War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  Henceforth known as the “Wyoming MOU,” the U.S.-Soviet agreement called for a two-phase exchange of data between the two countries on their respective chemical weapons stockpiles and related facilities, plus a series of reciprocal site visits as a confidence-building measure. The first milestone would come on December 29, 1989, when the two countries would exchange data on aggregate stockpile size; types of stockpiled agents; percent of chemical agents in munitions, devices, and bulk containers; locations of storage, production, and destruction facilities; and types of agent and munitions at each storage facility.

  Two days after the signing of the Wyoming MOU, President Bush made a speech to the U.N. General Assembly in New York in which he reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to negotiating a global ban on chemical weapons. To facilitate progress in the ongoing multilateral talks in Geneva, he proposed a bilateral agreement with the Soviet Union in which both sides would reduce their chemical weapons stocks to equal levels, with strict provisions for verification. The President suggested that the interim level be set at 5,000 metric tons, or less than 20 percent of the existing U.S. stockpile.

  Bush also pledged that after the multilateral CWC entered into force and the Soviet Union became a party, the United States would destroy 98 percent of its chemical stockpile within eight years, while keeping the remaining 2 percent—about 500 tons—as a “security stockpile.” Once all chemical weapons–capable states had joined the treaty, Washington would destroy its remaining stocks over a two-year period. Another element of the Bush plan was that the United States would retain the option to continue manufacturing binary weapons for the 500-ton “security stockpile” if a sufficient number had not been produced by the time the CWC entered into force. This rather awkward proposal was the result of President Bush’s attempt to strike a balance between the conflicting recommendations of the State Department and the Pentagon.

  France endorsed the U.S. initiative on the condition that all countries with chemical weapons would be allowed to retain a residual “security stockpile.” Although French officials denied possessing chemical weapons at the time, they wanted to acquire a small stockpile of binary munitions and “grandfather” them in under the proposed 500-ton limit. Most other countries strongly criticized the United States for seeking to retain some of its chemical weapons for an indefinite period after the CWC entered into force, despite the fact that the chemical “have-nots” would be prohibited from acquiring them in the first place. Such a two-tier system had already been created by the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gave special status to the five states that had tested nuclear weapons before January 1969. Because many developing countries viewed the NPT as discriminatory, they had no desire to create a similar arrangement for chemical weapons. Arms control advocates also attacked Bush’s “security stockpile” idea on the grounds that other countries would follow the example of the U.S. by continuing to produce chemical arms after the CWC went into effect. According to Representative Fascell, the administration’s proposal would have the result of “unwittingly legitimizing the very thing that President Bush and Congress want to halt—chemical weapons proliferation.”

  In December 1989, at a summit in Malta with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, President Bush made a small but significant concession: he dropped his insistence that all states capable of producing chemical weapons would have to ratify the CWC before it could enter into force. The two leaders also made some incremental progress on the bilateral negotiating track. Although Moscow was considering the U.S. proposal for both countries to reduce their chemical stockpiles to equal levels, the Soviets were not technically ready to begin destruction.

  At a meeting in Moscow on February 9, 1990, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze and Secretary of State Baker agreed to negotiate a Bilateral Destruction Agreement (BDA) that would reduce the chemical stockpiles on both sides to 5,000 metric tons. Since the declared Soviet stockpile of 40,000 tons was considerably larger than the American stockpile of 31,000 tons, reduction to equal levels would require the Soviet side to make a deep and asymmetric cut in its chemical arsenal. Shevardnadze insisted that his government could not accept such a deal if the United States continued to manufacture new binary weapons. Accordingly, he proposed including in the BDA a commitment by both sides to halt all further production of chemical arms.

  Seeking to conclude the bilateral agreement in time for a planned Bush-Gorbachev summit in Washington in early June, Secretary Baker returned to Moscow for intensive negotiations with his Soviet counterpart. On May 8, 1990, in a dramatic concession, Baker offered to terminate the U.S. production of binary weapons if the Soviets made deep cuts in their existing chemical stockpile. Given the binary program’s growing technical and political problems, Baker’s proposal sought to make a diplomatic virtue of necessity. In any event, the Soviets agreed.

  On June 1, 1990, during the U.S.-Soviet summit in Washington, Presidents Bush and Gorbachev signed the BDA, whose official title was the “U.S.-Soviet Agreement on Destruction and Non-production of Chemical Weapons and on Measures to Facilitate the Multilateral Chemical Weapons Convention.” The key provisions of the BDA were that both sides agreed to halt all production of new chemical weapons, and that destruction of the existing stockpiles would begin by the end of 1992 and reach the agreed level of 5,000 metric tons by the end of 2002. Washington and Moscow also pledged to negotiate a bilateral verification mechanism to check the accuracy of their respective stockpile declarations and monitor the destruction of the weapons. The proposed verification measures would include on-site inspections of chemical weapons storage facilities and the continuous presence of inspectors and monitoring instruments at the destruction facilities. The BDA further committed the two sides to cooperate in developing safe and environmentally sound technologies for destroying chemical arms.

