In addition to developing the Bigeye VX bomb for the Navy, Bill Dee and his team at Edgewood Arsenal were working on a binary Sarin artillery shell for the Army. Called the M687 projectile, it had entered advanced development in 1967. The main technical challenge associated with this munition was to ensure that the two precursor chemicals mixed and reacted efficiently to form Sarin inside the shell during its flight to the target. In order to reduce the weight of the projectile, one of its binary components was reformulated. Instead of the mixture of dichlor and difluor (known as “di-di”) that was used to manufacture Sarin at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, the M687 projectile contained pure difluor (DF). The other binary component, known as OPA, was a mixture of isopropyl alcohol, a stabilizer, and a catalyst.
A mock-up of the M687 binary Sarin 155 mm artillery shell, which contained two canisters filled with the relatively nontoxic precursors DF and OPA. When the projectile was fired from a howitzer, the setback forces ruptured thin diaphragms between the canisters, allowing the precursors to mix. They reacted in seconds during the projectile’s flight to the target to yield Sarin, which was dispersed on impact.
The DF and OPA used in the binary artillery shell were stored in separate canisters. Prior to firing, the two canisters would be inserted into the M687 projectile, one behind the other. The facing ends were each covered with a polymer plate and a very thin steel diaphragm known as a “burst disc.” When the projectile was fired from a howitzer, the intense setback forces would rupture the discs, causing the DF and OPA to mix and react inside the shell to form Sarin. The spinning of the projectile in flight would facilitate the blending of the chemicals, so that the reaction would take only about four seconds to go to completion. When the shell reached the target, an impact fuse and burster charge would disperse the newly synthesized Sarin as an aerosol of tiny droplets.
During field testing of prototypes of the M687 projectile at Dugway Proving Ground in 1971, Dee and his colleagues observed that about one shell in every eight suddenly became unstable and dropped out of the air. To diagnose the source of the problem, the development team tracked the shells in flight with high-speed cameras and Doppler radar. They concluded that the motion of the liquid precursors inside the spinning shell was causing the instability. By developing a computer model of the projectile in flight—a difficult task given the limited processing power available at the time—they managed to modify the design of the shell and fix the defect. For this accomplishment, Dee received the Army Science Award. The M687 projectile was now considered a technical success, and in 1972 it entered the engineering development phase.
Nevertheless, a major obstacle to field testing of the binary artillery shell was the FY 1970 Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 91-121), passed in the wake of the Skull Valley incident, which had effectively halted all open-air releases of lethal chemical agents. Thus, although the M687 projectile was fired more than two thousand times in the course of its development, only one test (on September 16, 1969) involved the use of live Sarin. All the other trials were performed with chemical simulants, raising questions about their realism. The binary artillery shell also proved to have a number of technical limitations. First, the target had to be far enough away from the point of firing to allow the reaction of DF and OPA to go to completion. Second, because the binary reaction created unwanted chemical by-products, the weapon would deliver less Sarin to the target than a standard unitary shell. Third, although the use of pure DF saved weight and improved reaction efficiency, it had the drawback of generating hydrogen fluoride (HF) gas as a by-product. Whereas Sarin itself was odorless, HF gave off a noxious odor that would warn enemy troops of the approaching agent cloud.
On September 18, 1973, a few months after a major withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, the Secretary of the Army, Bo Calloway, requested funding to build a new production facility at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas for DF, the primary chemical component of the binary Sarin projectile. This trial balloon elicited little support in Congress, where chemical weapons remained politically unpopular. One month later, however, a new Arab-Israeli war broke out in the Middle East. By transforming U.S. perceptions of the chemical warfare threat, the conflict gave the Army Chemical Corps a new lease on life.
FOR SEVERAL YEARS, Presidents Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Hafez al-Assad of Syria had plotted to avenge their nations’ humiliating defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War. The two Arab leaders devised a plan for a joint surprise attack against Israel on the festival of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, in the hope of catching the Israel Defense Forces off guard. During secret preparations for the invasion, both countries equipped their forces with chemical weapons. Egypt had at least one Air Force wing armed with Sarin-filled bombs and a supply of Soviet-made Scud-B missiles that could deliver chemical warheads over a range of 185 miles. Cairo also sold Syria an arsenal of chemical weapons for $6 million, including Sarin-filled artillery shells, Scud missile warheads, and spray tanks for tactical aircraft.
