vessels to repair injured tissue...
...The following year, the United States and the Soviet Union announced they would begin negotiations aimed at complete chemical disarmament and an eventual ban on the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical agents as weapons...
...The U.S...
...The munitions were sealed in concrete, then loaded aboard old liberty ships which were towed out to sea and scuttled...
...Colonel W. A. Phillips, the assistant commandant of the school, will not say what kind of training the visitors received, but says the curriculum was routinely approved in advance by the State Department...
...11 Last September, Secretary of State Alexander Haig publicly accused the Soviet Union and its clients of engaging in chemical warfare in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan...
...Chemical weapons have often been ignored in an era mindful of nuclear mega-death...
...The civilians in these urban areas generally do not have gas masks, protective overgarments, or the survival skills acquired in defensive chemical warfare courses...
...For hours and days on end they are taught to eat, sleep, walk, and, yes, fight inside layers of confining fabric and rubber...
...In the late 1960s, for instance, the chemical soldiers brought upon themselves a tide of criticism (and severely damaged their standing with Congress) when they test-sprayed toxic nerve gas in the skies aver Utah...
...Because the chemical isn't destroyed, the nerve transmission process is jammed...
...nausea, vomiting, cramps, and involuntary defecation and urination...
...Frequently forgotten in the discussions of atomic weaponry are the colorless, tasteless, odorless chemicals, lethal in drops the size of the period at the end of this sentence...
...Europeans understand that when Soviets and Americans talk about fighting the next war, they aren't talking about fighting in the suburbs of Moscow or Pittsburgh...
...About the same time, the public learned of a series of secret "CHASE" operations...
...All on hand, read an Army press release, were "directly involved with the nation's chemical warfare program...
...no-first-use retaliation-only chemical warfare policy prompts much talk at McClellan, some of it drawing on history...
...As the Pentagon moves through the 1980s, it takes with it this vestige of the past—chemical warfare...
...Some U.S...
...sent poison gases wafting across the desert for forty-five miles...
...II The Army says it will ask Congress to appropriate at least $1.5 billion over the next five years for chemical warfare research and development...
...Mustard gas is one of the longest-lived weapons in the U.S...
...VX was the granddaddy of the nerve gases, the most powerful ever developed...
...To this end, the school turns out officers trained "in nuclear and chemical target analysis and aspects of NBC defense [including] nuclear weapon fallout prediction, methods of protection from chemical and biological agent attack, and the use of screening smokes and defensive flame-producing expedient devices...
...They work by preventing the body from destroying a chemical nerve transmitter after the chemical has relayed a message from one nerve cell to another...
...GB can be lethal in doses of about one milligram...
...Those not killed by such a dose become extremely ill...
...No country used them in World War II...
...Both are similar in molecular structure to some commercial insecticides...
...They reported their handiwork to Nazi authorities, who quickly realized its military potential...
...Individual and unit endurance will no doubt be the key to completing the mission successfully...
...Their side will do the same...
...Despite the argument that the United States is merely responding to a Soviet threat and would never use chemical weapons first, there is room for doubt...
...Within an hour the whole position had to be abandoned...
...Favorable winds carried the dense yellow-green cloud, a lung irritant producing death by asphyxiation, over nearby Canadian and French lines...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt's name comes up...
...Often it caused lasting eye damage or blindness...
...dimness of vision and pinpointing of the eye pupils...
...The United States established a Chemical Warfare Service, which eventually reached a unit strength of 20,518 men...
...So who ends up breathing the poison winds and dying...
...First developed by the Germans and first used by them in World War I, its name came from the slight mustard or garlic smell given off by impure distillations of the substance...
...Whether the flood will engulf us, or keep us from being engulfed, is anybody's guess...
...After a gas attack, line units, medics, and transportation corpsmen would all be hit with a flood of wounded men, each needing immediate attention...
...drooling and excessive sweating...
...Last May, for instance, in the Senate, the proposal to spend $20 million to make "improvements" at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas so that the Army could begin producing binary nerve gas weapons was originally scheduled for less than an hour of debate...
...It appears, then, that the world's two superpowers are rushing anew into a theater for the arms race that for years was gladly forgotten by most observers...
...One Congressional hearing on that disaster found that "an explosion at Military Compound 19 in Sverdlovsk released a cloud of anthrax spores into the atmosphere...
...The anniversary passes largely unnoticed now, but the events of April 22,1915, changed the face of warfare...
...Despite the vaccinations "about thirty to forty people died each day [and] this went on for one month," another committee report concluded...
...These symptoms are followed by cessation of breathing and death...
...But by some accounts, this single attack was good for 5,000 dead and 10,000 incapacitated...
