A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Gas and Germ Warfare

EIGHT The Rise and Rise of Chemical Weapons

PRESIDENT NIXON’S STATEMENT ended the biological arms race. But in the field of chemical warfare it was designed to do no more than mark time. Many of the scientists employed at the chemical weapons bases viewed Nixon’s decision, that the United States would manufacture no new gas devices for the time being, as merely another temporary hiatus of the kind to which they had by now become accustomed.

The very buildings housing the Chemical Warfare Laboratories in Britain and the United States bear testimony to the alternating enthusiasm and coldness of post-war governments. Many of them might have been pulled down years ago. Instead they have been given a new lease of life by the addition of yet another coat of paint or varnish.

Despite the potentially catastrophic failure of Porton Down and British intelligence to warn of the existence of the Nazi nerve gases, at the end of the war the chemical warfarers owed their survival to their earlier mistake. For ten years after 1945 the scientists at Porton Down and Edgewood Arsenal, working with their associates at the Suffield research station in Canada, continued to investigate the ‘G Agents’ brought back from occupied Germany. The sensational effects of the gases gave added force to the conclusion reluctantly reached at the end of the Second World War that ‘the absence of any large scale chemical warfare in this war should not cause us to abandon research on the subject. It must continue as an insurance’.¹

The insurance adopted by the British, American and Canadian governments, who had collaborated in their chemical warfare research during the war, took three forms. All three countries at once began work on new gas masks and detection devices against the Nazi nerve agents. In Britain the army requested new gas masks and protective kit as a matter or urgency. The Home Office ordered the production of millions of new gas masks for the general public. Scientists in all three countries searched for a drug which would give some protection against nerve agents.

The second form of insurance was the decision to manufacture the G agents themselves, first in allied laboratories, and later in full scale production plants, which turned out the deadly liquid by the ton for loading into bombs and shells. Although Canada never manufactured nerve agents herself, her claim to be uninvolved in offensive plans for chemical warfare is undermined by the third step taken by the three wartime allies.

For by the end of the war the research programmes of the British, American and Canadian chemical warfare establishments had become so closely co-ordinated as to be virtually indistinguishable. The British scientists still probably possessed the greatest degree of expertise, but the American economy, and therefore the resources available for manufacturing, had been less damaged by the war. The Canadians had willingly provided the thousand square miles of land at Suffield, Alberta, where Allied weapons could be tested. The three countries decided to formalize their collaboration in a series of meetings which took place in 1945 and 1946.

In 1947 the three countries joined together in an understanding known as the Tripartite Agreement. As a former head of the US Chemical Corps put it: ‘We told each other everything. Things Porton felt better able to do, they did. Things we could do best, we did them. A country would take a particular area of research, like a nerve agent, work on it, and come back next year and report.’² The arrangement was attractive because it meant that each country could have access to a wider body of research, for no extra cost. For a country like Canada the agreement was particularly beneficial, since the Canadian government was given access to a wide range of research, in exchange mainly for the enormous expanse of prairie near Medicine Hat where the British and Americans tested their weapons. Indeed, as an official Canadian history recorded, by 1950 ‘most of the field trials of chemical warfare agents which were conducted in the free world were done at Suffield’.³

Representatives of the three countries would meet together once a year at a conference in which each would report on the research assigned to them at the previous conference. This interchange of ideas was consolidated by a regular exchange of personnel. Scientists from Edgewood Arsenal and Porton Down would regularly swap posts for a period of a year or more, an arrangement which continued into the 1980s. But while the Tripartite Agreement provided great practical benefits for all three countries, it also had serious political consequences.

The Canadians had no interest in manufacturing nerve agents themselves, and represented their position as one of ‘defensive research only’. By the mid 1950s the British had taken a similar decision not to continue with the production of nerve gas. Both countries then claimed to be involved in research only the better to protect their soldiers and people against gas. It was a publicly acceptable posture which was rendered largely meaningless by the terms of the Tripartite Agreement. As we shall see, not only were both Canada and the United Kingdom fully acquainted with the results of American offensive research at the annual conferences and in the frequent interchange of information and personnel, but both countries also actively participated in the quest for new chemical weapons.

In July 1965 the common pool of knowledge was extended to include Australia, whose government signed a Technical Co-operation Programme with the other three countries. Little is known about the nature of the Australian contribution to the chemical warfare agreement. There were persistent rumours, strenuously denied by the Australian government, that her main contribution was in the provision of tropical testing grounds for chemical warfare equipment.⁴ During the Second World War the British had used Australia to test new gases, but the arrangement ended in 1945. Despite the Australian government’s answer to protesters that there was no testing ground for chemical warfare in the country, in 1980 the Director of Porton Down claimed that the main contribution of both Australia and New Zealand to the agreement was for the testing of equipment developed in Great Britain and the United States.⁵

The agreements between the Western Allies arrived at after the Second World War have lasted to this day. To those who argued that chemical warfare research should be abandoned, the defence planners replied that having accumulated the expertise, it would be foolhardy to abandon further research at the very moment when ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’, obscuring what the potential enemy might be up to. This argument, that scientists must continue to research ever more effective methods of killing people since they could not know whether a potential enemy might not be doing the same, had been advanced as a justification for the chemical warfare establishments since the end of the First World War. Throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s it was held to be equally persuasive.

Perhaps there was another reason too. By the end of the war there were literally thousands of men and women who had dedicated their lives to the concept of wars fought with germs and gases. Their aspriations, their careers, their domestic security were to some extent at least bound up with the future of chemical and biological warfare. They argued that the future was so unpredictable, our information about potential future enemies so inadequate, and the state of the art so poised on the brink of momentous discoveries that it would be lunacy to abandon research. It was an argument which in the uncertainty of the new Cold War appeared to make a good deal of sense, and it was a view which triumphed.

