State Secrets

CHAPTER 10 Safety While Working with Chemical Agents – is it Possible?

The Degasification Department (Department D) had an important place in the scope GOSNIIOKhT’s work. This department developed methods for degasification of chemical agents and any equipment contaminated by them. According to the regulations, all the safety manuals had to be evaluated, revised and re-approved every five years. These manuals contained descriptions of degasification methods, checks for completeness, and the safety and first aid rules.

In the beginning, like my co-workers, I believed that the degasification methods described in the manuals were not subject to any doubt. But once I started to question them and began to study their efficiency independently of the planned revision schedule, I began to regret that I started this too late.

Back in the mid 1970s, Department D was reorganized in order to make it more clearly focused, goal oriented and efficient. Retired Colonel Grigori Drell, who had been a senior researcher from TSNIVTI, became the head of this department and one of its laboratories. My good friend and a retired colonel, Imam Yamaleev, became the head of another laboratory.

I collaborated with Drell’s laboratory in mastering the methods of chromatographic analysis. They had good American equipment purchased according to my recommendation, but unfortunately this equipment could never produce the results expected. This was due to the bone-headedness of the chief of this department.

Drell distinguished himself by his cruelty to his staff. He was entirely confident that they were making enormous efforts to violate safety rules and were to blame for all the emergency incidents which happened so often in his department. So, when one of his researchers, Olga Kolyada, was badly poisoned by mustard gas, Drell did his best to shift the blame to the victim. In reality, a drop of mustard gas happened to fall onto her glove, but she did not see it in time. Yperite has a highly effective rate of penetration and easily passes through rubber, causing lesions in the form of hard to treat burns and severe inflammation of the skin. If you consider that it is also one of the strongest mutagens, the consequences of contact with mustard gas can be terrible.

Immediately after the lesion was discovered, wet swab samples taken from the glove were brought to me. I analyzed them with the American Perkins Elmer chromatograph with a flame-photometric detector, which could selectively register chemical compounds containing sulfur or phosphorous atoms.

From the resulting chromatogram, you could tell there were several sulfur compounds, but not mustard gas. Surely, the degasification agent must have destroyed the mustard gas when Olga Kolyada decontaminated the glove at the end of the working day, according to safety procedures.

Chromatographic analysis of the control samples taken from a fresh glove surface did not show the presence of sulfur compounds either. So, it was practically proved that an organic sulfur compound got onto the surface of Kolyada’s glove, and it had to be mustard gas, as no one in the laboratory worked with any other sulfur-containing compounds.

You couldn’t expect anything else from Drell, who was notable for his devil-may-care attitude towards safety. According to one of his senior researchers, Sergei Davydov, he forced his employees to work with mustard gas, without any protection and even to sniff its vapors, so they could remember the smell. After this unfortunate accident, Kolyada was obliged to retire, and she died a year later of cancer.

Some of the safety violations at GOSNIIOKhT were due to the ignorance or carelessness of its employees. For example, safety procedures required that anyone transporting samples of dangerous chemicals from one part of the facility to another must place the test tubes in portable steel containers with activated charcoal strewn on the bottom, to absorb the agent in case of an accident. This was supposed to offer the carrier some protection. Safety regulations also required small-scale laboratory work with hazardous chemicals to be accomplished in cabinets with exhaust hoods that sucked the air inside the cabinets away from the workers, allowing them to perform many procedures without full gas masks.[49] As I prepared for an experiment connected with transforming Substance 33 into a stable aerosol, a beautiful, young research assistant appeared in my room, but without a container. My jaw dropped when she took three test tubes out of her pocket with her bare hands and quietly placed them in the safety cabinet. To this day, I still reproach myself for not reprimanding her for her carelessness because she died of lung cancer a couple of years later.[50]

Other dangers at GOSNIIOKhT resulted from a misplaced trust in out-dated safety procedures. Every five years, the Decontamination Department was responsible for revising all the safety manuals, which contained descriptions of decontamination methods, checks for completeness of safety precautions, and safety and first aid rules. Instead, the department merely reissued the manuals without making any significant changes, despite real improvements in safety technologies and practices. Misguided trust in the old ways is the reason that the process to sanitize items contaminated by soman was not changed for decades. I personally analyzed the decontamination solutions that GOSNIIOKhT used, and I always found that the decontamination solutions did not destroy significant quantities of agents such as sarin and soman.[51] According to GOSNIIOKhT’s safety manuals, glassware and gloves could be used again, unless they were broken or torn after cleaning with these decontamination solutions. Since the administration was too stingy to supply us with fresh gloves, GOSNIIOKhT laboratory workers were compelled to reuse ones that were still contaminated. Safe practice calls for protective gloves to be used only once.

