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

TEN From Disarmament to Rearmament

NIXON’S DECISION TO call a halt to the chemical and biological arms race had been prompted by a number of motives. The British and Canadian governments were arguing that an international agreement to ban biological weapons looked feasible, providing Nixon would make a gesture of good faith. There was widespread opposition to the use in Vietnam of weapons which, whatever the State Department might claim, certainly looked like gas. And there were a number of highly embarrassing accidents.

In March 1968 the US Army carried out a series of tests using live nerve agents at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. Shortly before six on the evening of 13 March an F4 Phantom jet screamed over the base, pouring VX liquid from tanks slung below the aircraft onto a marked-out target area. But there was a fault with one of the tanks being tested, and, while most was released from the expected altitude, some 20 lb remained inside the tank. As the jet climbed out of its bombing run, VX leaked from the container. At the higher altitude, the wind was gusting at up to 35 mph. The nerve agent hung in the air, before finally drifting down to the ground at Skull Valley, some twenty miles north of the test site. A massive flock of sheep grazing in the valley began to fall sick within hours. Local photographers and television crews arrived on the scene in time to see the carcasses of six thousand sheep being slung into hastily dug trench graves. The attendant national and international publicity, in the words of an army public relations officer, ‘delivered a crippling blow to the nation’s chemical-biological warfare programme’.¹

The following spring it became known that the United States army planned to ship thousands of tons of obsolete chemical weapons across the country from their mid-west bases to the Atlantic seaboard where they were to be loaded into elderly merchant ships which would then be scuttled offshore. Local residents, the memory of the Dugway accident still fresh in their minds, quickly dubbed the cargo ‘the ultimate hazardous freight’, and were less than happy at the prospect of the weapons being dumped off their summer beaches.

The problem of what to do with elderly and unstable chemical weapons and the poisonous waste created in their manufacture had been getting the US Chemical Crops a bad press for several years. At Rocky Mountain Arsenal, the main centre for manufacture of GB nerve gas, scientists decided in 1960 to dispose of toxic waste by boring a 12,000 foot tunnel into the earth, to connect with a vast underground reservoir. A month after they began pouring the waste chemicals into the ground, Denver was rocked by its first earthquake for eighty years.

As the Arsenal continued to pour 165 million gallons of waste into the underground cavern over the next five years, the area suffered no less than 1,500 earth tremors. When, in 1966, the dumping was called to a halt, the army announced it would investigate whether the stuff could be pumped out again. Their conclusion, that the liquid wastes could only be removed at a rate of 300 gallons a day, indicated that it would take over a thousand years to empty the well. Although the earth tremors stopped after only part of the waste had been removed, the incident did little for the popularity of chemical weapons.

In the summer of 1969 came more bad news. VX nerve agent was leaking from a container at the American base on the Japanese island of Okinawa and twenty-three servicemen had been taken to hospital suffering from its effects. This was doubly serious, for not only did it further erode what little confidence remained in the adequacy of safety measures at chemical weapons bases, but the Japanese government had not even been aware that gas was based on its soil. The previous summer one hundred children playing on a nearby beach had collapsed with an unknown illness. The Pentagon immediately ordered the weapons to be removed from the island.

This combination of incompetence and accidents led to increasing public hostility towards chemical weapons. After all, it was argued, if a few pounds of nerve agent was sufficient to kill six thousand sheep, what would be the consequence of a full-scale accident?

Nixon’s statement of November 1969 was nevertheless a gesture of some courage, representing as it did a decision to disarm unilaterally in the field of biological weapons, and to make no new chemical weaponry for the foreseeable future. The Geneva negotiations which led up to the international Biological Weapons Convention owed a good deal to the Nixon decision. But it was inevitable that during the discussions the original British proposals for a Biological Warfare Convention should be whittled down. While the essence of the British proposals remained unchanged – a complete ban on the manufacture and possession of germ weapons – the critical provisions dealing with the mechanisms whereby one country might check that another was complying with the treaty were made far less effective. This watering-down of the verification provisions was a critical weakness of the treaty.

But the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention was a major achievement. One of the provisions of the treaty committed the eighty-seven signatory countries to ‘continue negotiations in good faith’ with a view to obtaining a similar agreement to ban chemical weapons. The United Nations General Assembly optimistically dubbed the 1970s ‘The Disarmament Decade’. In the field of chemical and biological warfare it might more properly have been named ‘The Distrust Decade’. The difficulties were exemplified by the attitudes of three members of the U.N. Security Council. The Americans came to resist the idea of putting teeth into the Biological Weapons Convention because the right of unannounced inspection could compromise national independence. The French and Chinese did not want to sign a treaty which was toothless.

But the biggest problem was the Russians. When the tortuous negotiations to produce a treaty banning biological weapons finally produced an agreement,² signatory states included the United States, Great Britain and Canada, who had led Western germ warfare research, the governments of Japan and West Germany, and the entire Warsaw Pact. All undertook ‘never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain’ biological weapons. Any existing stocks were to be destroyed.

