War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  Mirzayanov enjoyed his work at GosNIIOKhT and received good performance reviews. To further his career, he became a member of the Communist Party, which was considered a prerequisite for high-level positions at the institute. In the late 1980s, after two decades of service, he was promoted to the position of chief of the Department of Technical Counterintelligence, responsible for shielding the highly classified research on chemical weapons from the eyes of foreign intelligence services. In this capacity, Mirzayanov carried a notebook filled with top secret code names and traveled frequently to meetings at Shikhany and Novocheboksarsk. He did his job so well that the U.S. intelligence community remained unaware of the Foliant program.

  As the years went by, however, Mirzayanov began to have moral qualms about his work. He was disturbed by the duplicity of Kremlin leaders who continued to invest vast resources in chemical weapons development while paying lip service to disarmament and failing to meet the basic needs of the Soviet people. When President Gorbachev eased restrictions on political speech, Mirzayanov became a bit more outspoken about his personal views. In 1989, he helped to organize the GosNIIOKhT branch of the opposition party Democratic Movement of Russia.

  During the spring of 1990, Mirzayanov was told to help prepare the chemical weapons production facilities at Volgograd and Novocheboksarsk for upcoming visits by U.S. experts under the bilateral confidence-building provisions of the Wyoming MOU. At the Khimprom plant in Volgograd, he took environmental samples throughout the Soman production unit. Although the manufacturing line had been shut down, samples from the smokestack contained fifty to a hundred times the allowed concentration of nerve agent. Mirzayanov also found that samples from the wastewater pond were highly contaminated, even though the plant manager claimed that the treated waste did not inhibit cholinesterase in laboratory tests. Puzzled, Mirzayanov did his own analysis and discovered that salts in the waste water interfered with the reaction between Soman and cholinesterase, masking what was in fact a dangerous level of toxicity.

  Mirzayanov wrote up his findings and took samples back to Moscow to bolster his case. When he told GosNIIOKhT director Viktor Petrunin that contamination of the Volgograd facility posed serious health risks for the workers and the local population, Petrunin frowned. “You did a good job with the analysis, but these findings are extremely troublesome for us,” he said. “I’m sure you would find the same thing at Novocheboksarsk.”

  Mirzayanov was taken aback by the implications of this remark. “You mean you don’t intend to correct the situation?” he asked.

  Petrunin shook his head. “Don’t be naive,” he replied sharply.

  Mirzayanov refused to follow the director’s advice and simply drop the issue. At an interagency meeting on counterintelligence problems, he reported his findings on the high level of toxic contamination at Volgograd. One senior official, the Deputy Minister of Chemical Production, took strong exception. “Dr. Mirzayanov was not authorized to make this report, which he did strictly on his own initiative,” he said. “Accordingly, his information is not trustworthy.” The deputy minister went so far as to cast doubt on Vil’s loyalty by implying that he might be working under the influence of a foreign intelligence service.

  After the meeting, Petrunin told Mirzayanov that he was fortunate not to be living in Stalin’s time, when such a remark would have sealed his fate. Although Vil was allowed to keep his job at GosNIIOKhT, it was clear that nothing would be done to clean up the toxic contamination at Volgograd. Deeply disillusioned, Mirzayanov resigned his membership in the Communist Party in May 1990. Petrunin retaliated by denying him access to laboratory equipment and transferring several of his colleagues in an attempt to isolate him. Although Mirzayanov debated whether to go public with what he knew, he hesitated, fearing the consequences for himself and his young family.

  MEANWHILE, THE U.S. binary program was winding down. In December 1990, Combustion Engineering completed the dichlor plant at Pine Bluff Arsenal and then, because of the unavailability of thionyl chloride from commercial sources, proceeded to put the plant into mothballs. Construction of a manufacturing plant for QL, the liquid component of the Bigeye bomb, had already been halted in July 1990 when the facility was 65 percent complete. The third binary weapons program, the Army’s MLRS rocket warhead, was canceled while still in development. Because the binary artillery shell had taken so long for Congress to fund and had experienced a series of technical and political delays, relatively few M687 projectiles had actually been produced by the time the program came to an end. As a result, the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile consisted of 30,600 tons of unitary agents but only 680 tons of binary components.