The three German nerve agents, tabun, sarin and soman were coded by the British as GA, GB and GD respectively. Although the Nazis had concentrated upon the manufacture of tabun (GA), tests had shown that sarin (GB) was many times more powerful, and soman more powerful yet. The Russians focused their efforts upon manufacturing soman, but the British decided that the alcohol needed for its production was too difficult to make in quantity. The British began a series of tests to establish the potency and other properties of weapons filled with the medium strength agent, GB.

They began with animals. In 1949 a special farm was built at Porton Down solely to breed the animals needed for research. In the early stages they used rats which were gassed with GB on the range at Porton. Later, monkeys were placed in cages in the Porton laboratories, and clouds of nerve gas blown over them.⁶ Flight Lieutenant William Cockayne, a young RAF officer notionally stationed at the nearby Boscombe Down airbase, but in fact working at Porton, was later to recall how in 1952 he had watched chimpanzees, goats, dogs and other animals being tethered to stakes on the range at Porton before nerve gas shells brought from Germany were fired at them.

The young RAF officer was sent to collect the corpses after the clouds of nerve gas had supposedly dispersed. Although clad in gas mask and protective suit, Cockayne collapsed. It was the end of his RAF career. While in hospital recovering from the gas’s attack on his nervous system he was discharged from the force, and later diagnosed as a psychiatric case. For all his civilian life Cockayne was to suffer from uncontrollable muscle spasms, fits of deep depression and inexplicable confusion and terror. It was fourteen years before the Ministry of Defence would even admit that Cockayne had been employed at Porton. Then, using the by now standard justification for chemical warfare work, they told his MP that Cockayne had been involved not in research into new nerve gases but in ‘experiments to assess the vulnerability of our equipment to nerve gas weapons’7 This distinction, critical to the preservation of a ‘respectable’ image for chemical warfare research, was at the time of Cockayne’s accident meaningless, since Porton Down was actively developing new weapons for the British army, based on the Nazi nerve gasses.

The Weapons Unit at Porton Down was dominated by attempts to develop new methods of delivering GB nerve gas to an enemy. They tested dozens of possible weapons – mortar bombs, artillery shells, aircraft bombs – filled with harmless substitutes. But there were severe restrictions on the sort of experiments which could be conducted in the open air in Britain – the stuff was simply too dangerous to risk a cloud of it blowing off the range and into homes and factories. Fewer restrictons applied, apparently, in Britain’s African colonies.

Between the end of 1951 and the early months of 1955, groups of up to twenty experts from Porton travelled regularly to West Africa.⁸ Here for periods of three months at a time, they carried out a series of tests which, even thirty years later, were still classified ‘secret’. During the Second World War, the British had tested their chemical weapons in Canada, Australia and India, in addition to the allied test sites in the United States. Although the facilities in Canada continued to be available to Porton Down, another site was now needed, where weapons could be tested under tropical conditions, India no longer being a colony. The British selected Obanakoro in Nigeria, because within easy reach they could find both jungle and dry sandy ground.

It is commonly assumed that the British never came near the manufacture of real nerve gas weapons. Yet the devices tested in Nigeria show how far advanced was their development. The weapons included 25-lb artillery shells, 5½-inch naval shells, mortar bombs, and small ‘bomblets’ for use within a larger aircraft ‘cluster bomb’. All were British-made.

Meanwhile at Porton Down, experiments were carried out on human ‘guinea pigs’ to assess the effects of the nerve gases. By 1953 no less than 1,500 British servicemen had volunteered for the Porton Down tests. But in May that year one of the experiments went disastrously awry.

Immediately afterwards the Wiltshire Coroner took the unusual step of holding an inquest in camera. The only members of the public allowed inside the courtroom were personnel from Porton Down and the elderly parents of Leading Aircraftman Ronald Maddison, a twenty-year-old National Serviceman from Consett, Country Durham. No details of the inquest were made public, and Maddison’s father was instructed not to discuss his son’s death, even with his wife. It proved impossible, however, to suppress the details of the airman’s Death Certificate. The document revealed that Maddison had died from blocking of the bronchial tubes, a classic symptom of nerve gas poisoning.

Maddison had been a ‘guinea pig’ for the nerve gas being refined at Porton Down. It appears that experiments had been conducted in which scientists had placed a drop of GB liquid on a volunteer’s arm, to test whether it would evaporate before penetrating the clothing and skin, and attacking the nervous system. Maddison had the misfortune to be chosen for an experiment in which a drop of the liquid was placed on his forearm, and then covered so as to prevent its evaporating. The result was to allow the liquid to penetrate through the skin, and so give him a dose far greater than any previous volunteer had experienced. He died surrounded by some of the most knowledgeable chemical weapons experts in the world, who could do nothing to save him.

Porton Down claimed that Maddison had been ‘abnormally sensitive’ to nerve gas, but even so, work with human volunteers stopped for six months while a government inquiry scrutinized the way in which young volunteers were being used at Porton. The investigation concluded that Maddison’s death had been an unfortunate accident, and that the tests should continue. The inquiry had been impressed to learn that the servicemen who volunteered to test nerve gas received no extra pay or other rewards for standing in the gas chambers.

