The Nerve Gas Controversy

Iq do not intend to debate the morality of chemical warfare, or of any other form of warfare. Rather, I would speak to you on the avoidance of war."

The speaker was William E. Dismore, a wiry young man with close-cropped hair and the easygoing charm and confidence of an astronaut. Although he was dressed in unassuming civilian garb, Dismore is a colonel in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. His audience was a collection of chemists and chemical engineers gathered in the Los Angeles Convention Center for the 167th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

The colonel was there to assure the chemists that regardless of morality, there is a real need to maintain a large stockpile of chemical-warfare agents as a deterrent or perhaps for retaliatory use against chemical attack from Russia. On the other hand, Colonel Dismore said, the old stockpile of nerve gases and other chemical-warfare agents is beginning to deteriorate. It is becoming increasingly difficult to store and transport these agents safely, some of which are so powerful that a single drop can consign an average human being to a very quick and unpleasant death. Because of the inadequacies of the old stock pile, it must be destroyed, the colonel insisted, and to take its place, a new, modernized stockpile of what are known as "binary agents" must be created.

As now conceived, each binary weapon, whether contained in an artillery shell, missile warhead, or some other delivery device, would consist of two "relatively nontoxic" components which would combine to form a lethal nerve gas only as the projectile was on its way to the target. Until then, the two components would remain separated, and pose no toxic threat to life while in storage or during shipment from one location to another.

Dismore's address last March was more evidence of the Army's current campaign to convince the American people and the Congress that they should invest in the binary-weapons system. Although the initial down payment would be only $5.8 million, the Army has not yet brought itself around to admitting in public that the ultimate cost of destroying the old stockpile and replacing it with binaries could be as much as $2 billion, as some outside experts estimate.

To the public, the Army stresses that the binary system, if given the go-ahead, would represent a "quantum jump in safety" over our present stockpile of 50 million pounds of nerve-gas agents. The binaries would help the Army solve a major public relations problem that threatened to scuttle the entire chemical-warfare program in the late sixties. At the time, the public had begun to wonder whether the Army's chemical weapons might be as big a threat to their own lives as they were to the enemy's. In short succession a nerve-gas test accidentally killed 64,000 sheep in Utah, a series of nerve-gas leaks broke out in various storage depots, and the Army floated a plan, since abandoned, to ship 27,000 tons of chemical munitions across the country for burial at sea. The Army seems to feel that the binary system's safety features will make the hazards of the past less likely and at the same time lower the level of revulsion that the idea of chemical weapons arouses in most people.

Safe as they might be in storage, the two components of a binary weapon in combination form one of two types of lethal nerve-gas agents, codenamed GB and VX respectively. Chemically, both organophosphates, deadly offshoots of what began as an innocent search for improved insecticides in Germany in the thirties. GB is a colorless, odorless liquid that evaporates at room-temperature. When inhaled, ten one thousandths of a gram in a cubic meter of air can kill an average adult in less than a minute. The VX agents have the added military advantage of being able to persist in the atmosphere for days and to kill by absorption through the skin as well as by inhalation. Both agents kill quickly but messily. By blocking the action of an enzyme which controls the transmission of electrical impulses from one nerve cell to another, the nerve gas paralyzes the muscles that control breathing, defecation, urination, and other body processes.

The binaries might be dressed up as a new look in chemical weaponry for the man in the street, but the program is hardly a surprise to Congress. More than $11 million for research and development of the binary munitions has been appropriated since 1968, but that is not the crucial expenditure. This year, the Army is asking for $5.8 million for procurement—that is, funds for setting up a production line for binary weapons at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. According to the Army plan, one binary component, an organophosphate called DF, will be loaded into 155-millimeter artillery shells. The other component is an alcohol, and it will be produced by the chemical industry and stored in separate canisters.

Before that initial procurement can be made, it must go the congressional rounds: through the House, and then to the Senate, where action on the binary-weapon program is expected in late summer. Senator Edward Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts) has said that at that time he will fight strongly to block the procurement. Should the binary program be stopped at some stage of this year's congressional action on it, the Department of Defense can be expected to try again next year, and the Army's research and development on binary weapons will continue as in the past.

In any event, if past experience with escalating defense budgets means anything, a small initial procurement now or in the future will encourage the Defense Department to believe that it has been authorized to follow the program through to $2 billion conclusion. "Little budgets almost invariably turn into big budgets," observes Representative Wayne Owens (Democrat, Utah), one of the strongest congressional critics of the binary program.

As details of the DOD plans were revealed before congressional hearings in May, what troubled Representative Owens and other informed critics of the binary program was the military's uncanny sense of timing. By broaching the idea at this time, the Defense Department seems to be making a calculated end run around negotiations on international chemical-weapons disarmament under way in Geneva. For the first time in five years, the twenty-six nations meeting there appear to be close to breaking a deadlock over on-site verification that has kept Russia and the United States on opposite sides of the question until now.

