War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  The next day, when the Skelton-Spratt amendment authorizing binary production came up for a vote, the House was in a defiant and angry mood. Fifty members changed their vote from the previous year, enabling the amendment to pass 229–196. The legislation placed two conditions on the release of FY 1986 funds: production of binary weapons could not begin until October 1987, and then only if NATO’s supreme governing body, the North Atlantic Council, formally agreed to station the new U.S. chemical weapons on European soil. Representative Porter, who had led the failed opposition, predicted that the second condition would be “changed or put in the hands of conferees and lost.”

  Final passage of the Defense Appropriations Bill by both houses meant that after several years of acrimonious debate, Congress had “crossed the Rubicon” and approved the production of binary chemical weapons.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SILENT SPREAD

  ALTHOUGH CONGRESS had finally approved production funds for the binary artillery shell, it had imposed a tough political condition on their release: President Reagan first had to obtain the agreement of the NATO foreign ministers to station the new U.S. weapons on Western European soil. Because this hurdle seemed nearly insurmountable, the Reagan administration persuaded Congress to modify the legislative condition so that the president was merely required to certify that the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s highest political body, had endorsed the U.S. chemical modernization plan. Still, given the extreme unpopularity of chemical weapons in Western Europe, even this watered-down condition would be difficult to satisfy.

  Seeking to avoid a fractious debate in the North Atlantic Council, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, David M. Abshire, decided to raise the issue of binary weapons in a lower-level body called the Defense Planning Committee (DPC), composed of the permanent representatives to NATO of the fifteen nations participating in the alliance’s military structure. (This committee had been created to discuss NATO military issues without the participation of France after Paris withdrew from the integrated military command.) The U.S. gambit was successful: on May 15, 1986, the DPC endorsed the NATO “force goal” for chemical weapons, and on May 22, the allied defense ministers meeting as the DPC simply “noted” the permanent representatives’ action without debate.

  On July 29, 1986, President Reagan sent a letter to the Speaker of the House stating that the administration had satisfied the legislative condition set by Congress and that production of the M687 binary projectile would proceed. But congressional opponents of the binary program protested that Ambassador Abshire’s “end run” around the North Atlantic Council had subverted the will of Congress. Representative Fascell and Senator Pryor prepared a legal brief arguing that because the “wrong” NATO body had approved the U.S. chemical modernization plan, the political condition in the appropriations bill had not been met. When this tactic failed, the binary opponents in the House tried to amend the FY 1987 Defense Authorization Bill to block production of the weapons. But Representative Les Aspin, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, caved to Senate negotiators in conference committee and allowed the binary program to proceed.

  Despite the DPC’s nominal endorsement of the NATO “force goal,” the Western European allies viewed the U.S. chemical modernization plan with extreme distaste. Ironically, the price for their acceptance of the binary program turned out to be a U.S. pledge not to station the new weapons on European soil in peacetime. Instead, the binary components would be stored at bases in the continental United States and airlifted to the host countries during a crisis or war. Once arrived at their destinations, the binary shells would be assembled and deployed, either for deterrence or to force the enemy to halt his first use of chemical weapons.

  West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl imposed another condition on Bonn’s willingness to accept U.S. binary weapons in wartime: he demanded the withdrawal of the roughly 120,000 unitary chemical weapons that the United States had stationed for decades on West German soil. When President Reagan agreed to this demand, conservative policy analysts excoriated the administration for having “shot itself in the foot.” Removing all U.S. chemical weapons from West Germany without replacing them would effectively create a “chemical-weapons-free zone” in Western Europe, weakening NATO’s ability to deter a Soviet chemical attack.

  Administration officials insisted that even if binary chemical weapons were stationed on U.S. soil in peacetime, they would still constitute a credible deterrent. But critics pointed out other problems with the wartime deployment plan. First, air-lifting the stockpile of binary weapons to Europe would require sixteen days of transatlantic flights by the entire U.S. fleet of C-141 Starlifter transport planes, displacing more urgent cargo such as troops and conventional munitions. Second, a massive airlift of U.S. binaries to Western Europe during a crisis might lead Moscow to believe that Washington was preparing a chemical attack, causing the Soviets to use their own weapons preemptively.