The Americans made great play of the destruction of their germ weapons. Photographers were invited to watch as containers of tularemia, anthrax, Q fever and Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis were mixed with caustic soda or heated to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit to destroy the virulence for which they had been selected as weapons. Equipment from the Pine Bluff manufacturing plant was similarly treated and melted down to harmless scrap. Guided tours were arranged through the abandoned factory.

As the deadline for the destruction of biological weapons approached, attention turned to the Soviet Union. Would a similar display take place there? The Russians merely issued a statement announcing that the Soviet Union ‘does not possess’ any bacteriological weapons. This was a barefaced lie and did nothing to build confidence between the Superpowers.

In addition, the agreement to ban biological weapons contained one serious flaw. There was no provision for one side to inspect the other’s facilities to determine whether or not the treaty was being adhered to. The growing distrust led to a campaign in the Western press the like of which had not been seen since the scare stories of Russian ‘disease factories’ in the early fifties. Within months of the Biological Weapons Convention coming into effect, suggestions were appearing that the Russians were already breaking its terms.

‘There is evidence,’ said an article in a Boston newspaper, ‘that within recent months the Soviet Union has been constructing or expanding facilities which appear to be biological arms production plants, having very high incinerator stacks and large cold storage bunkers that could be used for stockpiling the weapons’.³ Three months later came another claim, this time from the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. Anderson told his readers that the chief Soviet medical attaché in Washington had been caught trying to ‘weasel suspicious information’ from American scientists over dinner at a genetic engineering conference in California. ‘His efforts to elicit information that could help the Soviets advance their germ warfare research were obvious’, said Anderson.⁴

The claims continued. In January 1978, a correspondent with Reuters news agency reported from NATO headquarters that ‘scientific experts’ had informed him that the Russians were developing ‘three horrific new diseases for warfare… Lassa fever, which, according to the sources, kills 35 out of every 100 people it strikes, Ebola fever, which kills 70 out of every 100, and the deadly Marburg fever (Green Monkey Disease).’⁵

Not surprisingly, the effect of these allegations was to throw serious doubt on the value of attempting to negotiate a second treaty with the Soviet Union to ban gas warfare. Indeed, in the summer of 1978 a story appeared suggesting that Nixon’s original decision to stop developing new chemical and biological weapons had been the result of work by Soviet spies. ‘According to US intelligence officials’, said the New York Times, ‘the Soviet Union attempted to influence then-President Richard Nixon in 1969 to halt chemical and biological weapons development by transmitting information through double agents working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’.⁶ The paper maintained that the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had conveyed the information to Nixon personally. While none of Nixon’s White House staff was able to recall having been given any information about chemical or biological weapons by FBI agents, the New York Times report was sufficient nonetheless to add to the growing disquiet over what the Russians might be up to.

Soon there was a positive cascade of stories about Soviet preparations for germ warfare. A Polish army officer claimed to have been told that KGB specialists in biological warfare had been posted to Cuba.⁷ Then in October 1979 came perhaps the most sensational allegation of all.

The fledgeling British news magazine Now! splashed across its front cover the headline ‘Exclusive. Russia’s secret germ warfare disaster’. It reported that ‘hundreds of people are reported to have died, and thousands to have suffered serious injury as a result of an accident which took place this summer in a factory involved in the production of bacteriological weapons in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk’.⁸ The Soviet authorities had attempted to hush-up the accident, said the magazine, but information had been obtained from a ‘traveller who was in the city at the time’. This ‘traveller’ claimed that bodies of the dead were delivered to their relatives in sealed coffins. Those few who had managed to glimpse the bodies had described them as being ‘covered in brown patches’.

This macabre account, ‘exclusive’ to Now!, bore a remarkable resemblance to an article which had appeared three weeks earlier in an obscure Frankfurt based magazine named Possev published by a group of Russian emigrés.⁹ In January 1980 Possev returned to the story, claiming that, contrary to their earlier report, the accident had occurred not at Novosibirsk, but a thousand miles or so away, in the city of Sverdlovsk. The dissident magazine alleged there had been an outbreak of anthrax in April 1979 caused by an explosion at a military settlement south-west of the city. A north wind, the dissidents said, had carried a cloud of anthrax bacteria over a nearby village, and people had begun to die, at the rate of thirty or forty a month.

By the following month Robert Moss, a columnist with the London Daily Telegraph, had picked up the story.¹⁰ Moss, a right-wing journalist with impeccable intelligence contacts, reported that a thousand people had died after an explosion at ‘military village 19’, where army biologists had been experimenting with an agent known as ‘V21’. Two days later, Bild Zeitung, a downmarket Hamburg tabloid, published a despatch from Moscow, (where it did not maintain a full-time correspondent) describing in graphic detail the effects of the anthrax incident.¹¹ Patients had choked to death within four hours. Bodies had been burned. Bulldozers had been brought in to strip away the contaminated topsoil.