In September 1973, the Egyptian and Syrian armies began to mass troops near their respective borders with Israel. Egypt called up thousands of reservists and prepared antiaircraft and artillery positions along the west bank of the Suez Canal, facing the Israel-occupied Sinai Peninsula. Because the Egyptian Army had previously mobilized nineteen times without going to war, Israeli intelligence had been lulled into complacency and assumed that this latest deployment was another false alarm. On the afternoon of October 6, however, Egypt and Syria launched a ground invasion on two fronts. Egyptian combat engineers breached the Bar Lev Line, the fortified defensive wall along the Suez Canal that Israel had built after the Six-Day War, enabling columns of Egyptian tanks and armored personnel carriers to advance into the Sinai desert. Meanwhile, on the northern front, Syrian tanks broke through the thin Israeli defenses on the Golan Heights.
After a few panicky days, the Israel Defense Forces managed to mobilize and regroup, and over the next two weeks, the tide of war shifted in Israel’s favor. Fear of retaliation in kind deterred the Arab armies from resorting to chemical warfare. Although Israeli intelligence intercepted alert messages to Egyptian and Syrian units equipped with chemical arms, these formations were never ordered into action. On October 24, after eighteen days of fighting, U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger intervened diplomatically to impose a cease-fire.
In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Israeli military intelligence experts inspected Soviet-made tanks and BMP-1 armored personnel carriers that had been captured from the Egyptian and Syrian forces. The Israelis were surprised to discover that the armored vehicles had sophisticated seals, filters, and air pressurization systems to keep out poison gas. The Soviets had also equipped their Arab allies with gas masks, rubber capes, automatic detector alarms, chemical identification kits, autoinjectors filled with nerve agent antidote, portable shelters, and wash-down equipment for decontaminating tanks and planes. In principle, such protective systems could be used for either offensive or defensive purposes. Because Egypt had no reason to believe that Israel would use poison gas first, however, it seemed likely that the intent was to shield Egyptian troops from exposure to their own chemical weapons. Indeed, Egyptian prisoners of war later admitted under Israeli interrogation that their side had possessed munitions loaded with nerve agents.
Israeli leaders perceived Egypt’s burgeoning chemical arsenal as a serious threat, particularly when coupled with ballistic missiles that could deliver nerve agents against Israeli cities. Under optimal atmospheric conditions, a few dozen Scud warheads filled with Sarin could generate a toxic plume that would blanket a large area, potentially inflicting thousands of casualties. To prepare for the worst, the Israeli government quietly ordered the manufacture of more than 3 million gas masks of indigenous design for the civilian population. For infants too small to wear a mask, an enclosed crib-type air filtration system was developed. To avoid causing undue public anxiety, the government decided not to distribute the gas masks widely until the immine
nt threat of war returned.
ISRAELI MILITARY INTELLIGENCE allowed U.S. analysts to inspect captured Soviet equipment from the Yom Kippur War, including BMP-1 armored personnel carriers that incorporated chemical-protective systems. These vehicles had entered development in 1961 and gone into production in 1967, the period when the United States was mass-producing VX. Although the air filtration unit was a standard feature of the BMP-1, it was usually not included in the export versions that the Soviet Union sold to allied countries. Some military analysts speculated that Moscow, in its haste to deliver arms to the Middle East, had mistakenly shipped armored vehicles intended for domestic use. But the fact that the Soviets had also supplied Egypt with gas masks and other chemical defensive gear suggested that the special vehicles had not been provided in error.