  Over the next few years, congressional opponents tried to cut appropriations for binary weapons production and worked with the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, to expose technical and managerial problems with the program. In June 1986, Representative Fascell made public a GAO report stating that recent tests of the Bigeye bomb had left numerous operational problems unresolved. The analysis concluded that the weapon “should either move back to developmental and chemical testing . . . or should be abandoned in favor of newer concepts.”

  France, meanwhile, decided in 1986 to develop a binary chemical warhead for its multiple-launch rocket system under a program called ACACIA, an acronym for Armement Chimique Adapté pour Contrer les Intentions Agressives (“chemical weapon designed to counter aggressive intentions”). The proposed French military budget for the five-year period 1987–91, released in early November 1986, included funds for procurement of the binary warhead, which was justified with the argument that “France cannot renounce definitively those categories of armament that other nations claim the right to possess.” For many years, the French armed forces had pressured their political leaders to procure a “minimal” stockpile of nerve agent weapons as a deterrent. France’s lack of a chemical retaliatory capability, they argued, created a military imbalance in the European theater that risked lowering the nuclear threshold in the event of war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In 1987, however, French President François Mitterrand suspended the ACACIA program in the development phase because his government intended to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, which was nearing completion in Geneva.

  THROUGHOUT MOST OF THE 1980S, the Iran-Iraq War continued to rage. In December 1986, Saddam Hussein authorized the Iraqi Third and Seventh Army Corps and the Iraqi Air Force to employ chemical weapons without obtaining his prior approval. When the field commanders balked at this unexpected change in policy, Saddam traveled to the front in January 1987 to confirm the order in person. Once he had done so, the Iraqi commanders took full advantage of their new authority, and their chemical attacks against the poorly protected Iranian forces became increasingly effective. The Iraqi Chemical Corps integrated chemical shells, bombs, and rockets into the fire plan for large military operations, using nerve agents to attack Iranian reinforcements, forward defenses, command posts, artillery positions, and logistics facilities.

  Despite Saddam Hussein’s flagrant violations of the Geneva Protocol, the Reagan administration viewed the secular Iraqi regime as a necessary bulwark against Iran’s militant Islamic ideology and began to provide Baghdad with military advice and logistical support. Washington also encouraged friendly Arab states to sell military equipment to Iraq. The goal of this policy was to ensure a protracted stalemate between Iraq and Iran, so that neither country would pose a threat to Israel or to U.S. oil interests in the Persian Gulf. An eventual victory by a weakened Iraq was also seen as an acceptable outcome. In a highly classified program, more than sixty officers from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) provided Iraqi c
ommanders with detailed tactical intelligence on Iranian troop movements, including reconnaissance satellite images, and assisted the Iraqi military with tactical planning for land battles, air strikes, and bomb damage assessment. The American officers participating in the DIA assistance program were not particularly disturbed by Iraq’s extensive use of chemical weapons, which they saw as simply another way of killing the enemy.

  After 1986, Iraq halted the manufacture of Tabun at the Muthanna State Establishment and concentrated exclusively on Sarin. Egyptian chemical weapons experts provided assistance, enabling Iraq to increase its Sarin output from only 5 tons in 1984 to 200 tons in 1987 and 390 tons in 1988. The nerve agent was loaded into aerial bombs and 122 mm artillery rockets with a range of 25 kilometers. Because Iraq had never mastered the process of distilling Sarin, however, the purity of the agent ranged between 60 and 70 percent, resulting in its rapid deterioration. After three months in storage, the purity level usually dropped below 40 percent, the cutoff for filling munitions. Iraqi Sarin therefore had to be consumed on the battlefield almost as fast as it was produced. As Muthanna’s output of Sarin increased, so did the amount Iraq employed in the war against Iran. The annual consumption of Sarin-filled artillery rockets, for example, jumped from 1,200 rounds in 1986 to 15,000 rounds in 1987.