There was another inquest connected with Porton in 1953. The Director of the Chemical Defence Section took his own life. No one suggested that the balance of his mind had been affected by his work with nerve gas, but his wife told the Wiltshire Coroner that her husband suffered from terrible depression. Sometimes, she said, he would come home late, explaining that he had stayed out walking around in the evening air ‘until he felt civilized again’.⁹

If the British were to begin manufacturing nerve gas, they would need a new factory. The mustard gas plant, at Sutton Oak, Lancashire, was thought to be too near human habitation for it to be used safely for the manufacture of the highly poisonous nerve agents. It was razed to the ground, and later became the site of a gypsy encampment.

For the manufacture of nerve gas, the British chose a remote clifftop on the north Cornish coast, where the RAF already maintained an airbase. Nancekuke appeared an ideal site, high on a clifftop, well away from human habitation and with any accidentally released clouds of gas likely to blow out to sea. Many of the same considerations also made the area a popular holiday area, but inquisitive tourists were kept away from the place by eight foot tall fences. The Ministry of Defence later described the plant at Nancekuke as a ‘design exercise against the event of the UK requiring a retaliatory capability as a deterrent’.¹⁰ By 1953, this ‘design exercise’ was producing 6 kilograms of GB nerve agent every hour.

But the British never became fully committed to the production of nerve gas, partly because of memories of the horrors of the First World War, and partly because they simply could not afford the expense of producing a new weapon. At one stage, they sent an urgent message to Washington asking the Americans to supply them with nerve gas as soon as possible. The Top Secret memo which gives details of this request to the American Joint Chiefs of Staff makes no mention of the quantities asked for.¹¹ It was, perhaps, an interim amount to tide them over until Nancekuke became fully productive.

The plant at Nancekuke on the beautiful Cornish coast manufactured 15 tons of GB, all of which was supposedly used for research there and at Porton. The factory had been designed as a ‘pilot plant’, as Sutton Oak had been a pilot plant for the manufacture of mustard gas. In the event, the British, unlike their American allies, never developed a full scale nerve gas manufacturing plant, a decision often represented as one akin to unilateral disarmament. In truth there was no need to expand facilities because the British had proved to their satisfaction that the system worked. In times of crisis it would be necessary only to use the experience of Nancekuke to build a larger plant to produce the nerve gas necessary for future weapons.

But although Nancekuke produced only 15 tons of nerve gas, by wartime standards a tiny amount, its gas nevertheless claimed victims. The Nancekuke area, in the midst of the Cornish countryside, is one in which men find it hard to get jobs with any prospect of security. Among those attracted to the new factory being put up by the Ministry of Defence, with its guarantee of employment for the foreseeable future, was a young ex-RAF man, Tom Griffiths. He was lucky: they hired him as a fitter.

On 31 March 1958, Griffiths and a colleague were instructed to repair a sagging pipe.¹² Although the pipe in question formed part of the complicated latticework which made up the nerve gas production line, they had been assured that the area was ‘clean’, and they entered the room without either gas mask or protective clothing. Griffiths placed a ladder against the wall, and climbed up to examine the pipe. He was astonished to see a drip of clear liquid hanging from one of the pipe flanges. It could only be GB. Griffiths shouted a warning to his colleague, and jumped from the ladder. The two men made for the door, their breath coming in short gasps, their vision blurred.

Outside in the fresh air, as their breathing returned to normal and objects stopped swimming before them, with the happy-go-lucky fatalism born of working at Nancekuke, the two men congratulated each other on an extremely narrow escape. Griffiths was an intensely patriotic and normally honest man. And yet that evening, when he returned home, he lied to his wife, telling her he was suffering from a migraine attack. Although violently sick during the night, he forbade her to call the doctor, handing her a card with the name and telephone number of the Nancekuke Medical Officer. If anyone was to be summoned, he said, it could only be him. As he explained later, he had signed the Official Secrets Act, which instructed him not to discuss his work with strangers, an injunction he took to include his wife.

Over the coming months, although his condition improved, Tom Griffiths never fully recovered. His workmate was killed in a roadaccident, and Griffiths himself grew progressively more withdrawn, prone to fits of depression and loneliness when he would sit for hours staring into the fireplace of their small grey council house. He forgot things, became irritable. Sometimes he would be overcome with dizziness, and couldn’t breathe properly. Finally, he was unable to work any longer: unfit for further employment at the age of thirty-nine.

It was ten years before Nancekuke’s real function was revealed, and Griffiths finally admitted to his wife what he believed to be the cause of his condition. By then the Ministry of Defence had refused any compensation, while it would take another ten years before he was able to win a disability pension.

Nor was this the only accident at Nancekuke. Sixteen years after the end of the war the trophies captured by the Allies from the Germans were still stored there. In 1961 another fitter was told to begin dismantling a huge condenser which had been removed from a German nerve gas factory. The fitter, Trevor Martin, remembers the condenser was about five feet long and two feet in diameter, and ‘as rusty as an old anchor’.¹³ There was a label attached with the words ‘believed clean’, and so he wore no gas mask. He removed the end flanges of the container, and found a form of asbestos compound between the joints. There was a great deal of rust and dust.

But by now it was the end of the day. Martin stripped off his overalls and went home to tea. Afterwards he went out to work on his car – there were adjustments to be made underneath the chassis. When he stood up again, he felt dizzy, flushed and breathless. His speech became, he says, ‘incoherent’. He felt better later that evening and for the following five days went to work as normal. But on the sixth day his right leg began to twitch uncontrollably. The right side of his face was paralysed. He managed to work the three months necessary to claim a weekly £4 pension, but in the summer of 1962, at the age of thirty-seven he was rendered unemployable.