  In July 1990, a month after the BDA was signed, U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney notified the Army that he was withdrawing the administration’s request for new production funds for binary weapons, canceling planned tests of the Bigeye bomb, and preparing to put all binary manufacturing facilities in mothballs as soon as the BDA was approved by Congress and the Supreme Soviet. Because of the shortage of dichlor, however, production of DF for the binary Sarin projectile had already ended.

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1990, the U.S. Army prepared to withdraw its stockpile of unitary chemical weapons from West Germany. President Reagan had originally promised Chancellor Kohl that the U.S. weapons would be removed by the end of 1992, but the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the rapid pace of German unification had led Kohl to advance the timetable by two years. For political reasons, Kohl wanted to complete the transfer before the all-German parliamentary elections scheduled for December 1990. Although the German Green Party filed suit to delay the removal of the U.S. weapons pending a detailed assessment of the safety and environmental risks, the German courts rejected this legal action and a last-minute appeal, allowing the plan to proceed. Whereas the West German government called the transfer of chemical weapons Operation Lindwurm, the German word for a mythical dragonlike beast, the Americans gave it the more prosaic name Operation Steel Box, a reference to the sealed metal containers used to transport the munitions.

  On July 26, 1990, the buzz of police helicopters circling overhead and the idling of heavy trucks broke the early-morning calm in the southwestern German town of Clausen, population 1,600. More than 500 American troops, 500 German troops, and 1,200 German state and local police participated in the first phase of the operation. Despite threats of disruption, no protesters materialized and only a few town residents came out to watch, relieved that the weapons were finally being removed. Less than four months before, they had been shocked to learn that 437 tons of Sarin and VX, contained in 120,000 artillery shells, had been stored for decades in concrete bunkers at the nearby U.S. Army ammunition depot.

  At 8:00 a.m., a five-mile-long convoy of seventy-nine vehicles began to snake alon
g the empty roads from Clausen to the rail depot in the town of Miesau, thirty miles away. Twenty U.S. Army tractor-trailers carried the first shipment of 3,500 Sarin-filled artillery shells, packed into airtight steel containers. The tractor-trailers, escorted by armored personnel carriers, decontamination trucks, and West German police, fire, and emergency vehicles, drove at an average speed of eighteen miles per hour on secondary roads through populated areas, and thirty miles per hour on the closed Autobahn. After a journey of two and a half hours, the last vehicles in the convoy arrived in Miesau only a few minutes behind schedule. Similar convoys took place every weekday over the next month, and by the end of August all 437 tons of nerve agents had been moved to the rail depot.

  In the second phase of the operation, the steel containers packed with chemical shells were loaded onto special rail cars for a twelve-hour, 600-mile journey to the North Sea port of Nordenham, across from the larger harbor at Bremerhaven. The rail shipments started on the evening of September 12 and continued for the next six nights. Each convoy consisted of two trains carrying a total of eighty steel containers, plus an escort train carrying command-and-control and disaster response personnel.

  In the final phase of the transfer, the steel containers were loaded into the holds of two U.S. Navy cargo ships, U.S.S. Flickertail State and U.S.S. Gopher State. By the afternoon of September 19, all of the chemical weapons were safely onboard. Because of stormy weather in the North Sea, the two ships did not depart until the afternoon of September 22. Escorted by U.S. Navy guided missile cruisers, they crossed the Atlantic, rounded Cape Horn at the tip of South America, and traversed the Pacific, refueling three times at sea. The two cargo ships reached Johnston Island in early November and were off-loaded by November 18, after which the chemical shells were transported to storage bunkers in a secure part of the island. Remarkably, the $46 million “retrograde” operation, involving more than 23,000 U.S. and German personnel and the movement of hundreds of tons of lethal chemicals halfway around the world, was completed without a single accident or injury.

  Johnston Island now housed 120,000 chemical munitions from West Germany, along with the 300,000 bombs and shells that had been transferred from Okinawa in 1971. These weapons would eventually be destroyed in a special high-temperature incinerator called the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System (JACADS). Built at a cost of $240 million, the JACADS facility was then undergoing testing. The U.S. chemical weapons “demilitarization” program had begun with Project Eagle in 1969–1976, when the Army had disposed of large quantities of Sarin and mustard agent at Rocky Mountain Arsenal. In the early 1980s, the U.S. Congress, concerned over the hazards associated with leaking M55 rockets and other aging chemical munitions, had assigned the Army the task of destroying these weapons in a safe and environmentally sound manner. (Dumping at sea was no longer an option because Congress had banned it in 1972.)

  In 1984, the National Research Council’s Board on Army Science and Technology had assessed a variety of chemical weapons disposal technologies and endorsed the Army’s choice of high-temperature incineration over chemical neutralization. The rationale was that incineration could decontaminate all parts of a chemical munition (agent, explosive, metal parts, and packing materials) and would be effective for every type of toxic agent. Chemical neutralization, in contrast, was complex, time-consuming, specific to each type of agent, generated large amounts of liquid waste, and could not destroy explosives and metal parts, which would have to be incinerated. The advisory committee also concluded that incineration was as safe as neutralization, an assessment that would later become the focus of intense criticism.