  In addition to Iranian troops, the victims of Iraq’s chemical weapons included political prisoners, mostly Kurds and Shi’ites. A mysterious entity known as Unit 2100, reporting directly to the Iraqi Ministry of Military Industry, ran a secret chemical weapons testing facility near the village of Al-Haditha, in a remote area of Iraq’s western desert. Unit 2100 reportedly conducted experiments with human guinea pigs, and no prisoners sent to Al-Haditha ever returned alive. The Iraqi security services also used nerve agent for at least one mass execution in 1987. Troops from the Second Army Corps transported ten truckloads of political prisoners to a remote gulch near the town of Jalula on the Iranian border. As an Iraqi intelligence officer watched from a distance, a misty white cloud rose from the gulch. A few hours later, the trucks rumbled past in the opposite direction, piled with dead bodies; the corpses were unmarked and looked as if they were asleep. When the security agents escorting the convoy saw the intelligence officer, they angrily ordered him to leave the area immediately. By then he understood that what he had witnessed had been no ordinary execution. The dead were reportedly buried in a mass grave near the town of Ba’qubah in east-central Iraq.

  In response to tightened international controls on the export of nerve agent precursors to Iraq, Baghdad diversified its foreign suppliers and began to pursue an indigenous capability to manufacture its own chemical intermediates so that it would no longer be vulnerable to cutoffs in supply, a strategy known as “back integration.” Between 1986 and 1988, the Iraqi government contracted with two West German companies to build chemical plants at Fallujah, sixty kilometers west of Baghdad, for converting elemental phosphorus from the giant phosphate mine at Akashat into phosphorus trichloride.

  Iraq also acquired more persistent types of nerve agents. Because Sarin dissipated rapidly in the intense heat of the Iraqi desert, it was difficult to generate the concentrated clouds of vapor needed to inflict heavy casualties on Iranian troops. Accordingly, Iraqi military chemists at the Muthanna State Establishment began to develop less volatile agents, such as Soman. Iraq’s plan to manufacture Soman was foiled, however, by its failure to find a supplier of pinacolyl alcohol. As an alternative, Iraq chose to make Cyclosarin (GF), an analogue of Sarin whose lower volatility made it superior for use in hot climates. The production process for Cyclosarin was identical to that of Sarin except for the replacement of isopropyl alcohol with cyclohexyl alcohol, which was readily available from the Iraqi petrochemical industry. Iraqi military chemists also mixed Sarin and Cyclosarin together to form a “cocktail” that was more toxic than either agent separately. In 1987, Muthanna began to produce Sarin and Cyclosarin together in the same vessel by using a mixture of alcohols.

  Another persistent nerve agent developed by Iraq was VX. Although chemists at Al-Rashad had done preliminary research on V agents in 1975–76, serious development work on VX did not begin at Muthanna until 1985, under the direction of Dr. Emad Husayn Abdullah Ani, an Iraqi chemist who had studied at the Timoshenko Academy of Chemical Defense in Moscow. In 1987, the director-general of Muthanna, General Nazar al-Khazarji, wrote a top secret letter to senior Iraqi officials in which he compared VX to a nuclear weapon. Two metric tons of the nerve agent delivered by aircraft, he claimed, could kill as many people as the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Accordingly, the general observed, acquiring the ability to mass-produce VX would usher Iraq “into the [field] of armament of advanced countries.”

  A pilot plant at Muthanna produced a total of 2.4 tons of VX in five production runs between late 1987 and the end of May 1988, although the purity of the agent was only about 50 percent. Because VX could not be distilled, agent that was less than 90 percent pure was unstable and had a limited shelf life: Iraqi VX stored in bulk containers or filled munitions deteriorated to the point of nonusability within a few weeks. Toward the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq loaded some bombs with VX but apparently did not use them.