"A decision to go ahead with binaries at this time could almost certainly mean an end to disarmament negotiations, and with them, the prospect for improving U.S. security to a far greater extent than binaries ever could," Dr. Julian Perry Robinson told the same ACS meeting that Colonel Dismore addressed in March. The thirty-three-year-old Englishman from the University of Sussex probably knows more about chemical-warfare weapons—from their production to their international security implications—than anyone else inside or outside the walls of the Pentagon. Within the last few months, his careful, low-key attack on the folly of chemical weapons in general and binary weapons in particular has been heard at the Pugwash Conference in Helsinki in April, the ACS meeting, and the two congressional hearings in May.

Noting that the American delegation to the Geneva Conference of the Convention on Disarmament (CCD) has yet to make a counterproposal for an end to the production and storage of chemical weapons that the Russians put forward in 1972, Robinson, a former chemist, remarks:

"The United States, rightly or wrongly, is not credited by its CCD colleagues with a constructive attitude toward the negotiations. If it were now to embark on a billion-dollar acquisitions program [the other billion would go for destruction of the old stockpile], what confidence could remain in U.S. good intentions?"

In addition to its impact on the CCD negotiations, the binary-weapons issue could cloud chances that the Senate will finally get around to ratifying the Geneva protocol of 1925, an international agreement outlawing the first use of chemical and biological weapons as weapons of war. Although the protocol has been ratified by more than fifty countries, including the USSR, the United States has still to ratify, even though President Nixon recommended that the Senate do so in 1970. The chief stumbling block is the Administration's contention, contrary to the UN position of all but a few countries (England, Australia, and Portugal), that the protocol does not apply to tear gases and herbicides, both of which were used on a grand scale in Vietnam. Senate liberals want a reversal of that contention, rather than a protocol with gaping holes in it. Although the binary program does not relate directly to the protocol, the emergence of this new "safer" chemical-weapons system could dilute some of the horror of chemical weapons that would normally prompt the Senate to vote for ratification.

By now the Army's justification for the binaries has become familiar to congressional ears, and that justification has little to do with its impact on disarmament negotiations. Rather, the Army stresses the safety factor, and the use of binary weapons in a tit-for-tat encounter with the Russians, probably on a European battlefield. In defending the impending binary stockpile, the Army must in the same breath justify the raison d'etre for the old stockpile, an assignment that was most recently handled by Amos A. Jordan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

Reinforced by three generals, three colonels, and seven military aides, Jordan told the Foreign Affairs subcommittee in May that if the Russians attacked our side with chemical weapons and if we were not able to retaliate in kind, they would have a "significant tactical advantage." This would hold true even if our forces had protected themselves against attack with the gear required for defense against nerve-gas agents. If, on the other hand, we could retaliate with our own nerve-gas barrage, we would put the Russians in the same uncomfortable position, forcing them to waddle around in their own rubber suits and gas masks, decreasing their mobility, restricting their use of the terrain, and otherwise blunting the force of their attack. Stalemate. (Critics, including Julian Perry Robinson, dispute this point, observing that Soviet tanks and other military vehicles are already equipped with filters for nerve gas and other chemical agents and could roam through a chemical-saturated battlefield pretty much at will.) Finally, said Mr. Jordan, the chemical option might reduce the likelihood that we would have to cross the nuclear threshold to an even more devastating kind of warfare. Albeit not completely. In Pentagonese, the argument goes like this:

Stripped of the jargon, the statement seems to mean that we wouldn't plan to use the nuclear weapons in response to a chemical attack, but then again, if the going got sufficiently rough, we might decide to do so after all.

On the anti-binary side, one of the most persuasive, and in a historical perspective, most incongruous, witnesses before the Foreign Affairs subcommittee was Dr. Charles Price, speaking in behalf of the American Chemical Society, a scientific organization made up of more than 100,000 professional chemists and chemical engineers from academia and industry. Until recently, the ACS. was among the strongest partisans for chemical, weapons and in the twenties was part of the lobbying movement (along with veterans' organizations and the chemical industry) that was responsible this country's failure to ratify the protocol then. Since 1970, however, it has become obvious to the, Army Chemical Corps that a gradual greening in the ranks of the ACS has stripped the Army of one of its most enamored allies. Not only has the Society called for ratification of the protocol without the tear-gas-herbicide disclaimer, but there, standing before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on a warm May day in Washington, was the ruggedly handsome ACS spokesman, casting aspersions on the whole concept of chemical weaponry with nary a kind word for the proposed binary system.