The intelligence windfall from the Yom Kippur War caused the CIA to revise its assessment of the Soviet chemical threat, including the possibility that the Red Army might initiate the use of nerve agents in a future conflict. Other information suggested that the Soviet military was upgrading its chemical warfare capabilities and integrating them into the structure, equipment, and training of its ground, sea, and air forces. According to CIA estimates, more than 100,000 Soviet troops had offensive or defensive chemical warfare missions. Furthermore, the Soviets had about 20,000 vehicles devoted to chemical decontamination, compared to about 600 for NATO. One Soviet vehicle, the TMS-65, resembled a giant blow dryer on wheels; it used a jet engine to decontaminate tanks and other armored vehicles with a blast of superheated air and fluid.
In March 1974, several committees of the U.S. Congress held hearings on the military lessons of the Yom Kippur War. Testifying before a House subcommittee, General Creighton W. Abrams, the Army chief of staff, said that he had been “impressed . . . with the comprehensive CBR [chemicalbiological-radiological] defense in the Soviet-equipped forces of the Arab armies. It was comprehensive, sophisticated, complete, and detailed, on every vehicle and for all equipment and for all men. Our forces are not equipped in that fashion.”
Commenting on the general’s testimony, Representative Sikes of Florida, an outspoken supporter of the Chemical Corps, said that the Soviet Union’s sophisticated chemical defenses suggested that their offensive capabilities were equally strong. “The thing that disturbs me greatly about this matter,” he added, “is that our capability in the field of CBR . . . has been deteriorating as a part of national policy for several years, and that we are becoming more and more dependent upon a laboratory capability rather than an inventory of weapons or even an adequate defense against them.”
ANOTHER CONSEQUENCE of the chemical warfare intelligence derived from the Yom Kippur War was a major effort by the U.S. Army to improve its medical defenses against nerve agents. Among the captured Egyptian items that Israel had passed along to the CIA was a nerve agent antidote kit for crews of armored personnel carriers. Because this kit had writing in Cyrillic letters, the CIA assumed that it was the latest Soviet antidote. When agency chemists analyzed its composition, two of the ingredients were familiar: atropine and a PAM-like compound known as TMB4. The third component, however, was surprising. It was a drug called benactyzine, which Western scientists had never considered using as a nerve agent antidote.
The CIA dubbed the Egyptian antidote “TAB,” after the initials of its three components: TMB4, atropine, and benactyzine. In a top secret project code-named “Grand Plot,” CIA researchers tested TAB on laboratory monkeys exposed to nerve agents and concluded that the mixture was highly effective as an antidote for Sarin, Soman, or VX. Benactyzine appeared to act extremely rapidly, whereas atropine provided longer lasting protection. In view of the apparent advantages of the new antidote, the Army discarded its old autoinjectors containing atropine and PAM and purchased 7 million copies of the new TAB kits.
Over the next five years, the Army realized that it had made a serious mistake. Not only did benactyzine cause florid hallucinations, incapacitating soldiers and reducing their ability to fight, but the TAB mixture contained too little atropine to be effective. It turned out that the captured antidote kits had not been manufactured by the Soviet Union after all. CIA analysts who did not speak Russian, seeing the Cyrillic writing on the captured kits, had jumped to the conclusion that they were Soviet-made, forgetting that other languages, such as Bulgarian and Serbian, are also written in Cyrillic. In fact, when the Egyptian Army’s Soviet-supplied kits had expired in 1969, Cairo had replaced them with the TAB kits, which were made in Bulgaria. Due either to incompetence or inadequate testing, the Bulgarian antidote was defective. On November 4, 1980, the U.S. Army chief of staff quietly ordered the destruction of the 7 million TAB autoinjectors, which fortunately had never been used in combat.