  AFTER THE END of the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq’s military, intelligence, and security services began to focus on other regional threats, particularly Israel. Saddam Hussein’s goals were to counterbalance Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal and deter a possible attack against Iraq’s own nuclear weapons installations. On April 1, 1990, Saddam gave a bellicose speech in which he warned that if Israel launched a preemptive strike, Iraq would retaliate in a way that would “make the fire eat up half of Israel.” This statement was widely interpreted as a threat to use chemical weapons against Israeli cities.

  Shortly after Saddam’s speech, Iraq launched the development of two new chemical weapons. The first was the R-400 aerial bomb, which was designed for low-level release from aircraft and based on the reverse engineering of an imported, parachute-retarded system. Prototypes of the R-400 were field-tested on May 22, 1990, and the weapon went into production soon thereafter. The second project was to develop a chemical warhead for the Al-Hussein ballistic missile, an extended-range version of the Soviet Scud. Iraqi engineers conducted two flight tests of the new warhead, the first with a mixture of oil and water, and the second with degraded Sarin. In June 1990, the first lots of R-400 bombs and “special” missile warheads were delivered to Muthanna.

  Saddam’s strategic objectives vis-à-vis Israel culminated in the so-called Thunderstrike project, which involved acquiring the capability to attack Israeli cities using Al-Hussein ballistic missiles armed with chemical (and possibly biological) warheads. Saddam chose ballistic missiles rather than aircraft for this strategic mission because of the poor combat record of the Iraqi Air Force and the fact that equipping aircraft with his most potent weapons could create an internal threat to the regime. The Thunderstrike project envisioned a total of sixty fixed-arm missile launchers, configured in groups that took into account the limited accuracy of the Al-Hussein’s guidance system. Six to eight launchers grouped together would fire salvos of missiles, ensuring multiple hits on a city-sized target.

  On April 12, 1990, during a meeting with a visiting delegation of U.S. senators, Saddam warned that if Israel carried out a surprise nuclear attack on Baghdad that destroyed the Iraqi chain of command, special military units were under standing orders to drive to secret launch sites in the western desert, mate the chemical warheads in their custody with long-range missiles, and fire them at targets in Israel. Twenty-eight of the sixty planned fixed-arm launchers had been completed by the summer of 1990.

  Meanwhile, the eight years of war with Iran had devastated the Iraqi economy, which was heavily dependent on oil exports. Baghdad’s financial straits exacerbated a long-standing border dispute with Kuwait over a valuable oil field that straddled the border between the two countries. After months of rising tensions over Iraq’s claims that Kuwait was “stealing” its oil reserves, Saddam Hussein ordered the surprise invasion of his southern neighbor. In the early-morning hours of August 2, 1990, columns of Iraqi tanks, armored vehicles, and trucks ferrying 100,000 troops sped down the north-south highway and into the oil-rich emirate. By mid-morning the invaders had occupied and looted Kuwait City, and Saddam quickly annexed the country as a new province of Iraq. Three days later, U.S. President George H. W. Bush declared that the Iraqi aggression would “not stand.” After obtaining the permission of Saudi Arabia, he ordered a major buildup of U.S. military forces in the region for what he called Operation Desert Shield. The United States also began to assemble a broad international coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait.

  UNDER THE WYOMING MOU, the Soviet Union gave the United States a detailed set of data declarations on its stockpiled chemical weapons and related development, production, and storage facilities. Despite Gorbachev’s rhetoric of glasnost, the Soviet declaration contained several major gaps, including a failure to mention the Foliant nerve agents and the Novichok binary formulations. In 1989–90, the Soviets conducted trials of Novichok-5 at the Chemical Research Institute in Nukus, Uzbekistan, and its open-air testing site on the Ustyurt Plateau, an expanse of arid desert several hundred miles west of the Aral Sea. The Kremlin intended to keep these top secret activities under wraps in order to preserve its technological advantage. This gambit probably would have succeeded, had it not been for the courageous decision by a senior scientist at GosNIIOKhT to disclose the institute’s most explosive secrets to the outside world.


  Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov was born in a small Russian town on the European side of the Ural Mountains. He was a member of the Tatar minority, a Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim ethnic group that had experienced a long history of persecution. As a young man, he showed an aptitude for math and science and was admitted to the Moscow State Academy of Fine Chemical Technology, where he earned a degree in petroleum-refinery engineering in 1958. He was then hired by a state research institute on synthetic fuels, moving after a few years to another institute involved in the development and production of boranes as rocket propellants. He also began his doctoral studies in chemistry at the Institute of Petrochemistry of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he wrote a dissertation on the chromatographic analysis of trace concentrations of chemical compounds.

  After Mirzayanov successfully defended his thesis in 1965, one of the members of his doctoral committee recommended him for a job at GosNIIOKHT. Although he had already obtained a security clearance for his work on boranes, the new position required a more rigorous background investigation that took three months to complete. Finally the clearance was approved and Vil joined the technical staff at GosNIIOKhT in 1966, at the age of thirty. His first assignment was to monitor toxic emissions from the laboratory into the Moscow air and water, and to perform chromatographic analyses of the various chemical warfare agents under development.