The danger for GOSNIIOKhT’s workers was clear, and matters were made even worse by the fact that the waste water, from rinsing the allegedly decontaminated glassware and gloves, ran directly into the Moscow city sewer system, carrying with it the residues of undestroyed chemical agents. When gloves were torn, instructions required the scientist to cut to them up into narrow strips, which were placed in bags that were sent to Moscow’s garbage sites. Arguably, such lax safety practices put human health and the environment at risk, both inside and outside of GOSNIIOKhT’s territory.

The Soviet Army preached an entire philosophy of reusing previously-contaminated equipment, weapons, and clothing. This approach was deeply wrong, but General Anatoli Kuntsevich, the commander of the military chemical complex at Saratov, had developed his own methods of decontamination. When I applied this decontamination solution on steel test plates to model the use of Kuntsevich’s decontamination solution on military equipment, I was shocked to find that all of the samples contained a hundred times more than maximum permissible concentration of sarin.[52] The safety practices in Military Unit 61469 were particularly egregious. Soldiers took unreasonable risks and there were open safety violations. I was horrified to see an officer bring a couple kilograms of soman to his work station and open a container to take samples without using any safety measures whatsoever. When I asked why he was so “brave” and taking such risks, he simply replied that he was “a chemical officer.”

Perhaps the most significant safety shortcut that GOSNIIOKhT’s hierarchy took was with the very air that its employees breathed. Employees at the main laboratory building at GOSNIIOKhT were constantly breathing an atmosphere partially composed of exhaust air. GOSNIIOKhT had powerful ventilators, but this ventilation system was largely redirecting exhaust air into the workrooms, and on days when the atmospheric pressure dropped, the exhaust air from the safety hoods would spread out close to ground level in the rooms. On such days, it was literally impossible to breath in the laboratories, and it was not uncommon to see people in gas masks rushing out of the main laboratory building.[53]

The same was true on the eve of Soviet holidays, when according to the rules all rooms had to be free of all chemical agents (old and newly synthesized ones) and their precursors. For almost a week all scientists and assistants were busy destroying these hazardous substances in huge quantities under the hoods creating contamination in the ventilation exhausts.

According to the safety rules, the ventilation was shut down at 6 PM and started up again at 8 AM the next day, one hour before the working day began. These requirements were supposed to provide enough time to clear the working rooms of chemical agent vapors that were released during the night, while the ventilation system wasn’t working. The Safety Department ordered me to research the dangers posed by these procedures. As a model, I used a non-toxic substance and the tracer sulfur hexafluoride, which has far less adsorption on the walls of the hoods and working room surfaces than any of the chemical agents. I discovered that the tracer was released in significant amounts in the closed hood, diffusing into the room and becoming adsorbed to the walls during the night time. The chemical agents were less volatile than the safer model, so they were more likely to adsorb to the workroom walls and surfaces at night.

After starting the ventilation up at 8 AM, an initial measurement was taken at 9 AM the next day. By 5 PM, the concentration of sulfur hexafluoride was equal to 70% its original value that morning, proving that the model was desorbing slowly. So, the working rooms were never free of any traces of chemical agents, unless the ventilators were operating round the clock.

My findings did not prompt the management of GOSNIIOKhT to take any steps to correct this problem, because they could not afford such a luxury as a permanently working ventilation system.

At that time, the problem of purification of the exhaust air, which was ventilated from the buildings of GOSNIIOKhT, had not been resolved in any way at all. I am not sure that this problem has been solved, even today. Activated charcoal cannot be safely used to purify these emissions, as it is a flammable solid, which is extremely dangerous. It is absolutely clear that a fire at such a plant could have catastrophic consequences.

This was the reason why the exhaust ventilation at GOSNIIOKhT was not equipped with filtering devices, and practically all of the air from the production and laboratory areas was emitted into the atmosphere without any purification.[54]

Certainly they did try to solve this problem by using inorganic adsorbents, aluminum oxide in particular. Victor Aborkin, a senior researcher from the Department D, was obsessed with this idea, which was the topic of his master’s thesis.