The rest of his life was spent in and out of hospitals, consulting rooms and surgeries. He was told that he suffered from an inoperable brain tumour, inflammation of the brain, psycho-neurosis, fibrositis and epilepsy. Nineteen years after the accident which he claimed caused his condition, Trevor Martin was still pursuing his lonely campaign to prove that he was indeed a victim of nerve gas poisoning. He still suffered from a permanent headache, muscle cramps, acute fatigue, twitches in his right arm, blurred vision, and a breathlessness so acute that he could walk no more than a few hundred yards. Perhaps most distressing of all were his psychological symptoms: what he describes as ‘confusion’, depression, and a tendency to sit and, for no apparent reason, to weep uncontrollably.

While the British continued their research and evaluation, the Americans decided to go into production with GB shells and bombs as soon as possible.

The initial experimental work had been carried out at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, but soon it was clear that the Chemical Corps needed far more space. They settled on Dugway Proving Ground, a run-down Second World War base in a remote corner of the Utah Canyons near the Skull Valley Indian reservation. It was here that American munitions specialists had built entire Japanese and German villages to test new Allied bombs, but after the war the base had been designated ‘inactive’. Now, in 1950, the place was reopened, building contractors moved in, and yet more land was bought or borrowed, until the Dugway Proving Ground covered an area the size of Hampshire. A new administrative area and housing scheme was built to accommodate the thousands of scientists and soldiers expected at the base. And other research stations were opened, in the Panama Canal Zone to experiment with nerve gas in tropical conditions, and in Alaska and Greenland, for Arctic tests.¹⁴

There was a problem when it came to trying to produce the GB liquid itself. The chemical necessary for production of sarin, Dichlor, was, the Chemical Corps felt, beyond the capability of the civilian chemical industry. They solved the problem by building their own factory to manufacture Dichlor on forty-five acres of land acquired from the Tennessee Valley Authority in Alabama.¹⁵ By 1953 the factory was producing Dichlor in abundance, which the Chemical Corps then carried overland to Rocky Mountain Arsenal, an innocuous looking huddle of buildings ten miles north-east of Denver, Colorado. Here the chemical process was completed, and finished nerve agent produced. It cost, all told, only three dollars a kilogramme to manufacture, and during the cold war years of the mid-1950s the factory turned out between fifteen and twenty thousand tons.¹⁶

It did not take long to load the sarin into weapons. By the mid-1960s the American armed forces were equipped with an enormous range of weapons filled with nerve gas: artillery shells, rocket warheads, missile warheads, and a range of bombs from small ‘bomblets’ to 500-lb ‘Weteye’ bombs.¹⁷

While the United States in her role as Defender of the Free World continued to develop new gas weapons, Britain, beset by economic problems, reassessed her interest in chemical warfare. A number of considerations bore down on the British Ministry of Defence, most notably the need to save large amounts of money. Gas had not, after all, been used in the Second World War. The German nerve agents had been thoroughly analysed at Porton Down, and the British had developed their own shells and bombs. There was a pilot nerve gas plant operating in Cornwall. And the United States was producing nerve gas weapons which she was prepared to make available to the British.¹⁸ In 1956 the Ministry of Defence came to a decision that after forty years of developing new weapons, Britain would get out of gas.

This decision to renounce chemical weapons, although largely based upon economic considerations, came to be seen as a brave moral gesture. This decision, in later years vaunted as an example of the moral courage of the nation, was less than the whole truth. True, the remaining stocks of British phosgene and mustard gas from the Second World War, together with thousands of tons of captured German nerve gas weapons, were loaded aboard ships and taken to a point off the Inner Hebrides above the thousand fathom line. Here, as the gas weapons were sent to the bottom of the sea, the British renounced their capacity to wage chemical warfare. Research on new nerve gas weapons was cancelled.¹⁹ From henceforth Britain would be concerned only with devising methods of protecting her soldiers against attack.

During the 1930s Porton Down had evaded the restrictions on developing new chemical weapons by conducting research ‘under the rose’.²⁰ Now faced with a government decision to halt the further development of new gas weapons, Porton Down had a different cover in the Tripartite Agreement.

In September 1958, two years after the British government ruling, representatives of Porton Down met their American and Canadian counterparts at the Thirteenth Tripartite Conference on Toxicological Warfare, held in Canada. It can be assumed that all three countries, although two were now committed to purely defensive research, pooled their information. But the summary of the conference also records that:

In other words, Britain and Canada, although both officially concerned purely with defensive research, agreed to continue research into new weapons. Porton Down would justify such research by arguing, as was argued during the 1930s, that research must be conducted into new ‘Weapons against which defence is required’. But the history of chemical warfare since the Second World War is a succession of British discoveries which were later turned into weapons by her partner in the Tripartite Agreement.

In 1952 chemists at the Plant Protection Laboratories of the giant Imperial Chemical Industries were attempting to develop a new pesticide. One of the ICI chemists, Dr Ranajit Ghosh, discovered a substance which appeared to be so toxic that not only would it destroy insects, but it might also kill humans. He sent a sample, together with the chemical formula, to Porton Down.²²

Dr Ghosh’s new liquid was heavier and more viscous than the German G agents, closer to the consistency of engine oil than anything else. At one stage in its manufacture it had the appearance of frozen milk, but it had little or no smell. The Porton scientists discovered that although it was different in appearance, it worked in the same way as the German nerve agents, by interfering with a vital enzyme needed to control muscle movements. It seemed a potent weapon.