On 18 March, one month later, the press corps assembled as usual at the State Department in Washington for the daily briefing on world events and American diplomacy. It was ‘a quiet news day’, and so one of the press agency correspondents asked the question he’d previously been tipped off about by a State Department source: what was the American attitude to the Soviet germ warfare allegations? The spokesman had his answer well rehearsed: ‘an outbreak of disease’ in Sverdlovsk, he said, raised questions of whether the Soviet Union had violated the 1972 Biological Warfare Convention. The US Ambassador in Moscow had been instructed to request an explanation. By the following morning the American press was quoting ‘intelligence sources’ as saying that two or three hundred people had died in an outbreak of anthrax, an outbreak which indicated that the Russians were developing biological weapons.¹² The Kremlin reacted with predictable outrage.

In a rare concession, the Soviet news agency, Tass, admitted that there had indeed been outbreaks of anthrax in Sverdlovsk, caused by what it called poor standards of personal hygiene in handling contaminated food. The explanation had a vaguely plausible ring to it, since it was well known that anthrax had not been eradicated from large areas of the Soviet Union, and that at the time of the Sverdlovsk incident articles had appeared in the local press advising people on how to treat ‘Siberian Sore’, as the disease was locally known. What little information had reached the west about Sverdlovsk tended to support this explanation.¹³

But the intelligence experts disagreed. In July the American Congressional Committee on Intelligence issued its report on the Sverdlovsk incident. The outbreak of anthrax, they claimed, could not have been caused naturally. They had been told by ‘a Soviet emigré’, and had seen from classified intelligence files, that the anthrax deaths were the result of an explosion at a biological weapons factory.¹⁴

When the Soviet Union imploded, and details of the Soviet biological warfare programme emerged, this alarming conclusion was fully vindicated: the clandestine Soviet biological warfare programme was vast (see here, chap 11). The problem for intelligence analysts was that in the absence of any verification procedures, there was no easy way to separate alarming fact from horrifying fantasy. In the growing diplomatic frostiness of the 1970s and 1980s it was predictable that the allegations would surface with increasing frequency.

The reports were also more than sufficient to justify the existence in both Britain and the United States of groups of men who continued to work on defence against biological attack. With the decision to renounce germ warfare ‘for all time’, Fort Detrick had been handed over to the civilian National Cancer Institute. But part of the camp remained secret. Here the Pentagon established the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where a small group of biologists would continue to work on ‘those diseases which plague mankind’, in the words of a Pentagon spokesman.¹⁵ Within two years of its foundation, the Institute’s staff and budget had trebled. The Pentagon maintained that the Fort Detrick scientists’ work was purely defensive – the development of vaccines for example. Yet the ‘diseases which plague mankind’ were precisely the diseases investigated during the offensive biological weapons programme. The work, said the army, was essential ‘just in case’.

A similar pattern was followed in Britain. At Porton Down the Microbiological Research Establishment, where post-war germ warfare work had been conducted, was handed over to the Department of Health, where the laboratories were to be used, among other things, for genetic research. But within the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down, which is still a Ministry of Defence installation, a small, little known biological unit exists. Despite having signed a treaty which notionally banned biological weapons for all time, in 1979 the Ministry of Defence recruited a dozen specialists to ‘take care of critical Defence problems in microbiology’.¹⁶ In 1980 one of the laboratories which had been transferred to the Department of Health after signature of the treaty was handed back to Porton Down, for use by the defence microbiologists.¹⁷ The exact nature of the work carried out in the biological laboratories is, of course, unknown. In the words of the director of Porton Down, the establishments in Britain and the United States were designed to give a ‘watchtower capability’ for assessing possible new germ warfare threats.¹⁸

The Biological Weapons Convention did not attempt to restrict or ban germ warfare research, merely the development, production and stockpiling of biological weapons. In maintaining biological warfare research stations, albeit on a reduced scale, neither Britain nor America was breaking the terms of the Convention. But the fact that both countries have considered it impossible to abandon research is eloquent testimony to the fact that, international treaty or not, scientific warfare, once begun, has a life of its own. The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, major achievement though it was, did not remove the suspicions which created the arms race.

Professor Adolf-Henning Frucht sat in the corner of the Berlin to Prague express, his mind skipping over why he might have been asked to represent his East German medical institute at a conference on scientific planning. He had been surprised by the invitation, since it was a subject in which he took little interest. Just inside the border between East Germany and Czechoslovakia the train stopped to admit the inevitable stream of Eastern European officials. One of the uniformed bureaucrats told Frucht his papers were not in order. They led him from the train, across the now deserted platform and into an office. Two officials from the State Security Service were waiting inside. They took him away for interrogation.

Over the next eight months this frail grey-haired professor would endure no less than eighty-seven interrogation sessions with the East German secret police. Who was he working for? How had he become a spy? How did he pass on the information? Transcripts of the questioning sessions piled up on the floor of his interrogators’ office. Finally, in January 1968, Frucht was taken for trial at a military court. Within three days the trial was over. Frucht was sentenced to life imprisonment.

For five years the former professor of medicine spent most of his waking hours putting nuts onto screws. Held in solitary confinement for much of the time, his only contact with humanity was the warder who delivered three meals a day to his primitive cell. Frucht kept himself sane by reading the books of the prison library and by rigorous mental and physical self-discipline. After nine and a half years he was collected from prison and delivered to the West German border. Here, as one component in a complicated spy exchange in June 1977, he limped the few yards into the West.

