War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  Civilian victims in the streets of the Kurdish city of Halabja after Iraqi aircraft dropped nerve-agent-filled bombs on March 16, 1988.

  At the request of ten countries, U.N. Secretary-General Pérez de Cuéllar asked the government of Saddam Hussein to permit an impartial investigation of the Halabja attack, but a senior Iraqi official refused. “This is a question of sovereignty,” he said, “and therefore I do not think we are going to accept that.” At the same time, the Reagan administration suggested that Iran as well as Iraq might have been responsible for the gassing of Halabja. This allegation, made on the basis of flimsy evidence, had the effect of reducing the political pressure on Baghdad.

  AFTER THE ATTACK on Halabja, the Iran-Iraq War ground on inconclusively. Although the U.N. Security Council had passed Resolution 598 in July 1987 calling on both sides to stop fighting and withdraw to their prewar borders, Tehran had refused to accept a cease-fire in the belief that it could still prevail militarily. During the spring of 1988, however, Iran suffered a series of grave military setbacks. The first came in mid-April, when Iraq launched Operation Ramadan to recapture the Al-Fao Peninsula, which provided access to the Persian Gulf and had been one of Iraq’s major oil-exporting ports before the war. Iraqi aircraft and helicopters dropped Sarinfilled bombs on Iranian frontline troops, opening the way for an amphibious attack from the sea and a massive land assault by Iraqi regular forces and Republican Guard units, equipped with two thousand tanks and six hundred heavy guns.

  After the Iraqi victory on April 18, 1988, a U.S. Air Force officer named Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona, who served with the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as liaison to the Iraqi military intelligence service, visited the Al-Fao battlefield. The once-lush peninsula had been transformed into a cratered moonscape, and areas were cordoned off with colored warning flags to indicate persistent chemical contamination. Scattered over the ground were dozens of atropine autoinjectors that Iranian soldiers had used after an Iraqi Sarin attack.

  During the late spring of 1988, Iraq and Iran launched hundreds of conventionally armed ballistic missiles at each other’s population centers. Known as the “war of the cities,” this campaign involved the most extensive military use of missiles since the German V-1 and V-2 attacks on southern England during World War II. If Ayatollah Khomeini refused to accept a cease-fire, Saddam Hussein planned to attack Tehran with conventional bombs and missiles to shatter windows throughout the Iranian capital. He would then follow up with a barrage of chemical-tipped Scuds, creating clouds of Sarin vapor that would penetrate into homes and offices and kill thousands of civilians. Although Iran did not have its own nerve-agentfilled warheads with which to retaliate, it did have chemical bombs that could be dropped from aircraft. To prepare for an Iranian retaliatory strike, the Iraqi Ba’ath Party organized a large-scale civil defense exercise in Baghdad that involved the evacuation of two entire city districts. Saddam was clearly willing to accept a heavy toll in both Iranian and Iraqi civilian casualties to end a war that threatened his regime.

  Although an Iraqi chemical strike on Tehran never materialized, the specter of missiles armed with nerve agent warheads caused widespread panic in the Iranian capital, triggering a mass evacuation in which some two million people abandoned their homes. The pervasive terror inspired by the Iraqi chemical threat, combined with a deep sense of war weariness, led to the collapse of civilian morale and helped to convince the Iranian leadership that the war could not be won. On August 20, 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini finally accepted a humiliating cease-fire under the terms of U.N. Security Council Resolution 598, an act that he compared to drinking from “a poisoned chalice.”

  After eight years of bloody attrition, neither Iraq nor Iran could claim victory: the border dispute between them was unresolved and both countries had suffered devastating human and financial losses. Iraqi chemical attacks had inflicted some fifty thousand Iranian casualties, of which about five thousand had been fatal. Even so, these figures were only a small fraction of the more than one million military and civilian casualties on both sides.

  The Anfal campaign continued even after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, forcing tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees to flee into southeastern Turkey. In July 1988, the Iraqi Army retook Halabja and razed nearly every building in the city with dynamite and bulldozers, leaving the bodies of the dead to rot where they had fallen.