In 1952, the British had not yet decided whether to mass produce weapons filled with the German G agents. Under the terms of the Tripartite Agreement they were bound to pass the information on this new nerve agent to the United States and Canada. The Canadians had no interest in developing a new weapon, but to the American Chemical corps the liquid was attractive. It would penetrate through the skin itself, but was many times more powerful than sarin (a few milligrammes of the new substance would kill), and whereas the G agents tended to evaporate, the heavy, viscous liquid from Porton Down would lie in poisonous puddles for weeks. Whole areas of the battlefield could be turned into virtual no-go areas. Soon chemists at Edgewood Arsenal had refined one variant of the Porton liquid. They named it ‘VX’.

The two countries collaborated in a series of tests to establish how VX could be manufactured. It was the British, once again, who were the first to develop a reliable production process at the Nancekuke base in Cornwall. But by the time the process had been perfected it was 1956, and the British government had decided that Britain would renounce chemical weapons. The results of the British process studies were passed to the Americans under the terms of the Tripartite Agreement.

The Americans chose an old heavy water plant in Indiana as the site on which they would begin manufacturing VX. It was situated at Newport, a few miles north of Terre Haute, Indiana, where the Allies had been planning to mass produce the anthrax bombs to be used in the Second World War. From the outside, the new factory at Newport looked unexceptional, its main characteristic being a ten storey tower where the forty miles of pipes involved in the process culminated in the final production of VX. In a lower building the oily liquid was loaded into rockets, shells and bombs.

Each of the three hundred or so workers at the Newport factory was made to undergo a rigorous physical examination before being employed.²³ Inspectors in the production tower were required to don gas masks and heavy protective clothing before sampling the liquid for its fatal purity every ninety minutes. They were expected to undergo blood tests, and to take a shower three times a day.

The Newport factory, built at a cost of eight million dollars, was run for the Pentagon by the Food Machinery and Chemical Corporation of New York. By 1967 it had produced between four and five thousand tons of VX, and a new generation of chemical weapons had entered service with the United States. VX had been loaded into landmines, artillery shells, aircraft spray tanks, even the warheads of battlefield missiles.²⁴ In less than ten years a potential British pesticide had become the most poisonous weapon in service with the American forces.

In the late 1950s, with two nerve agents being prepared for the battlefield, the US Chemical Corps set out to teach people to ‘love that gas’. There was no understanding the size of the task facing them. In the folk memory of the 1950s gas was still the most feared and horrific of all the non-nuclear weapons. Then, as now, the word ‘gas’ immediately conjured up photographs of blinded men being led away to lingering deaths in squalid field hospitals.

As the United States Defense Science Board put it, gas was now a weapon capable of inflicting ‘devastating casualties on unprotected personnel, both military and civilians’.²⁵ In light of this view, popular attitudes had to be changed, and the Chemical Corps set out to manipulate public opinion into an acceptance of chemical weapons. The thrust was basic: the Soviet Union had massive stocks of chemical weapons, the West far fewer. The propaganda techniques chosen ranged from private speeches by senior Chemical Corps officers to selected interest groups, to articles by recently retired members of the Chemical Corps, and off-the-record briefings for potentially sympathetic journalists. Senior officers were made available for interviews. Previously classified documents were leaked to chosen newspapers.

A favourite example of the propagandists was the Second World War battle of Iwo Jima, in which 6,000 marines had died and a further 19,000 had been wounded. The Chemical Corps now suggested to the American public that the lives of American servicemen lost at Iwo Jima could have been saved had the decision been taken to use gas.

Some others, on the advice of the public relations consultant hired by the Pentagon, went further. ‘Man is now confronted by the possibility that he can eliminate death from war’, claimed one of the articles planted in the press.²⁶ In another press report the former commander of the Chemical Corps announced that ‘there is no question in my mind that for the first time in history there is the promise – even the possibility – that war will not necessarily mean death’.²⁷ These outlandish advertisements for gas multiplied. In magazines and newspapers all over the United States, and later in Britain, articles began appearing which suggested that soon wars would be fought without any bloodletting.

As one government scientist put it: ‘Ideally we’d like something we could spray out of a small atomizer that would cause the enemy to come to our lines with his hands behind his back, whistling the Star-spangled Banner. I don’t think we’ll achieve that effect, but we may come close.’²⁸

Whether the Chemical Corps genuinely believed this science fiction is not clear. At any event, the public relations campaign brought results. The latter stages coincided with the decision of the Kennedy administration that the United States could no longer rely upon a doctrine of massive nuclear retaliation to deter her enemies. Between 1961 and 1964, the annual budget for chemical and biological warfare almost trebled. But what were these weapons that had such a selling point in the campaign to present gas as ‘humane’?

During the later 1950s and early 1960s hundreds of American servicemen and civilians underwent experiments in which they were given so-called ‘psychochemicals’, drugs which the Army hoped would prove that war without death was indeed possible. In Britain a similar, smaller series of tests involved over 140 experiments in which Porton Down tested LSD, the most potent of the candidate weapons.³⁰ The search had begun soon after the Second World War.

In April 1943 a research chemist at the Swiss Headquarters of the Sandoz drug company had made an extraordinary discovery. Dr Albert Hoffman was attempting to snythesize a drug from ergot, a fungus which attacks cereals. He began to feel dizzy, tipsy and restless. Hoffmann lay down in the hope that the effects would soon pass off. But they did not. As a succession of colours and patterns drifted across his consciousness, he took the first LSD ‘trip’.³¹

Hoffman’s discovery of LSD soon began to interest psychiatrists who wondered whether a drug which appeared to open the doors of perception might be valuable in treating mental illness. The results of their experiments were soon known to the chemical warfare scientists in all three members of the Tripartite Agreement, who began to evaluate the drug as a potential weapon.