Like a number of other Western secret agents, Frucht had become a spy because he was convinced that the Warsaw Pact planned to initiate World War Three. In the early sixties he had been approached by a colleague at the Institute for Industrial Physiology to work on new methods of detecting poisons in the atmosphere. Frucht devised a system of using fireflies, rather on the principle by which miners had taken canaries in cages with them to the coalface to detect the presence of gas. With fireflies, the amount of light emitted would be noticeably affected by the presence of gas in the air.

Professor Frucht soon received a visit from General Hans Rudolf Gestewitz, the senior medical officer of the East German army. The two men began to enjoy relaxed theoretical scientific discussions over dinner. They talked of possibilities for future wars – how, for example, an entire army might be hidden underwater to protect it from nuclear attack.

But from these fanciful, rambling chats came a remark which made Frucht determine that it was his ‘darned duty’, as he later put it, to become a spy. General Gestewitz mentioned that the Warsaw Pact had developed a chemical agent which would resist the extreme cold and bright sunlight of the Arctic. Frucht had never heard of such a weapon – normally nerve agent would evaporate in the sun, or freeze in extreme cold. The conversation continued in its theoretical way until suddenly the professor realised that they were no longer talking about abstract speculations, but about plans for a real military operation. The scheme, he was told, was for Warsaw Pact forces to attack American Ballistic Missile Early Warning bases in Alaska with chemical weapons.

The attraction of such an attack was obvious enough. If the staff of the early warning stations could be disabled, the United States would be defenceless. General Gestewitz told Frucht that the Warsaw Pact had developed a chemical agent which would remain liquid and effective even at forty degrees below zero. It would knock the technicians at the bases out for twelve hours.

Frucht considered this such a threat to world peace that he resolved to pass the information on to the West. After a series of meetings with agents of M16 and the CIA arranged at great personal risk, he managed to establish a system for mailing information to dead letterboxes in West Germany.

During the coming months, as different chemical agents were brought to Frucht for analysis at his Institute, he would compile two reports. One would be the official assessment to be sent back to the East German army. A second report he would send to the CIA in West Germany.

In this manner Professor Frucht passed to Western intelligence details of almost the entire Warsaw Pact chemical armoury; details of agents, code-names and protective measures. Among the information he sent to the West was the chemical formula for what he believed to be a new agent, unknown in the West, a variant of the V agents developed in Britain and the United States.¹⁹

It is hard to assess the effect which Frucht’s information may have had upon NATO war planners at Supreme Headquarters. In Richard Nixon, the United States was now led by a President committed to detente with the Soviet Union, and the following year he announced the ban on new American chemical weapons. Restless at what they saw as giving a dangerous hostage to fortune, the advocates of chemical weapons within NATO soon began a campaign to appeal to the public direct. The year after Nixon’s decision, reports began to appear in the Western military press of a new Soviet nerve agent. Identified as ‘VR55’, the new weapon was said to be similar to VX, but even more potent.²⁰ Whether this was the gas which Frucht had discovered, or a second new weapon is not known.

In the latter half of the 1970s there emerged a group of military theorists who believed the threat of Russian chemical warfare to be one of the great unrecognized dangers facing the West. In increasingly strident tones they began to argue in favour of chemical rearmament within NATO. One of the more restrained analyses of the Soviet threat was made by Professor John Erickson, an acknowledged authority on the Soviet Army.

Erickson estimated that there were eighty thousand specialist troops in the Red Army, commanded by Lieutenant General V. K. Pikalov, whose battlefield job it was to decontaminate men, machines and weaponry of chemicals. There were a thousand ranges where Soviet troops trained to fight on a contaminated battlefield. Soviet tanks and armoured cars were equipped with elaborate seals and pressurization systems to keep out gas. Chemical training was taken so seriously that Soviet soldiers, he discovered, had been burned by real gas used in training.

Erickson noted that the Russians ‘constantly emphasise the likely use by the enemy – presumably NATO – of chemical weapons’, yet NATO, as Erickson remarked, had only a small number of such weapons. Furthermore, Russian training emphasized defence not only against nerve gas, but also against blood and lung agents first developed during the First World War, and now unimportant in the NATO stockpile. Erickson decided that ‘the attraction of the chemical weapon would appear to be growing for the Soviet command’.²¹

NATO airfields might be knocked out by Soviet missiles releasing their cargoes of heavy and persistent nerve liquid overhead. Nuclear weapon sites might be immobilized for weeks in the same way. Quickly-evaporating nerve and blood gases might be used in attacks on Allied anti-tank posts. The advancing Soviet forces would seal their flanks from attack by spreading persistent nerve agents on the ground and thereby make them impenetrable to counterattack. Indeed, while American forces could only ‘go chemical’ on the authority of the President, Erickson speculated that in the Soviet army a decision to use gas might be delegated to a divisional commander. It was a frightening picture; and then came the evidence of the Yom Kippur War.