  In October 1988, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a nonprofit humanitarian organization, sent an investigation team to northern Iraq to interview and examine Kurdish refugees who had witnessed or experienced Iraqi chemical attacks. Refugees from several villages reported that lowflying jets had dropped bombs that produced lethal clouds. The first animals to die had been birds and domestic fowl, followed by sheep, goats, cows, and mules; humans close to the bomb bursts had succumbed in minutes. Based on this testimony, the investigators concluded that the Iraqi chemical strikes had involved mustard and at least one type of nerve agent.

  Four years later, in 1992, a forensic team from PHR visited the site of a 1988 attack on the Iraqi-Kurdish village of Birjinni. The team collected soil samples from bomb craters near the village and sent them to the British Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down. There, analysis by a sensitive technique known as gas chromatography–mass spectrometry confirmed the presence of chemicals with the unique spectral “fingerprint” of Sarin breakdown products.

  THE FAILURE OF the international community to punish Iraq’s flagrant violations of the 1925 Geneva Protocol had a deeply corrosive effect on the legal, political, and moral norms constraining the spread of chemical arms. In an article published in September 1988, New York Times columnist Flora Lewis criticized the “deafening silence” of Western governments in response to Iraq’s extensive use of chemical weapons against Iran and its own Kurdish minority. Lewis wrote that the “complicity of the world community” in this systematic violation of international law would encourage other states in the Middle East region to acquire chemical arms. A year earlier, in an address to retired intelligence officers, deputy CIA director Robert M. Gates had made a similar prediction, warning that Iraq’s massive use of mustard and nerve agents during the Iran-Iraq War had “broken the moral barrier” against chemical warfare.

  These ominous predictions were soon borne out. Iran, the chief victim of Iraq’s chemical attacks, moved quickly to expand its capabilities for the manufacture and delivery of chemical arms. In October 1988, two months after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the speaker of the Iranian Parliament (and future president) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared, “Chemical and biological weapons are . . . the poor man’s atomic bomb. We should at least consider them for our defense. Although the use of such weapons is inhuman, the war taught us that international laws are only drops of ink on paper.” In 1989, Iranian officials signed contracts with the Swiss company Krebs AG of Zurich to build a production facility for phosphorus pentasulfide, a dual-use chemical, and with the German chemical giant Hoechst to build a large pesticide plant near Tehran.

  Other states in the Middle East also expanded their chemical warfare capabilities. In 1985, the Egyptian government–owned El Nasr Pharmaceutical Company had built a new factory to manufacture phosphorus trichloride at the production complex in Abu Za’abal, north of Cairo. Egypt had hired Krebs AG to construct the plant and Stauffer Chemicals of Pennsylvania to supply the production equipment. In March 1989, after learning of these contracts, the United States and Switzerland pressured the Egyptian government to certify that the Abu Za’abal plant would be used only for civilian purposes and to declare what chemicals would be produced there. When Cairo refused to comply with these demands, the Swiss Foreign Office sent a letter to Krebs ordering the firm to sever all business ties with its Egyptian partner. Because the Swiss government had been slow in acting, however, it failed to prevent the Egyptian plant from becoming operational.

  Syria, too, acquired a sophisticated chemical arsenal. Since 1979, when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat
had negotiated the Camp David peace accord with Israel, Syria had found itself without a close regional ally in its confrontation with the Jewish state. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 had again demonstrated the conventional military superiority of the Israel Defense Forces, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad decided to expand his country’s chemical warfare capability as a deterrent. The main Syrian organization responsible for developing nerve agents was the Center for Scientific Studies and Research, known by its French acronym CERS. Although Syria had extensive mineral deposits of phosphorus, it relied for chemical precursors and specialized production equipment on commercial suppliers in West Germany, Switzerland, and India. By the end of the 1980s, Syria had built chemical weapons production plants that were reportedly located near the cities of Allepo, Homs, and Hama.