...Tramping through the heavily forested Alabama foothills in thick clothing, gas masks, rubber gloves, and boots, these soldiers resemble nothing so much as heavily bundled-up Arctic explorers who have somehow lost their way and ended up in this humid climate...
...In 1946, the Chemical Warfare Service, which had reached a wartime unit strength of 69,000 troops, was renamed the Chemical Corps...
...Army...
...All existing biological weapons were ordered destroyed and the President said U.S...
...Given the mood of the Reagan Administration and an acquiescent Congress, objections to the chemical rearmament effort seem unlikely to count for much...
...As armies traded clouds of deadly gas, the death toll rose...
...In the name of national defense, expenditures which would have been unthinkable a few years ago will now be devoted to bigger and more sophisticated chemical warfare munitions...
...And hence the bitter attacks on the military that disclosure of the operations brought, many from people along the Eastern Seaboard who viewed the Atlantic as something other than the Army's sewer...
...Toxic smoke was apparently used in India as early as 2000 B.C., and later by the Spartans and various medieval armies...
...But agreement is not unanimous that this stockpile was built merely in preparation for a final showdown with the West...
...American interest in chemical warfare has fluctuated...
...On the Western Front, mustard gas proved monstrously effective, producing severe burns and blisters when brought in contact with exposed flesh...
...I don't believe we can transfer to them the confidence they need in their own ability and in the ability of the equipment to protect them unless we do this in a realistic fashion," Watson says...
...Mustard gas became a favorite of some front-line commanders, Allied and German, because it often maimed rather than killed the enemy...
...I In early 1981, McClellan's Chemical School held a secret, closed-to-the-public "Worldwide Chemical Conference," attended by 250 officers, noncoms, and senior civilian officials...
...The poisonous smoke "hid everything from sight and hundreds of men were thrown into a comatose or dying position," wrote one British officer who had witnessed the attack...
...The military in general was unpopular, thanks to Vietnam...
...The Haig accusation has bolstered the arguments of supporters of American chemical rearmament—if the Soviets have such weapons, so must we...
...One of a class of organophosphorous chemicals, it does its job by paralyzing the nervous system...
...Our side will suit up in gas masks and protective overgarments...
...Army Almanac noted years later, "It has sometimes been claimed that, if the German High Command had had the vision to employ this surprise weapon on a broad front and as the spearhead of a major attack, they might have won the war then and there...
...difficulty of breathing...
...Allied armies, including the American expeditionary force, quickly responded in kind...
...And Congress, uneasy over the Utah sheep kills and public reaction to the CHASE caper, was unwilling to give the chemical soldiers a free hand...
...Some "survivors" of the war were actually lingering casualties, living on for years as constant reminders, with their coughing, retching, blindness, or scarred flesh, of the gas attacks along the Western Front...
...What appears to have been a major disaster in 1979 at a Soviet biological warfare weapons factory in the town of Sverdlovsk points to a continuing Soviet effort of substantial magnitude...
...The spray killed 6,400 sheep and terrified many residents of nearby Salt Lake City...
...On the military maps of the two alliances, key European cities are in target zones and regions of expected conflict...
...In the 1930s, German scientists searching for a better way to kill insects synthesized the first of the "nerve" gases...
...Ypres was not mankind's first sortie into gas warfare...
...Bigger and better is the motto of the military today, and the chemical warfare boom is just part of the flood of dollars and rubles now flowing into the armed forces of the world's leading antagonists...
...Inhalation of mustard fumes sometimes led to such severe lung damage that unprotected soldiers simply coughed and retched themselves to graves registration...
...At the same time, Nixon disavowed any American intent ever again to make biological weapons...
...In any event, the specter of chemical weapons rearmament, and possibly even chemical warfare, is real...
...However, the South Korean government, for one, has not signed the 1965 Geneva Protocol, the major international agreement banning chemical warfare...
...Still, there is no denying the Soviets have built a massive chemical warfare capability—the greatest in the world by some accounts...
...The effect was more devastating than even the most optimistic German officer had hoped for...
...Fort McClellan, a 46,000-acre complex sprawling over the north Alabama foothills, is the home of the Army's chemical warfare school, known officially as the U.S...
...Instead of a massive nuclear confrontation with thousands of missiles filling the sky, leaving the world a cinder in space, many strategies now foresee a limited "conventional" or semi-conventional war...
...But the Ypres attack, marked by the massive assault on unprotected armies and the ghastly effectiveness of the agents employed, was a major escalation in the chemical arms race...
...Army lobbyists are already telling Senators and members of the House that the sum is barely adequate for national defense and is far less than the Soviets are spending on comparable activities...
Vol. 46 • February 1982 • No. 2