For fifty-three minutes on the afternoon of 6 October 1973 a thousand Egyptian guns punched their shells across the Suez Canal and onto the Bar Lev Line, the fortified wall built by the Israelis after the Six Day War in 1967. Having caught the Israelis unawares, the Egyptians poured a thousand tanks and ten infantry brigades across the canal. For a while it seemed that the redoubtable Israeli army faced defeat. But a combination of massive reinforcement and a brilliant counterattack destroyed the impetus of the Egyptians, and forced them to agree to a ceasefire.

As the two armies disengaged, Israeli intelligence officers began to collect trophies from the destroyed and abandoned Egyptian vehicles in the desert. Among the equipment they collected from immobilized armoured cars were rubber capes, gas masks, alarms to warn of the presence of nerve gas, small tin boxes containing glass phials filled with coloured liquids to identify various gases, and automatic syringes filled with an antidote to soman, the main Soviet nerve agent. All carried instructions in Arabic, but had been manufactured in the Soviet Union.

There was no evidence that the Egyptians had intended to use gas themselves. Probably they carried the equipment because, like the Soviet army, they had been instructed to do so. Israeli intelligence immediately passed the captured equipment to the United States, where examination of the extensive Soviet precautions against gas attack resulted the following year in a Pentagon decision to spend one and three quarter billion dollars on improving the defences of American forces.

Ever since their decision not to proceed with any new weapons of their own, the British, Canadians and Australians had been devoting most of their energies to protection for their troops. In addition to animal experiments at Porton Down, which by the late 1970s were consuming 25,000 animals a year,²² an average of ten servicemen and women arrived at Porton every month to test new equipment.²³ By concentrating on defensive research, the British developed both new gas masks and, most importantly, a cloth whose baked rayon structure protected the body against nerve liquids which could penetrate through the skin. Unlike the heavy rubber suits worn by Soviet soldiers, which became sweaty and uncomfortable within minutes, the Porton suits could be worn for days at a time without the danger of the wearer collapsing from exhaustion. Porton Down also produced new alarms and decontamination equipment and a series of pink and white pills which would protect soldiers against three or four times the normal lethal dose of nerve gas. Periodically, entire British army units would be required to don ‘noddy suits’, the soldiers’ unaffectionate name for the kit designed to protect them against chemical attack, and perform all their normal tasks while wearing the heavy and uncomfortable equipment.²⁴

Even after the Pentagon decision that the American forces, too, needed to improve drastically their chemical defence research and training, many still believed that they lagged far behind the Soviet army. The Commander of the United States army in Europe was called before a Congressional Committee in 1979 to explain his preparations for decontaminating after a chemical attack. General Frederick Kroesen had the following exchange with Congressman Larry McDonald:

The conviction was growing among the ‘hawks’ in NATO that the decision to stop expanding the chemical arsenal had given a dangerous hostage to fortune. In 1980 the British opened a purpose designed 7,000 acre chemical warfare ‘Battle Run’ training area in the Wiltshire hills alongside Porton Down. The US Army opened a specialist chemical training school in Alabama. The US Chemical Corps, reduced to 2,000 in the early 1970s, was built up to nearly 6,000 by 1981.²⁶

But even with superior ‘noddy suits’, pressurized battlefield headquarters, and an array of sophisticated alarms, detectors, decontamination equipment, pills and syringes, there was still an apparently insuperable problem. Without a credible threat to use chemical weapons themselves, allied soldiers would have to button themselves into their protective kit not when they chose, but when a Soviet attack was conceivably imminent. Inside the masks and rubber gloves the delicate tasks of modern warfare become extraordinarily difficult. Sighting a weapon, twiddling the knobs and flicking the switches on modern artillery, become clumsy and cumbersome operations. Suddenly everyone on the battlefield looks identical. Since verbal orders are muffled by gas masks, commanders sometimes have to throw stones at their troops to attract their attention. An enemy who is not obliged to dress his soldiers up like frogmen because only he knows when a chemical attack may be launched gains an immediate tactical advantage, it was argued.

Meanwhile, the negotiations to secure a treaty on chemical disarmament dragged on. As a gesture in the right direction the United States finally ratified the Geneva Protocol, fifty years after it had been drawn up. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were committed by the Biological Weapons Convention to negotiate ‘in good faith’ towards a similar agreement on chemical arms. In July 1974, shortly before resigning in disgrace, Nixon met with Chairman Brezhnev in Moscow. To widespread surprise the communiqué issued at the end of their discussions indicated that the two countries would begin preparing a joint initiative on chemical disarmament. Talks between American and Soviet officials finally started in August 1976.

But what began with high ideals continued in an increasingly bad-tempered series of haggles. The two countries stated early in the discussions that they were seeking a comprehensive treaty which would oblige all countries not only to dispose of their present stocks of chemical weapons, but also not to develop any future gas weapons. After the suspicions which had followed the germ warfare treaty, the Americans were determined to establish an adequate system for ‘on site’ inspection, to ensure that nerve gas plants were no longer operational. By May 1978, after seven sessions of negotiations, the two sides believed they had at least delineated the sorts of weapons which would be covered by the treaty.²⁷ But an agreement on how to ensure that the treaty was being observed remained elusive.