  Assad also purchased from North Korea medium-range Scud B and C ballistic missiles, which were capable of delivering nerve agent warheads over hundreds of miles. By threatening cities in northern Israel, these missiles would give Syria a degree of “strategic parity” and constrain Tel Aviv’s military options. At the same time, the integration of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons ushered the Middle East region into a frightening new era in which civilian populations were increasingly vulnerable to surprise chemical attack.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PEACE AND WAR

  AFTER THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR ended in 1988, Baghdad destroyed its old, degraded stocks of chemical weapons and the Muthanna State Establishment switched to the production of pesticides and other legitimate chemicals. But Muthanna remained under the control of the Iraqi military, which continued research and development work on nerve agents under the cover of commercial activity. In August 1989, the director-general of Muthanna wrote to senior Iraqi officials that “research on munitions and chemical weapons are very important in war conditions. We must always be ready and prepared and must follow up every new development in this domain.”

  One priority task was to improve the stability of nerve agents, the low quality of which had caused them to deteriorate in a matter of weeks during the Iran-Iraq War. Even storing Sarin-filled munitions in refrigerated bunkers had failed to solve the problem. Although a brief shelf life had been tolerable in wartime, when the weapons were consumed almost as fast as they could be produced, in peacetime more stable formulations that could be stockpiled for long periods were required. Iraqi scientists addressed this problem by developing field-mixed nerve agent bombs and warheads, in which the final precursors would be combined by hand one day before use. One of the binary components was DF, which could be stored for years in plastic jerry cans. The other component was a 60:40 mixture of isopropyl alcohol and cyclohexyl alcohol, which was preloaded into bombs and Scud missile warheads. Before a weapon was prepared for delivery, an Iraqi soldier wearing a gas mask and protective suit would pour the DF solution into a bomb or warhead already containing the alcohol mixture. The chemicals would then react vigorously to produce a 60:40 mixture of Sarin and Cyclosarin. Although the resulting nerve agent “cocktail” would be impure, it would still be considerably more potent than a unitary agent after a few months of storage. Iraq later claimed to have produced and stockpiled 1,024 aerial bombs and 34 missile warheads of the field-mixed type.

  Iraqi scientists also experimented with dual-chamber artillery shells and 122 mm rockets, in which DF and the alcohol mixture were stored in separate compartments and allowed to combine and react after the munition was fired. About a hundred prototype “true binary” shells were tested in 1989 and 1990 with “encouraging” results, but the technology never worked reliably enough to warrant large-scale production. Another focus of Iraqi chemical weapons research and development was on improving the manufacturing process for VX. The earlier method had resulted in an agent of low purity that deteriorated rapidly and had a shelf life of only one to eight weeks. In April 1988, Iraqi scientists developed a salt form of VX known as “dibis” that remained stable for up to eight months and could be converted into active VX as needed. Although Muthanna produced dibis on a trial basis, Iraqi officials later claimed (without providing hard evidence) that all of the material had been converted into 1.5 metric tons of VX, which had then deteriorated and been destroyed.

  AT PINE BLUFF ARSENAL in Arkansas, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps was converting dichlor into difluor (DF), one of the chemical components for the M687 binary Sarin artillery shell. Although the Chemical Corps had built a dedicated plant at Pine Bluff to produce dichlor, it was not yet operational. By August 1989, however, the available supply of dichlor was shrinking and would soon be exhausted. To get the new plant up and running, the Army needed to find a reliable supplier of thionyl chloride, the preferred chlorinating agent used in the production of dichlor. At least 160,000 pounds of thionyl chloride would be needed by June 2, 1990. Since Congress was holding up a $47 million appropriation for the M687 projectile until the dichlor plant was fully operational, the stakes for the Army were high.