Having only a very vague concept of the basics of adsorption, this inventor managed to attract the attention of Guskov and Golubkov, the Deputy Minister for Chemical Industry, to his idea. Then he enlisted the help of those two bosses, who became his coauthors, and he aggressively and persistently pushed his idea further along. Aborkin began promoting this adsorbent project in Workshop N 34, in the Volgograd Scientific Production Association where soman was produced.

When I visited this workshop in 1984, I was shown a big adsorber outside the building where aluminum oxide had turned into an absolutely airproof monolith. It turned out to be a lesson on adsorption basics for the unlucky speculators, but they had already received considerable sums of money for their “invention”, so they didn’t care.

When I returned to Moscow, I decided to make a more thorough check of this adsorbent. As a result of this test, it was proved that after adsorption, soman could exist in its solid state indefinitely without degrading. Moreover, aluminum oxide stopped adsorbing soman after acidic vapor, or just hydrogen chloride gas or clorine, was passed through it. The concentration of hydrochloric acid in the atmosphere of the Volgograd plant exceeded the permissible standards by hundreds of times. So this huge monolith had entirely stopped working as a “filter” a long time before. Still, it contained huge quantities of the dangerous chemical agent.

The plants for producing phosphorous chloride, which was a precursor for the synthesis of phosphoorganic compounds including soman and sarin, were continuously secreting unbroken clouds of chlorine and hydrogen chloride into the open air.

I went on a number of business trips to our Volgograd branch and to the Volgograd Institute of Toxicology and Professional Pathology. Their buildings were located on the territory of the NPO “Khimprom”. Along with the employees of these institutions, I was repeatedly “assaulted” by chlorine gas. In this place it was sometimes even difficult to see each other in the workrooms, due to the extremely high gas content. Only a gas mask could help, and gas masks were provided to all the visitors, who had to wear them until they left the territory of the NPO enterprise.

Sometimes distance could not save you from a gas attack, even if you were far away from the plant. I remember that during one of my first visits to Volgograd, we stayed in the Beketovka settlement, which is 7 kilometers from “Khimprom”. In the middle of one summer night, we woke up suffocating. Immediately we understood from the smell that we were being poisoned with chlorine. We could save ourselves only by closing all the windows and covering them with wet sheets and blankets.

The residents of the settlement and of other regions located within the zone of the gas attack could breathe somewhat easily only when the wind shifted direction. If the wind was blowing from the plant, which is on the banks of the Volga River, it was a real disaster. No wonder all this led to massive protests by the inhabitants, even during times of Communist stagnation. Unfortunately, the protests did not produce any tangible results. From time to time, party leaders simply found some scapegoat, leaving the existing production process unchanged.

Aluminum oxide was equally unsuitable as a filtering adsorbent for purifying the emissions from GOSNIIOKhT. In the laboratory rooms, calcium hypochlorite and hydrochloric acid (the solution of hydrogen chloride gas in water) are used almost everywhere on a daily basis to destroy chemical agents, to neutralize chemicals on the laboratory glassware, gloves and other items for individual protection. Since aluminum oxide is very quickly deactivated by acid and chlorine, it would be absolutely useless in a filter.

Additionally, there is another substantial obstacle that prevents the use of any filters in the path of the air vented into the atmosphere.

According to the safety standards for working with chemical agents, the linear velocity of the air sucked by the ventilation into the laboratory exhaust hood should be at least 1.0 meter per second. It is believed that only this air speed, as measured at the hood gate when opened to 40 centimeters above the surface of a table, can guarantee certain safety to people working with chemical agents. Additional airflow is forced into each room through the ventilation with air-blowers located close to the laboratory building, in order not to create a rarefied atmosphere during the constant suction through the exhaust hood. The pressure equilibrium between outgoing and incoming air volumes is maintained in this way. Every room is equipped with its own ventilator fan, which constantly drives air out of the building. The capacity of each ventilator is calculated for maintaining the necessary exhaust air velocity and no more than that.

If some filter with an absorbent is installed in the path of the exhaust air, this would reduce the exhaust velocity from the laboratory chamber to a level below the allowable limit, and this would be intolerable. Every exhaust hood has a chart attached to it where the date and the last measured air velocity are logged.