The early results seemed encouraging.

reported an American assessment.³² The British followed up these early findings with experiments of their own on volunteers. But their results did not support the enthusiasm the Americans were now showing for LSD as a potential weapon. The British found that:

This was to remain the British view: psychochemicals like LSD were simply too unpredictable in their effects to be worthwhile as weapons of war. They were bothered too by the cost – at a price of £100 a pound, and a ton thought necessary to cover a square mile, LSD was soon ruled out as too expensive.³⁴ Research in Britain continued only sporadically. But others were undeterred.

Excitement over the possibilities of LSD even reached China, whose representatives are believed to have negotiated a clandestine deal with a British company for the supply of 400 million dosage units of the drug. The arrangement was made in the early 1960s, with the British firm acting as middle men, buying the drug itself from a Czechoslovak manufacturer.³⁵

In the United States the Chemical Corps remained convinced that LSD, or some similar drug, represented a powerful potential weapon. They embarked on a programme of secret tests to determine the effects of the candidate drugs.

Shortly before ten on the morning of 8 January 1953, Harold Blauer, a tennis professional undergoing treatment at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, was given an injection. Six minutes later, according to his medical report, he was ‘out of contact with reality’, his arms flailing. At one minute past ten the report noted rapid oscillation of the eyeballs. Ten minutes later, Blauer’s body was ‘rigid all over’. Ten minutes after that he went into a deep coma, from which he never recovered.³⁶

Harold Blauer had believed he was undergoing conventional psychiatric treatment in a conventional psychiatric hospital. But in fact he was an unwitting guinea pig in US Army tests to discover a technique for ‘war without death’. Blauer had been given a drug about which the doctor in charge knew next to nothing, since it was identified only by its Edgewood Arsenal number, EA 1298. The doctor later told investigators ‘we didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him’.³⁷ EA 1298 was a derivative of mescaline, one of many drugs the Edgewood Arsenal scientists were testing in the lengthy search for ways of making an enemy ‘come out singing the Star-spangled Banner’. So little was known about the drug that the huge amount injected into Blauer’s body had stimulated him to death. While Harold Blauer became the first person known to have died as a result of the secret army experiments, as hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on supporting research at prestigious universities and hospitals. Between 1953 and 1957 the United States Army gave 140,000 dollars to Blauer’s hospital, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, to discover what effect selected drugs would have on patients.

There were other tests, involving nearly six hundred American servicemen and nine hundred civilian volunteers.³⁸ Some of them were written up, in bemused detail, for the benefit of a wider audience. Among the many effects of three selected drugs on a group of 159 ‘normal enlisted men’ at Edgewood Arsenal were:

A further series of tests was filmed by the Chemical Corps, and later released to army units under the title ‘Armour for the Inner Man’. The film shows American servicemen manning an anti-aircraft gun, carrying out surveys, completing assault courses. Each is then given a pill. Later the film shows the soldiers unable to complete any of their assigned tasks. They loaf about and giggle. Po-faced officers ask questions, but the men are unable to answer. They stagger about, unable to stand upright. From these and other tests the army concluded that psychochemicals, in removing the will to fight, were powerful potential weapons.⁴⁰

From the military point of view, psychochemicals appeared immensely attractive. They seemed to offer all the advantages of chemical or radiological weapons, with none of the disadvantages: no damage to property, no dead bodies, and no danger of infection.

The army settled on a substance which they code-named BZ. It possessed some properties similar to LSD, but had the advantage that, unlike many of the drugs they had tested, it could easily be distributed as an airborne cloud. BZ took about half an hour to affect its victim, but its after-effects could last for at least two weeks. During the first four hours the victim would find his mouth and throat parched, his skin hot and flushed. He might vomit, his vision would be disturbed. He would stagger around, speaking with a drunken slur or mumbling nonsense. Later he might lose his memory, and would probably suffer hallucinations.⁴¹

The American Army commissioned a commercial company to produce BZ in bulk and chose the biological and chemical weapons plant on an old Second World War base in central Arkansas as the site on which the BZ would be loaded into bombs. In 1962 they spent two million dollars on the BZ factory at Pine Bluff Arsenal, and over the next two years one hundred thousand pounds of it was produced. But despite all the years of research and the expense of building special factories, BZ, the ‘humane weapon’ has probably never been used.⁴² The Army continued to experiment with the gas during the ’60s, in a series of tests at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, and, in conditions of extreme secrecy, at a site on Hawaii.⁴³

In the end the Army concluded reluctantly that even though BZ had been manufactured and loaded into bombs, it was not a reliable weapon. An enemy general under its dangerous delirium was as likely to push the nuclear button as he was to lie down and sham dead or stand up and sing the Star-spangled Banner.

By 1979 the total British stock of BZ was one gram, ‘for reference purposes’ in the vaults at Porton Down.⁴⁴ The search for the humane gas had come to naught.

In November 1961 three C123 ‘Provider’ transport planes of the United States Airforce took off from their base in the Philippines, bound for South Vietnam. All three were equipped with huge tanks capable of holding 1,000 gallons of liquid. High pressure nozzles were fitted beneath the wings and tailplanes. They were to be the instruments of the biggest use of chemical warfare since the First World War.⁴⁵

The mission of these aircraft, and the many others which later joined them, was named ‘Operation Ranch Hand’, and was directed not against people, but against the environment of Vietnam. Even so, it is still held responsible for tragic human consequences.

The theory of Operation Ranch Hand was simple enough. The Viet Cong’s main advantage in their war against the South Vietnamese and Americans was surprise, the ability to mount an ambush and then slip away into the dense protective cover of the jungle. Operation Ranch Hand aimed to strip the jungle bare.