The military, meanwhile, were growing restless. The United States had produced no new gas weapons since Nixon’s ban in 1969. Now, a succession of military experts stated their belief that the Russians were adding to their gas stocks almost daily. ‘The hope that the Soviets would emulate US restraint has proved to be wishful thinking’, wrote Colonel Charles H. Bay, a senior Chemical Corps officer, in a typical complaint.²⁸ There was, admittedly, a notable vagueness to the details of these claims. Indeed, 1979 figures produced in support of this argument – that up to one third of Soviet bombs, rockets and shells might be filled with gas – bore a great similarity to the estimates current at the time of Nixon’s ban in 1969.²⁹ By contrast with the figures leaked to the press or bandied about in conversation, official military spokesmen were notably reluctant to make any estimate of the number of Soviet chemical weapons. In 1975 the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff could say only that ‘it is not possible with any reasonable degree of assurance to predict or estimate the size of the USSR’s CW stockpile’.³⁰ In 1980 a senior official in British scientific intelligence could refer only to the estimates already published in the press, that the proportion of Soviet bombs and artillery shells filled with gas amounted to ‘anything between five and thirty per cent – you pay your money and take your choice’.³¹

But this absence of reliable information did nothing to shake the belief that the Russians had indeed acquired an enormous arsenal of gas weapons. Although the size of American stocks is classified information, from comments by the Chemical Corps and Department of Defence, civilian observers have been able to estimate the quantity at about 150,00 tons of bombs, shells and landmines, about two thirds of which contain nerve gas, the remainder being mustard gas weapons left from the Second World War.³² The same authorities believed that the Russians stopped adding to their stocks in 1971, two years after the United States called a halt.

Nevertheless, the campaign for rearmament continued. The United States had ‘frightened and moralised’ herself ‘into throwing away a vital deterrent’, as one hard line politician had it.³³ ‘Simply by negotiating the Soviets appear to have tied US hands on chemical weapons’,³⁴ wrote Colonel Bay in 1979. He went on to predict that not having chemical weapons made nuclear war more likely; ‘some day a President of the United States might have to choose between acceptance of defeat or nuclear war’.³⁵

Paradoxically, the British had used precisely the reverse argument as a reason for not needing chemical weapons themselves. As the Defence Secretary had explained in 1968:

Now, the argument was being stood on its head: chemical rearmament now could prevent nuclear war later.

In 1979 NATO commanders played out one of their biennial war games simulating the outbreak of World War Three. Codenamed ‘Wintex’, the exercise involved only the generals, civil servants and politicians who would make the critical decisions about how the war should be fought. In Operations Rooms in Europe and North America they acted out how they would respond to an escalating international crisis which finally pitted NATO and Warsaw Pact against each other in open war. As hostilities intensified, someone in NATO headquarters fed new information into the war plan being flashed to the decision makers in their concrete bunkers: the Soviet army had launched an attack with chemical weapons. What should be the NATO response? The choice alarmed everyone – both the smaller NATO members who disliked gas but wanted to avoid nuclear war at all costs, and the NATO nuclear powers, where many felt that the appropriate response was an attack with battlefield nuclear weapons, which itself ran the danger of inviting full scale Soviet nuclear counterstrike.³⁷

The then NATO Supreme Commander, General Alexander Haig, soon to become President Reagan’s Secretary of State, told reporters in 1978 that NATO’s ability to wage war with chemicals was ‘very weak’. ‘Sometime in the near future,’ he said, ‘this will have to be reassessed’.³⁸ His successor as Supreme Commander went further. ‘We ought to be able to respond with chemical weapons’, he said, ‘and they ought to know we have that capacity to respond’.³⁹ Ten years after Nixon’s decision to suspend the manufacture of chemical weapons, by the end of the so-called Disarmament Decade, the advocates of chemical rearmament included some of the most senior figures in the military establishment.

There was already a weapon developed to make up for the deficiencies the generals saw all around them. The idea was simple, and, even by the 1970s, some twenty years old.

Shells and bombs loaded with nerve gas were not only dangerous to an enemy, but to anyone who had anything to do with them, including soldiers and civilians who happened to live near one of the bases. An accident or leak of the type which had already occurred enough times to sow public mistrust resulted in pools of nerve agent spreading everywhere, likely to kill any living animal within seconds or minutes. The weapons were so dangerous that they could not be moved, except in heavily guarded, extremely slow-moving convoys diverted well away from human habitation. Allied governments were unhappy at the thought of weapons filled with some of the most poisonous substances known to man being based on their soil, but not under their control. Edgewood Arsenal suggested a solution which would overcome both the environmental and political objections to chemical weapons.

Since nerve gas is made from different chemical compounds, they suggested, why not redesign the bombs and shells so they could be filled with two separate canisters, each containing chemicals harmless in themselves, but which when mixed together would form a nerve agent? One agent would stay inside the shell, the other would be stored and transported separately, and loaded into the shell only on the battlefield. When the shell was fired, the wall separating the two canisters would burst, forming a nerve agent inside the shell. When the shell detonated on impact, the nerve agent would spread and vaporize in the air, like any other poisonous gas. They called the new concept a ‘binary weapon’.