If these measurements are lower than the standard norms, any operations with chemical agents must be terminated. So, if filters were installed, the existing ventilation units would have to be replaced, requiring an extensive capital investment. Even in good times, the leadership of the military-chemical complex could not afford such a ‘luxury’ for their scientists.

The Soviet military-chemical complex was also running their factories without proper waste water and exhaust air treatment. In 1986, I decided to introduce my new, highly sensitive, and selective chromatographic methods for the determination of concentrations of soman and sarin at the Volgograd chemical plant, where their previous analytical procedures showed that the exhaust air was meeting permissible standards. Our first analyses of the exhaust air, conducted on February 10th 1987, were made of samples taken after the plant had been closed for maintenance and inspection for one and a half months. The sobering results showed that air containing many times the permissible level of soman was flowing out of the exhaust stacks.[55] I assumed that these already poor levels would increase when the plant was operating.

In addition, the analysis of several samples taken from the tank storing Volgograd’s decontamination waste water showed that 100 to 1,000 times the maximum permissible concentration of soman remained in the water.[56] The main reason for this mistake was a flawed cholinesterase-based analytical method of the determination of the residues of sarin and soman in presence of salts such as sodium chloride and others in this waste water. That waste water from the Volgograd plant was mixed with the waste water from the production of pesticides, and it flowed into a nearby lake, which was directly adjacent to the apartment complexes of Volgograd Industrial Association VPO “Khimprom.”

This lake was nicknamed the “White Sea”. The same defective analytical methods and irresponsible engineering practice at Volgograd Industrial Association VPO “Khimprom” resulted in the disastrous breakthrough of these waters into the Volga River in the spring of 1965. According to eyewitnesses, the entire surface of the Volga River up to Astrakhan was covered with dead fish.[57]

I presented these findings in full detail to Victor Petrunin, Director of GosNIIOKhT, who then calmly reminded me that Sergei Golubkov, the Deputy Minister of Chemical Industry, had once been the Volgograd factory’s chief engineer.[58] Presenting Golubkov with this “inconvenient truth” would simply result in the loss of both our jobs, he asserted. Moreover, he warned that environmental and safety analysis at the Novocheboksary plant would reveal a similar state of affairs. I had no doubt that he was correct on both counts. Indeed, the Novocheboksary factory used a dangerously flawed GOSNIIOKhT technology for the recirculation of its waste water, a process in which it was decontaminated by ozonation and redirected for subsequent use, including decontamination procedures and the laundering of protective suits and underwear. Unfortunately, they used the cholinesterase method to monitor and control the effectiveness of this procedure, and I had already proven that it produced gross errors in the Volgograd factory. A similar ozonation procedure was used to “scrub” the air vented from the technological buildings into the surrounding environment, using the same flawed cholinesterase method for evaluating the air.

True to form, nothing came out of my attempt at prompting accountability, except for some flaming rhetoric directed back at me. GOSNIIOKhT Deputy Director Konstantin Guskov said that I had performed this research on my own initiative, and that GOSNIIOKhT did not stand behind my conclusions.

Really, it was impossible to control the fate of all the containers with chemical agents in the working laboratories. According to security regulations, every room had the right to keep up to 200 grams of chemical agents in its iron safe under the hood. The limit was up to 500 g or more for some laboratories (Departments MB, D and RP) which consumed large quantities of chemical agents. At the end of each day, scientists were supposed to lock their box and hang the key up under the hood. Taking into account that there were more than 100 laboratory rooms working with chemical agents in the GLK, this means that at least 20 kg of them were stored in this building alone, and perhaps more than 60kg altogether at GOSNIIOKhT. This is more that I had previously estimated, when I wrote the article “A Poisoned Policy” in Moscow News,[59] about than dangers posed to Moscow’s citizens by storage of chemical agents at GOSNIIOKhT. What could have happened if a major fire had broken out in the GLK and could not be contained?

There was already a huge fire in the Novocheboksary factory on April 28, 1974, during which “several tons of Substance 33 was dispersed within a 30 kilometer radius” of the storage facility for the final chemical agent of Installation 83. According to eyewitness accounts, more than 100 people were poisoned there.[60] The environmental problems created by military chemical complex of Russia is also raised by Judith Perera.[61]

It’s actually laughable that they tried to pretend that they were worried about foreign intelligence services picking up information about new chemical weapons in the environment surrounding GOSNIIOKhT and its branches and test sites, since the contamination was so widespread.