ALTHOUGH THE U.S. intelligence community was correct in assessing that the Soviet Union was modernizing its chemical arsenal, the true size and scope of that effort were unknown in the West. In 1972, the Soviets opened a manufacturing plant for R-33 at the vast chemical industry complex in Novocheboksarsk, a suburb of Cheboksary, the capital of the Russian Chuvash Republic. The V-agent production facility was six stories high, a hundred meters long, and fifty meters wide, and was constructed of reinforced concrete and cement block. Inside, the process equipment was equally overdesigned, with large numbers of glass-lined reactors and rotary driers made of titanium. Additional plants were built nearby to make the precursor chemicals aminomercaptan and chloroester and to produce and fill munitions. Although the Novocheboksarsk factory never operated at full capacity, it manufactured a total of 15,000 tons of R-33. On April 28, 1974, a fire broke out near the munitions-loading line and flames consumed a wooden warehouse containing aviation bombs filled with R-33. About fifty bombs were damaged and leaked, requiring an extensive cleanup by workers in protective suits. Although the accident caused no immediate deaths, several workers later died of chronic illnesses associated with low-level exposure to the Soviet V agent.
In order to keep pace with and eventually surpass the chemical warfare capabilities of the United States, the Soviet Union maintained an active program of research and development. In May 1971, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Soviet Council of Ministers approved a new effort to create “fourth-generation” chemical weapons. (World War I agents such as phosgene and mustard were considered the first generation, G agents the second, and V agents the third.) The Kremlin sought to acquire a new class of nerve agents with greater toxicity, stability, persistence, ease of production, and other militarily relevant properties. Code-named “Foliant,” this research-and-development program was shrouded in the highest level of secrecy. All related documents were stamped with the classification “Top Secret—Series F” and access was restricted to those with the proper clearance and a need to know.
The main scientific organization involved in the Foliant program was the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology. Known by the Russian acronym GosNIIOKhT (pronounced “gos-niockt”), it was headquartered in an industrial district of eastern Moscow, four and a half miles due east of Red Square. The institute was considered a prestigious place to work, with superb laboratory equipment, generous salaries, and access to imported foods and consumer goods not available in public stores. Only the Soviet Union’s most outstanding young chemists, chemical engineers, and physiologists were offered positions there.
From the outside, GosNIIOKhT appeared unimpressive: a cluster of nondescript concrete buildings crowded onto a small triangular plot at No. 53 Highway of the Enthusiasts, with steel steam conduits suspended over the narrow alleyways. The windows of the institute were obscured by faded curtains and a medical clinic occupied a corner of the ground floor. Except for an elaborate gate-pass system that sealed off the closed portion of the building, nothing gave away its real purpose. In fact, GosNIIOKhT was what the Russians called a yashik, or box—a classified facility within the Soviet military-industrial complex. Formerly known as Scientific Research Institute N
o. 42 (NII-42), it was the country’s leading center for the development and testing of chemical warfare agents. Like many weapons-related institutes in the Soviet Union, GosNIIOKhT had a postal address for secret correspondence: Post Office Box M-5123.
The Moscow institute reported to the Ministry of Chemical Industry and employed about 3,500 people, of whom about 500 were Ph.D. scientists. Although GosNIIOKhT did some research on toxins (poisonous compounds derived from living organisms), its primary focus was the synthesis of new chemical warfare agents and the development of manufacturing processes. Security at the institute was extremely tight: KGB guards continually patrolled the laboratory complex and members of the staff had to obtain a special pass to go from one floor of the building to another. In addition to its Moscow headquarters, GosNIIOKhT operated three satellite laboratories in Volgograd, Shikhany, and Novocheboksarsk. The Volgograd branch employed between 500 and 700 people; the Shikhany branch about 1,500 (600 of them scientists); and the Novocheboksarsk branch about 300.
Leading the effort to develop fourth-generation chemical weapons was Dr. Pyotr Petrovich Kirpichev, a brilliant young scientist who worked in the Shikhany branch of GosNIIOKhT. Later known as the State Institute for Technology of Organic Synthesis (GITOS), the Shikhany branch was located in the closed city of Volsk-17, twelve miles from the Central Military Chemical Testing Site of the Red Army. In 1973, drawing on some new ideas circulating among Soviet military chemists, Kirpichev synthesized a nitrogen-containing organophosphorus nerve agent that was initially designated K-84 and later renamed A-230. Although the new compound was highly toxic and stable, it was a viscous liquid that crystallized at 14 degrees Fahrenheit and thus presented disadvantages for use in cold weather.
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