  Iran, for its part, had decided in 1984 to acquire its own chemical warfare capability after enduring numerous Iraqi chemical attacks and attempting without success to persuade the international community to enforce the Geneva Protocol. With assistance from Western European companies, Tehran built factories for the production of mustard, phosgene, and hydrogen cyanide, which were loaded into bombs and artillery shells. Even after Iranian leaders had acquired a stockpile of chemical weapons, they debated whether to employ them. Ayatollah Khomeini was opposed to chemical warfare on religious grounds, noting that the Koran forbade the use of poisoned weapons. But as Iraq’s chemical attacks intensified, the Iranian military put increasing pressure on Khomeini to authorize retaliatory strikes, and in 1987 he finally relented and issued a secret order. Although the Iranians employed chemical weapons sporadically in 1987 and 1988, their lack of training and experience prevented these attacks from having any real military impact. Toward the end of the war, Khomeini decided to halt the use of chemical weapons and deny any previous attacks so as to regain the moral high ground vis-à-vis Iraq. Nevertheless, the Iranian leadership did not abandon its pursuit of chemical weapons but sought to intensify its efforts and acquire a militarily significant stockpile for future use.

  ON APRIL 10, 1987, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who had taken office in 1985, declared publicly that the Soviet Union was ending all production of chemical weapons and would henceforth convert its existing military chemical facilities to civilian purposes. Despite Gorbachev’s pledge, however, the secret development and testing of Novichok binary agents continued. In 1986, the Soviets had built the Chemical Research Institute at a closed military complex in Nukus, Uzbekistan. This facility employed 300 people and included laboratories, a pilot production plant for Novichok agents, a munitions filling line, and a large test chamber in which dogs were exposed to toxic agents through gas masks placed over their muzzles.

  In May 1987, a serious accident occurred at GosNIIOKhT in Moscow. Andrei Zheleznyakov, an experienced military chemist at the institute, was conducting an experiment under a fume hood in which he combined the binary precursors of Novichok-5 inside a small stainless-steel reactor and measured the reaction temperature. Previous experiments had shown that the higher the temperature, the greater the purity of the end product. Using a syringe connected to a flexible metal tube, Zheleznyakov drew samples from the reactor for analysis. Suddenly overcome by a spell of intense dizziness, he saw that the tube had become disconnected from the syringe and was leaking invisible fumes into the air. He quickly sealed the leak, but his ears were ringing and orange spots flashed before his eyes. Paralyzed with fear, he murmured, “Guys, I think it’s got me.”

  Zheleznyakov’s coworkers quickly took him outdoors for some fres
h air and gave him a shot of vodka. When he returned to the laboratory, he looked pale and drawn, and his section chief told him to go home and rest. A colleague escorted him to the bus stop. As he waited for the bus, Zheleznyakov experienced a hallucination in which the onion-domed church across the way suddenly glowed brightly and broke up into a thousand swirling pieces. He fainted and collapsed on the sidewalk, and a friend brought him back to GosNIIOKhT. There the KGB security detail called an ambulance and followed in a car as the emergency vehicle, sirens blaring, carried the stricken chemist to the Sklifosovsky Institute for Emergency Care, the leading poison center in the Soviet Union.

  By the time Zheleznyakov arrived at the hospital, his breathing was labored, his heart was barely beating, and his nervous system was shutting down. The KGB escorts told the admitting physician, Dr. Yevgeny Vedernikov, that the patient was suffering from food poisoning caused by the ingestion of bad sausage. They then made the doctor sign a security form pledging never to discuss the case in public. Although Dr. Vedernikov did not know the exact cause of the poisoning, a blood test revealed that Zheleznyakov’s cholinesterase level was close to zero. By treating the chemist symptomatically with atropine and other antidotes, Vedernikov managed to save his life.