  Under the BDA, the United States and the Soviet Union were supposed to negotiate a set of bilateral inspection procedures to verify the destruction of chemical weapons, but the talks bogged down and the BDA never entered into force. Another problem that sank the agreement was that the schedule for reducing the chemical weapons stockpiles on both sides to 5,000 metric tons by the end of 2002 proved to be highly unrealistic. Although the Soviet Union had spent $165 million to build a chemical weapons neutralization facility ten miles outside Chapayevsk, a city of 90,000 people south of Moscow, the local inhabitants protested so vehemently when the plant opened in 1989 that the Kremlin finally agreed not to put it into operation. A new destruction facility would therefore have to be built elsewhere, resulting in a lengthy delay.

  IN THE PERSIAN GULF, war clouds were gathering on the horizon. The United States, having built up a large invasion force in Saudi Arabia over the previous four months, persuaded the U.N. Security Council to pass Resolution 678 on November 29, 1990, giving Saddam Hussein an ultimatum: either withdraw all Iraqi forces from Kuwait by January 15, 1991, or face military action to expel them. The Iraqi regime gave no sign of backing down, however, and instead prepared for war by stockpiling large quantities of weapons, including chemical arms. Between December 1990 and January 1991, the Muthanna State Establishment churned out Sarin and Cyclosarin at the rate of one metric ton per day and loaded a mixture of the two agents into 8,320 artillery rockets.

  In early January 1991, General Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein who directed all of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs, ordered the Iraqi Ministry of Defense to provide thirty-one trailers to transport the chemical rockets to munitions depots near Ukhaydir and Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. A few days before the January 15 war deadline, Iraqi officials ordered the evacuation of Muthanna. Chemical munitions stockpiled on-site were dispersed to airfields and military bases in the western desert and other remote locations, and Al-Nida mobile missile launchers (which had replaced the vulnerable fixed-arm launchers) were deployed to forward storage and support centers.

  At a meeting of the Iraqi leadership shortly before the start of the war, Saddam personally authorized the use of chemical weapons against Israel, Saudi Arabia, and U.S. forces. Although he did not spell out the exact circumstances under which the weapons might be employed, possible triggers included a direct threat to the Iraqi regime. In addition to stockpiles of chemical shells, bombs, and rockets, a special mobile-launcher unit equipped with seven fully fueled Al-Hussein missiles with chemical warheads was reportedly designated as a strategic reserve. Because Saddam did not trust the regular armed forces with such powerful weapons, he placed them under the exclusive control of the Special Security Organization (SSO), his most trusted praetorian guard. To deter a surprise attack by Israel that might aim to “decapitate” the Iraqi leadership, Saddam predelegated to the SSO missile unit commander the authority to launch retaliatory strikes with chemical warheads.

  AS THE U.N. DEADLINE NEARED for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait, the coalition forces prepared for the worst. For the first time since World War II, American and British soldiers faced an enemy that had already employed chemical weapons extensively in battle and was considered likely to do so again. According to CIA estimates, Iraq possessed more than 1,000 tons of blister and nerve agents loaded i
nto a variety of munitions, including artillery shells, aerial bombs, and rockets. In the face of this threat, scientists at Edgewood (now part of Aberdeen Proving Ground) and Porton Down scrambled to improve the ability of coalition forces to survive and fight on a contaminated battlefield.

  Of particular concern was intelligence that Iraq had large stockpiles of Cyclosarin, a nerve agent that had never before been weaponized on a large scale. Chemical defense specialists worried that the handheld chemical agent monitors (CAMs) employed by allied forces to detect nerve agent vapors would fail to recognize Cyclosarin. To eliminate this potential vulnerability, the staff of the Detector Technology Division at Porton Down worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to reprogram the Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EPROM) chips in every CAM in the British stockpile.