The idea had first attracted the US Navy, worried about possible accidents with nerve gas leaking from shells stored in the ammunition holds on warships. By the mid-sixties a binary bomb had been designed, and by the mid-seventies a binary 155 mm shell for army howitzers. As voices were raised to claim that the Russians had a dangerous lead over the West in chemical armaments, a campaign began to ‘sell’ binary weapons to the public. (Although there were environmental advantages, this was a purely relative argument, since the chemical in one of the ‘safe’ canisters for the binary GB shells, a substance known as ‘DF’, was as poisonous as strychnine.) The designers of the binary weapons at Edgewood Arsenal drew up a list of other supposed advantages of the binary weapons, which included relative ease of handling, and an entry entitled simply ‘OCONUS Preposition Acceptable’.⁴⁰ This curious jargon translates as ‘Outside Continental United States Preposition Acceptable’, a reference to the Pentagon belief that those countries which had not been prepared to allow the United States to base chemical weapons on their soil on political, ethical or environmental grounds, would be prepared to accept the new binary weapons.

The Pentagon produced a plan. A factory would be built, capable of producing 70,000 binary GB nerve agent artillery shells each month. By 1986 the plant would be producing eight inch shells filled with the chemical precursors of VX nerve agent, and 500 lb ‘Bigeye’ bombs also filled with VX. A final stage of the plan provided for the mass production of chemical warheads for multiple launch rockets, and ‘Lance’ battlefield missiles. The total cost was estimated in 1980 at 170 million dollars for the plant, and a further three or four billion dollars for the munitions themselves.⁴¹

But each time a request for money to begin producing binary weapons was included in the Defence Budget, either Congress or the White House turned it down. Between 1967 and 1980 no less than nineteen separate investigations were carried out into the plans for binary chemical weapons. Often when the Pentagon was refused money the argument was used that it would be foolish to do anything which might prejudice the negotiations towards a chemical disarmament treaty making their painfully slow progress in Geneva.

The Generals reflected ruefully on how much more fortunate were their Soviet counterparts.

On 13 September 1981, Alexander Haig, Secretary of State, arrived in Berlin to deliver a speech his aides had been preparing for weeks. Nearly fifty thousand demonstrators flooded the streets to protest against the Reagan administration’s plans massively to increase defence spending. The Secretary of State, convinced of the need to stiffen European resolve, claimed in his speech that the United States now had ‘physical evidence’ of an entirely new form of CBW being waged by the Soviet Union and her allies.⁴²

This astonishing claim was based upon a few fragments of leaf gathered in South East Asia.

Within months of the American retreat from Saigon in 1975, Hmong tribesmen who had formed the backbone of the CIA’s ‘secret army’ in Laos during the Vietnam war began arriving at refugee camps in Thailand claiming that the communist Vietnamese and their allies had bombed them with gases which caused horrific, and hitherto unknown, symptoms.

One elderly tribesman described how his family had been preparing a meal in the mountains several weeks’ walk north of Vientiane, when a light aircraft suddenly appeared. It wheeled in the sky, aimed at the villagers, and fired a rocket. ‘When the rocket hit the ground, there was yellow powder everywhere. Most of the fifty people in our group inhaled some of the powder. They began to vomit,’ he told the authors. Their skin burned, and they began to cough up blood, he said. ‘Then people began to fall down unconscious: only 15 out of 50 people in our group woke up again,’ he said.⁴³ This account, similar to dozens of others received from both Laos and Kampuchea, alarmed the Pentagon. No known chemical agent could produce the multiplicity of symptoms described. The powder appeared to burn like mustard, choke like phosgene, and to kill as effectively as nerve agent.

For five years the refugees’ stories remained the tittle-tattle of war, on the border-line between fact and propaganda. All attempts to collect samples of the powder came to naught. It seemed that the stories of ‘yellow rain’ would pass into the footnotes of history, as had the alleged use of gas during the Yemen Civil War in the 1960s.⁴⁴ But on 24 March 1981, a package arrived at the State Department from the American embassy in Bangkok. It contained a leaf and a one-inch length of stem from an area on the Thai/Kampuchean border where a ‘yellow rain’ attack was said to have just occurred. Both army and civilian scientists contracted by the State Department to carry out analysis discovered the leaf and stem were contaminated by tricothecene mycotoxins.⁴⁵

American suspicions grew when it was realized that much of the published research on the toxins had been carried out in the Soviet Union. Russian scientists had begun their investigations of the tricothecene, or T2, toxins during the 1930s, after fungal growths on poorly stored grain had killed thousands of Soviet citizens. Accounts of the poisonings described symptoms strikingly similar to those reported by the victims from Laos and Kampuchea – burning in the mouth and nose, followed by headaches, dizziness, and convulsions, before the victims began to spew up blood. Given the apparent similarity of the symptoms, the Soviet ability to produce the toxins artificially, and their close political links with the suspected forces in South East Asia, the State Department concluded that the Soviet Union had developed a new chemical weapon and was collaborating in its testing upon primitive peoples.