There was nothing new about the theory behind the American plan. As in so many areas of chemical warfare the initial discoveries which made it possible dated from World War Two. In 1940, UK scientists had discovered a number of chemicals which, while apparently closely related to natural plant hormones, were capable of killing crops with surprising efficiency. Although the British felt unable to deploy enough aircraft to mount attacks on the farms producing German food supplies, in the United States research on both biological and chemical agents for attacking plants continued at a great pace. By the end of the war American scientists had investigated over a thousand chemicals for their effects on vegetation, and had developed three main agents.⁴⁶ Had the war continued, they would have used chemicals to destroy the Japanese rice crop, and so starve the country into surrender.⁴⁷

Because the Second World War had ended before the plan could be put into effect, it was the British in one of their final colonial wars who first used chemical weapons against plants. In their battle against Chinese guerillas in Malaya during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the British sprayed trichlorophenoxyacetic acid, better known as 245T, one of the chemicals developed as a weapon by the Americans, onto suspected guerilla food plantations in an effort to starve them into surrender. In other attacks they used the herbicide to destroy jungle cover. The effects of the British spraying were made known to the small group of American scientists who continued desultory anti-crop research during the 1950s. But with the beginning of American involvement in their own war against guerillas in South-east Asia, Fort Detrick rapidly accelerated its investigations. In the eight years beginning in 1961 its scientists would investigate no less than 26,000 chemicals for their potential usefulness.

Six were chosen for the job of denuding the jungle, coded as Agents Green, Pink, Purple, White, Blue and Orange, after the colours painted onto the drums in which they were delivered to the airfields of South Vietnam. The men into whose aircraft they were loaded chose as their slogan ‘Only we can prevent forests’. They boasted that ‘we are the most hated outfit in Vietnam’.⁴⁸

The lumbering aircraft were an easy target for Viet Cong ground fire, but their spraying was soon judged a success. By 1964 Operation Ranch Hand aircraft were dumping their poisonous rain over the whole of Vietnam, from the Mekong Delta to the Demilitarized Zone, and later over Laos and Cambodia too. Soon the spraying was extended. Operation Ranch Hand planes would set out to destroy food plantations of the Viet Cong. The Americans were initially embarrassed at the idea of attacks on food plantations, and in the early days aircraft on defoliation missions would fly with American Airforce markings, which were replaced by the insignia of the South Vietnamese airforce when they flew on anti-crop assignments.⁴⁹ Eventually an area the size of Israel had been sprayed, much of it more than once. A spokesman for the Department of Defense stated unequivocally in 1966 that the chemicals ‘are not harmful to people, animals, soil or water’.⁵⁰

Of all the chemicals used to strip the jungle, the one which created the greatest bitterness was Agent Orange, used on particularly dense areas of forest. Agent Orange had a spectacular effect, sending vegetation on a rapid and self-destructive growing binge. Plants would explode, leaving a surrealistic landscape where weeds had grown into bushes and where trees, bowed down by the weight of their fruit, would lie rotting in the foul-smelling jungle. The Vietnamese peasants called the areas affected by Agent Orange ‘the land of the dead’, but American officers claimed that in some places the ambush rate dropped by 90 per cent after the Operation Ranch Hand planes had passed over.⁵¹ Requests from field commanders were coming in faster than the Air Force could ship the stuff out from the United States.

Agent Orange was a mixture of two chemicals, one of which, 24 5T, had been the defoliant used by the British in Malaya. 245T contains minute amounts of dioxin, one of the most virulently poisonous substances ever produced, at least as toxic as nerve gas and known from experiments to cause deformities in animal foetuses. The proportion of dioxin in Agent Orange was minuscule; so small, it was said, that it could surely cause no damage to humans.

But the quantities being poured from the sky were enormous. Each C123 could discharge its one thousand gallons in five minutes, and would then return to make another sortie over the jungle. In 1968 the domestic weedkillers using the active ingredients of Agent Orange almost disappeared from the American market, so great was the demand from the army in Vietnam.

Within the massive amounts of weedkiller being showered from American aircraft onto the jungles of Vietnam, the small amounts of dioxin accumulated. By the time the spraying had ended, an estimated 240 lb of the stuff had been dumped on Vietnam.⁵² A few ounces in the water supply would have been enough to destroy the population of London or New York.

The evidence soon began to accumulate. In Tay Minh Hospital, in the area most heavily sprayed with Agent Orange, the number of still-born babies doubled during the height of Operation Ranch Hand. During the period of heaviest spraying doctors at Saigon Children’s Hospital discovered that the number of babies suffering from spina bifida and cleft palates trebled.⁵³ As the years passed, the evidence of Agent Orange’s toxic legacy accumulated. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese children have been born with serious disabilities, ranging from missing limbs to blindness, deafness and cranial abnormalities. A generation after the end of the war visitors to Vietnam can see the catastrophic after-effects in towns and villages across the land.

Nor were the effects of the spraying confined to Vietnamese who had been on the ground as the Operation Ranch Hand aircraft passed over.

One September weekend, five years after the end of the war, Paul Reutershan, an American who had served in Vietnam as an aircraft mechanic, doubled up with what he took to be food poisoning. A series of tests at a local hospital revealed not food poisoning, but abdominal cancer so severe that doctors could not operate. It had been established that 245T would produce cancer in some laboratory animals. Reutershan was convinced that Agent Orange had caused his cancer. He began organizing a national campaign: seven thousand former servicemen came forward believing that their cancers and other illnesses or birth deformities in their children were produced by Agent Orange. Before they could organize very far, Reutershan died.