  U.S. troops deploying to Saudi Arabia were issued the MARK-1 antidote kit containing two autoinjectors, one loaded with atropine to counteract the immediate effects of nerve agent poisoning and the other with 2-PAM chloride to reactivate cholinesterase. However, these standard antidotes were known to be of limited effectiveness against Soman, which the United States suspected was in Iraq’s arsenal. Because Soman inactivates cholinesterase irreversibly in minutes (a phenomenon known as enzyme “aging”), the Pentagon decided to augment the MARK-1 antidote kit with a pretreatment drug called pyridostigmine bromide (PB). U.S. soldiers were issued bubble packs of PB tablets and ordered to start taking one 30 milligram tablet every eight hours as soon as they entered combat.

  PB works by binding reversibly to cholinesterase, converting a portion of the body’s supply of the enzyme into a reserve that is protected from permanent inactivation by Soman. Thus, pretreatment of soldiers with PB, followed by postexposure therapy with 2-PAM chloride to displace PB from cholinesterase and reactivate the enzyme reserve, would enable troops to survive exposures to Soman that would otherwise be lethal. Nevertheless, PB was contraindicated in individuals who had already been exposed to nerve agents, including low levels of Sarin, and its use as a pretreatment was known to cause serious side effects in a small number of susceptible individuals. (Only after the war did it become clear that Iraq did not possess Soman.)

  Not only did the risk of Iraqi combat use of nerve agents appear high, but some intelligence suggested that Baghdad might sponsor terror attacks with chemical or biological agents against coalition targets at home and abroad. In early December 1990, the British chemical weapons expert Ron Manley and his colleague John Clipson were called into the director’s office at Porton Down and told to organize two emergency response teams, which could be deployed on short notice to any country in the world where British interests might be targeted. The response teams were equipped with protective gear, chemical agent detectors, and supplies of antidotes, drugs, and decontamination equipment.

  Even as the U.S. and British governments prepared to fight in a toxic environment, they tried to deter Saddam Hussein from ordering the use of unconventional weapons. During an eleventh-hour meeting in Geneva on January 9, 1991, Secretary of State Baker handed Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz a letter addressed to Saddam Hussein. The letter warned that if Iraq launched chemical or biological attacks, the American people would demand “the strongest possible response. You and your country will pay a terrible price if you order unconscionable actions of this sort.” Although Aziz refused to accept the letter, he presumably conveyed the gist of its contents to Saddam Hussein. Aziz later said that Saddam had interpreted the U.S. statement as a veiled threat to retaliate with nuclear weapons.

  In the morning darkness of January 17, 1991, the first phase of Operation Desert Storm—the coalition air campaign—got under way. Among the priority bombing targets were a number of Iraqi chemical weapons sites, including the production complexes at Muthanna and Falluja and the ammunition storage depots at Muhammadiyat and Ukhaydir. Although the U.S. Air Force used a combination of explosive and incendiary munitions to break open the bunkers and burn the chemical weapons inside at high temperature, some U.S. military officials worried that the air strikes would vent plumes of toxic material that could endanger the health of Iraqi civilians and coalition troops downwind.

  Indeed, on January 19, two Czech chemical defense detachments deployed nearly fifteen miles apart in the desert near Hafar-al-Batin in northern Saudi Arabia began to detect low levels of Sarin in the atmosphere with a highly sensitive Soviet-made detection system based on the inhibition of purified cholinesterase. The Czechs were convinced that the nerve agent had been released by the U.S. bombing campaign that had begun two days earlier and was targeting suspected Iraqi chemical weapons facilities. Although the Czech soldiers were ordered to don their gas masks, U.S. troops in the area did not receive a similar order and were not even told that nerve agents had been detected. Later the same day, French chemical troops also reported detecting “infinitesimal amounts of nerve and blister agent” in the atmosphere approximately nineteen miles from King Khalid Military City, a sprawling military base in northern Saudi Arabia. Although senior American commanders were aware of the Czech and French detections, they chose to ignore them because they did not want to create a “panic.”