  The prime contractor for the Pine Bluff facility, Combustion Engineering, ordered thionyl chloride from the two U.S. chemical companies that manufactured it: Occidental Chemical Corporation of Dallas and Mobay Corporation of Pittsburgh. These firms produced thionyl chloride as an intermediate for the synthesis of commercial pesticides, dyestuffs, and plastics. In September 1989, both Occidental and Mobay declined to sell thionyl chloride to the U.S. government, citing legal issues and corporate policies against involvement in chemical weapons production. An Occidental spokesman stated, “As a matter of company policy, Occidental Petroleum will not sell or distribute chemicals that contribute to the production of chemical weapons or illicit drugs.” Mobay’s parent company, the West German firm Bayer, also refused to supply thionyl chloride to the U.S. Army because of concerns about negative publicity, including possible references to the Nazi era. Observed a Mobay spokesman, “In this day and age, who wants to be involved in providing chemicals that go into chemical weapons?”

  The administration of President George H. W. Bush, which had taken office in January 1989, found itself in an awkward position. Given the refusal of the two U.S. manufacturers to cooperate, the Army considered ordering thionyl chloride from foreign suppliers, but doing so would create thorny political problems. In response to U.S. pressure, the West German government had finally begun to crack down on domestic companies that were suspected of selling chemical weapons precursors to proliferators such as Libya, Iraq, and Iran. Indeed, only a few months earlier, the United States had helped block a shipment of thionyl chloride from a West German company to Tehran. If the Pentagon now ordered the same chemical for its own nerve agent production program, Washington would be open to charges of hypocrisy.

  In view of the political drawbacks of purchasing thionyl chloride from abroad, the Army Chemical Corps asked the Department of Commerce to force the two U.S. manufacturers to sell the chemical. Under an obscure 1950 law known as the Defense Production Act, the federal government had the authority to compel qualified companies to accept defense production orders if the Pentagon certified that the product was vital to national security; corporate executives who refused to comply could face fines and imprisonment. Even so, taking legal action against the two firms would prevent the Army from meeting the June 1990 Congressional deadline. Going to court would also antagonize the U.S. chemical industry, which was making a good-faith effort to prevent the sale of chemical weapons precursors to proliferators. All told, the issue risked becoming a major embarrassment for the White House.

  As a stopgap measure, the Chemical Corps shipped railroad tank cars filled with leftover dichlor from Rocky Mountain Arsenal to Muscle Shoals for redistillation. The purified dichlor was then sent to Pine Bluff for conversion to DF, providing enough feedstock for one month of production. Nevertheless, a shortage of thionyl chloride was not the only problem facing the M687 projectile. Marquardt Corporation, which produced the canisters that held the binary components, had a three-year backlog of orders for parts it was havi
ng trouble manufacturing. The company had also come under federal scrutiny for alleged quality-control problems and ties to figures in a defense procurement scandal known as “Ill Wind.”

  AS TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES slowed the U.S. production of binary weapons, there was some movement on the arms control front. On July 28, 1988, U.S. Ambassador Max Friedersdorf made a speech to the Conference on Disarmament in which he revealed the locations of all U.S. chemical weapons production facilities, outlined plans for their destruction under the future Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and called on the Soviet Union and other states to follow suit. Six months later, on February 21–23, 1989, the United States conducted a trial inspection at a DuPont chemical plant in New Jersey to test draft procedures for verifying the chemical weapons ban. The goal of this exercise was to check treaty compliance at a “dual-use” chemical industry site that could potentially be converted to military production, without unduly disrupting commercial production or disclosing industrial trade secrets.

  During bilateral talks with Moscow that ran in parallel with the multilateral CWC negotiations, the Bush administration proposed a reciprocal exchange of data on chemical weapons stockpiles and related facilities in the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite lingering suspicions between the two countries, arms control officials from both sides began to negotiate the agreement and developed a degree of mutual trust as they hammered out the details. This effort culminated in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), which was signed on September 23, 1989, by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. The signing ceremony took place at an outdoor table at Jackson Lake Lodge in the heart of Grand Teton National Park, just north of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Secretary Baker liked to vacation. Under a deep blue sky, the sweeping panorama of the Grand Teton range, rising almost vertically from the table-flat plain, provided a spectacular backdrop to the event.