The Vietnam veterans tell stories of paint being stripped from the Operation Ranch Hand aircraft by Agent Orange, of flying spraying missions in helicopters when the entire crew would be covered in herbicide. On over forty occasions aircraft dumped Agent Orange directly onto American military bases. Both the servicemen and reports from Vietnam speak of a higher than average rate of birth deformities.⁵⁴ By 1982, of the children fathered by men exposed to the defoliant, no less than 40,000 were said to suffer from serious birth defects.

The American government maintained that in using chemical weapons to attack the jungle it was breaking no international agreements. The understanding upon which this belief was based dated back to the Second World War, when both British and American chemical warfare advisors had argued that anti-plant weapons were not covered by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Although the United States had still not signed the Protocol, on the grounds that to do so would deprive her of the ‘humane’ use of riot agents such as tear gas, it was believed that her stance on chemical weapons was no different to that of countries which had acceded. In Vietnam this understanding was stretched to breaking point.

The Geneva Protocol had laid down firm controls over the use of gas in war. But the use of chemical weapons, like tear gas, by domestic police forces was a matter purely for national governments. Both the United States and Britain had established factories to manufacture CN gas after the First World War, and the British were soon using the gas against rioters in the colonies. The weapon which replaced it, and was used in Vietnam, CS gas,⁵⁵ provides a near-perfect example of the way in which chemical warfare research, despite a commitment to purely defensive uses, came to be applied to war.

The British realized in operations in both Korea and Cyprus during the early fifties that their standard tear gas, CN, ‘would not drive back fanatical rioters’.⁵⁶ Porton Down began the search for another, more powerful weapon, which would affect other parts of the body, since determined demonstrators could resist CN simply by closing their eyes. The scientists at Porton worked their way through almost a hundred chemical compounds, before eventually choosing CS. The advantage of CS was that it produced a whole range of unpleasant effects. The victim felt his eyes burn and water, his skin itched, his nose ran, he coughed and vomited between gasps for breath. The British tested the new gas when faced by rioters in Cyprus in 1958, and reported the power of CS to their colleagues at the Tripartite Conference that year.

The US Chemical Corps immediately established a crash programme, code-named ‘Black Magic’, to manufacture CS for use in grenades and from spray-tanks mounted on helicopters and aircraft. But while the British could claim that they had only used the gas in police operations, or when the army was acting ‘in support of the civil power’ (a justification to be used when CS was first used by the army against rioters in Northern Ireland later in the decade), its use by the American forces in Vietnam was nothing of the kind. In 1965 General Westmoreland, the American commander in Vietnam, decided that CS would be invaluable in driving the Viet Cong from their hidden bunkers. Conscious of the sensitivity of the issue, the troops who took part in the operation on which CS was first used officially were thoroughly rehearsed in speaking not of ‘gas’ but ‘tear gas’, believed to be exempt from the general ban on chemical weapons.

Some indication of the ‘humanity’ of CS gas in Vietnam can be gained from one operation in which it was employed.⁵⁷ Viet Cong soldiers were believed to be hidden in bunkers in a narrow stretch of jungle. First, helicopters were sent in, poring out CS gas from their dispenser tanks. Then came huge B52 bombers which ‘carpeted’ the area with high-explosive bombs. Finally, American troops in gas masks would be sent in to ‘clean up’ any survivors. As an American spokesman explained later, ‘the purpose of the gas attack was to force the Viet Cong troops to the surface, where they would be more vulnerable to the fragmentation effects of the bomb bursts.’⁵⁸

All told, thousands of tons of CS gas were used by American forces in Vietnam. The worry that Vietnam might develop like the First World War, where use of tear gas had been the precursor to use of ever more sophisticated poisons, had not been justified. But at times Vietnam did look like a First World War battlefield, as clouds of gas drifted about, occasionally obscuring the frogmen-like GIs in their gas masks. One French journalist described an attack which bore a disturbing similarity to some First World War encounters:

In the eyes of some Vietnamese watchers, it did not matter that the United States had stopped short of the use of fatal gases, even at the moment of her final humiliation. It was, in the eyes of critics of American policy, a mistake to have used even riot agents. As the New York Times put it: ‘In Vietnam, gas was supplied and sanctioned by white men against Asians. This is something that no Asian, Communist or not, will forget’.⁶⁰

While aircraft poured defoliant onto the jungles of Vietnam and soldiers lobbed CS gas grenades at suspected Viet Cong, back in the United States work continued on the lethal nerve gases. By the middle ’60s there was hardly one of the more distinguished American universities (and many undistinguished ones too) which was not carrying out research into chemical or biological warfare. At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, some forty civilian scientists employed by the ‘Institute for Co-operative Research’ were working exclusively on chemical and biological warfare.⁶¹ Whereas the British were devoting most of their energies to the development of new gas masks and protective suits, in the United States much of the work concentrated on the development of new weapons, particularly on problems of how to spread nerve agents more effectively.⁶²

By the late 1960s the United States possessed a fearsome chemical armoury. At Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Colorado, stood row upon row of cluster bombs filled with mustard gas and phosgene. The warehouses were filled with more stocks of nerve gas. At Tooele, an old mining town twenty miles south of Salt Lake City, were millions more pounds of G agent, together with VX bombs and shells, and mustard gas, part filled into weapons, the rest packed into eight rows of silver drums stretching half a mile or more in the desert. There were other dumps too, in Arkansas, Indiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Oregon, Colorado and Maryland. On the island of Okinawa in the Pacific was the Far Eastern forward base, and in West Germany another secret gas dump, in the event of a European war. Altogether, there was said to be enough for a twelve-month campaign.⁶³