There remained a number of objections to the alarming American claim, not least the question of why the Russians should have chosen the mycotoxins as a weapon when they could have achieved the same fatal results with one-fiftieth of the quantity of nerve agent, and one-tenth of the amount of mustard gas. But after six investigations, the State Department produced a 32-page summary of their evidence in March 1982.⁴⁶ It contained astonishingly detailed numbers of alleged victims of the Soviet-inspired attacks: 6,310 in Laos, 981 in Kampuchea, and a further 3,042 victims of chemical attack in Afghanistan. In the Afghanistan cases, the State Department was unable to ascertain which agents had been used, although they appeared to include ‘nerve agents, phosgene oxime and various incapacitants and irritants’⁴⁷. In Laos and Kampuchea, several agents had been used, including the mycotoxins. ‘The conclusion is inescapable that the toxins and other chemical warfare agents were developed in the Soviet Union’, they added.⁴⁸ The State Department official leading the investigation was unambiguously dramatic. ‘We’re talking’, he said, ‘about the possibility that genocide is being committed.’⁴⁹

Officially the State Department maintained that their angry denunciations of the Soviet Union and her allies were unconnected with proposals that the United States restart her own chemical warfare programme. It was, perhaps, pure coincidence that the most telling evidence – blood and urine samples from alleged victims which showed traces of the toxins – should have been announced within 24 hours of a crucial Senate vote on proposals for chemical rearmament.

By the late 1970s increasing cynicism about Soviet intentions had already resulted in pressure for Western rearmament. Discussions between the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence on the possible basing of new American chemical weapons in Britain were initiated in the dying days of the Callaghan administration, but came to nothing. However, by the spring of 1980, Francis Pym, the new Conservative Defence Secretary, was publicly ruminating on the danger of an apparent Soviet chemical superiority. Meanwhile, in the United States an investigation by the Defense Science Board had recommended that the long-delayed plan for production of binary chemical weapons should finally go ahead. British and American officers held a series of secret meetings in the summer of 1980 which resulted in final British support for the proposals.

Even before the mycotoxin allegations, the climate of suspicion was such that the Pentagon did not need to include proposals for the new binary weapons in its 1980 budget application to Congress. There was no need. When the draft budget came before Congress for approval, the mood of alarm was already sufficient that eager politicians ‘wrote in’ to the budget plans to begin work on a new factory at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, capable of turning out 20,000 rounds of binary 155mm artillery shells each month. The entire debate took less than three hours.

Two events combined to create conditions suitable for chemical rearmament. They were the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the election of Ronald Reagan. Not only did the Afghanistan invasion demonstrate the Soviet will to advance its political goals by all available means; in addition, each of the five Soviet divisions which rolled across the border carried with it portable chambers in which troops could quickly strip off contaminated clothing, and trucks mounted with high-pressure hoses capable of cleaning the heaviest nerve agent from tanks or troop carriers within minutes. Eyewitnesses spoke of seeing Russian soldiers carrying gas masks and heavy anti-gas capes. Within three weeks of the Soviet invasion Afghan refugees were streaming into hastily erected camps in Pakistan telling horrific stories of how they had been gassed by the Russians. It seemed that the Russians were using the same methods recommended by Foulkes during the British Afghan campaign some sixty years earlier.

The accession of the Reagan administration gave the chemical rearmers the champion they needed. With Afghanistan demonstrating the evidence of Soviet intent, and a steadily growing dossier documenting the use of chemicals by Soviet allies in South East Asia, Reagan acted. Within six weeks of taking office the decision to implement the binary plan had been made. A year later, in early 1982, in a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Reagan announced that development of binary weapons would ‘provide strong leverage towards negotiating a verifiable agreement banning chemical weapons’.⁵⁰ This latest restatement of the familiar argument that ‘to prevent chemical warfare we must have chemical weapons’ had lost nothing of its potency.

The plan called for the construction of a factory to produce first binary nerve gas artillery shells, to be followed by ‘Bigeye’ binary bombs, warheads for battlefield missiles and rockets and, possibly, chemical warheads for the Cruise Missile. By dint of intense lobbying the Reagan administration persuaded the Senate to accept the proposal. The opponents of a new chemical arms race now began an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the House of Representatives not to rubber-stamp the plan. Notable among the new opposition was Saul Hormats, an engineer who had spent no less than 37 years working with the Chemical Corps, 12 of them in charge of the new weapons programme. He argued, in a letter to Representaives, that the new binary weapons were unnecessary and inefficient. Above all, he said, if used in a European war, they would kill not soldiers, but ‘millions of civilians’.⁵¹

Alarmed by these and similar arguments, the House was unhappy about ratifying the proposal. But the civilian legislators would almost certainly have felt differently had they seen the raw intelligence emerging from the Soviet Union about the nature of the CBW programme.

By the early 1980s even Richard Nixon, the man who had attempted to stop the chemical arms race, was convinced that his efforts had been in vain.⁵² Soon came evidence that he was right to be gloomy.