  When the coalition ground campaign began on February 24, 1991, U.S. intelligence assessed the threat of Iraqi chemical attacks as high. Although Iraq had not used poison gas during an early skirmish on January 30 at Al-Khafji, a Saudi town near the Kuwait border, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of coalition forces, remained extremely concerned. According to his memoir, “My nightmare was that our units would reach the barriers [along the Saudi-Iraq border] in the very first hours of the attack, be unable to get through, and then be hit with a chemical barrage. We’d equipped our troops with protective gear and trained them to fight through a chemical attack, but there was always the danger that they’d end up milling around in confusion—or worse, that they’d panic.”

  To bolster the coalition’s chemical defenses, the German government donated to the United States sixty FOX nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) reconnaissance vehicles. These six-wheeled, lightly armored vehicles were mobile laboratories that could take air, water, and ground samples and analyze them immediately for the presence of toxic agents.

  U.S. troops participating in the ground campaign carried a full set of personal protective gear, including a gas mask, helmet cover, battle-dress overgarment (BDO), hood, overboots, and rubber gloves. The BDO is a coat and trousers made of an outer layer of cotton material with camouflage markings and an inner layer of charcoal-impregnated polyurethane foam that absorbs and traps chemical warfare agents. Although the suit provides good protection, wearing it for more than short periods significantly impairs fighting ability. The BDO and hood cause a rapid buildup of body heat, increasing the risk of exhaustion and heat stroke in the desert sun; the gas mask degrades the ability to see, speak, and hear and causes severe claustrophobia in some individuals; and the rubber gloves limit the sense of touch and the ability to perform delicate manipulations.

  Soldiers from the 24th Mechanized Infantry Brigade undergo chemical defense training in eastern Saudi Arabia in November 1990, prior to the start of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in January 1991.

  To minimize these problems, the U.S. Army employed an operational doctrine during the Gulf War known as Mission Oriented Protective Posture (MOPP), which allowed commanders to adjust the amount of protective gear worn by their troops so that they were adequately protected while minimizing the concomitant loss in fighting effectiveness. In response to changes in the chemical warfare threat, troops were ordered to don or doff various items of protective equipment. The five threat levels were based on strategic as well as tactical intelligence, including reports of enemy weapons deployments, chemical-detector alarms in nearby sectors, and confirmed chemical attacks. Each increase in MOPP level involved adding additional protective gear and resulted in some degradation in combat performance. The alert levels were as follows:

  Level 0
: No chemical protective gear worn, but readily available.

  Level 1: BDO and helmet cover worn.

  Level 2: Overboots added.

  Level 3: Gas mask and hood added.

  Level 4: Rubber gloves added.

  As it turned out, no Iraqi chemical attacks of any consequence took place during Operation Desert Storm, but low-level exposures to chemical fallout may have occurred. One indication was provided by the M8 portable automatic chemical agent alarms, which were deployed upwind of U.S. units and continually monitored the atmosphere for blister and nerve agents. Throughout the air and ground campaigns, thousands of M8 alarms went off across the battlefield—so many, in fact, that troops started disabling them so that they could get some sleep. The Pentagon claimed that all of the alarms had been false, triggered by chemical “interferents” such as diesel fumes and pesticides. But some of the alarms may have been triggered by nerve agents released by the bombing of Iraqi chemical weapons depots and production facilities and carried downwind over coalition forces.

  Another serious threat during the Gulf War was the possibility of Iraqi chemical attacks against Israeli cities, using extended-range Scud missiles armed with nerve agent warheads. To counter this threat, the government of Israel distributed gas masks and antidote kits to the entire civilian population and broadcast public-service announcements on radio and television with detailed instructions for their use. Over the course of the war, Iraq launched thirty-nine Al-Hussein missiles at Israel. U.S. reconnaissance satellites provided a few minutes’ warning of each launch, which was relayed directly to the Israeli civil defense authorities. As soon as the air-raid sirens went off, civilians evacuated to a “sealed room” in each house or apartment building that had been built to special standards. They donned their gas masks and waited, sometimes for hours, until the all-clear sounded.