Times have changed, said Price, a University Of Pennsylvania chemist. In World War I, the prime victim of a chemical attack using the gases and primitive delivery systems of the day was the soldier in the trench. But now that an attack with nerve gases mounted in modern artillery shells, in modern missile warheads, can cover thousands of acres with some of the most lethal concoctions ever devised by man, argues Price, "they could exact a great toll among civilians as well as the military. In fact, since substantial measures of protection and advanced training are usually available to the military, the most likely victims of chemical warfare will be civilians. Chemical-warfare agents have become weapons of indiscriminate destruction, and in our view, every step toward their nonuse and eventual elimination should be encouraged."

Arguing that production of binary weapons should be postponed at this time, Price suggested that the safety factor was far outweighed by the possibility that initiation of the program could easily "serve as a moral sanction for other nations to do likewise, and so tend to encourage proliferation of these weapons.

"A greater concern of the American Chemical Society is that the more such know-how is developed, especially in an open society like that of the United States, the more readily the technology can be disseminated to less developed nations. Furthermore, the simplicity and accessibility of the components of the binary agents make this weapon potentially available to terrorists." And this indeed is most frightening aspect of the binary-weapons debate. The hazards and costs of building and storing conventional chemical weapons are great enough to deter small countries, not to mention urban guerrillas, from getting into the binary business. The same "quantum jump in safety" our Army emphasizes in making the case for binaries, together with the ease of production of which Price speaks, amounts to an invitation to an appalling proliferation of the weapon.

Dr. Robinson agrees with Price, adding that because most small countries have the means for manufacturing binary nerve-gas weapons, their use these nations in a small-scale foray could quickly mushroom into an international calamity.

"Suppose, for example, that a client government of the United States decided to acquire nerve gas and then used it to escalate a local conflict. There very little anti-gas protection available outside Europe, and under such circumstances, the consequences of nerve-gas employment could be mass destruction on a large scale. How conceivable is it that a direct superpower confrontation could not be avoided? Or look at it another way. What if a Client government of the Soviet Union did this? Could the resultant pressures for direct U.S. intervention be resisted? One need look no further than the Middle East to envisage the enormous dangers to world peace of proliferation."

And what would Russia's reaction to this country's decision to create a new chemical-weapons system be, other critics ask. Would the USSR have any real inclination to destroy its own chemical stockpile, as proposed in Geneva, while the United States is embarking on its accelerated nerve-gas production scheme? Would this not be considered a provocation, especially when the new weapons begin to move into Germany as replacements for the old system? Or, is there any way to determine if it is our nerve-gas stockpile that induced Russia to create a stockpile that some experts say is more powerful than our own, while building up its defenses against chemical weapons in both the civilian and military sectors? If it did, would Russia not be forced for its own national security reasons to continue what might appear to them to be a new cycle in the chemical arms race?

Convincing answers to such questions have not been forthcoming from Administration spokesmen in the past, and they were no more evident at the congressional hearings in May. Leon Sloss, deputy director for Politico-Military Affairs of the State Department, allotted 122 words in his oral statement to the subject of binaries. All aspects of the issue, including the impact on further arms-control agreements, will be "under study" over the next several months, after which the Administration will make its own decision on whether or not the program is necessary and worthwhile, Mr. Sloss said.

If his remarks seemed bland to the members of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, the comments of Dr. Fred Ikle, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, were downright frustrating. The ACDA serves as technical backup for ongoing deliberations in the field of international disarmament. In earlier statements, Ikle has candidly stated that the binary program could be disruptive to the American negotiating position at the CCD in Geneva. This time there was little trace of that conviction in Ikle's three-page statement, and it was only under sharp questioning from Representative Edward Biester (Republican, Pennsylvania) that he would admit that the binaries might indeed prove to be a problem in Geneva. "DOD was very uptight about his earlier statements and must have gone downtown and bitched about it," said a discouraged staff member of the House subcommittee. "We practically had to rape him to get any kind of meaningful testimony out of him."

Putting all the other arguments for or against binary weapons aside, what rankles a legislator like Representative Owens is the fact that Congress is being asked to put its imprimatur on a weapons system that has never really been tested where it will ultimately be used—in the atmosphere. Representative Owens, whose concern over the direction that U.S. chemical-weapons policy is taking, goes back to that sheep kill in his home state in March, 1968, an event responsible in large part for inducing Congress to make its most recent appraisals of the whole issue, including the binaries. It is, in fact, the Utah disaster that has made the Army cautious about testing the binaries in the open air. Following the public outcry that accompanied that disaster, the law now demands that atmospheric tests of nerve-gas agents can be carried out only after the Army files an environmental impact statement and receives authorization from the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Meanwhile, the Chemical Corps has been relying on nonlethal mock nerve-gas weapons to evaluate how the lethal materials perform under battlefield conditions. Even the binary critics admit that simulation testing is far from ideal. Nerve gases have their own peculiar chemical characteristics and are uniquely subject to the vagaries of wind, rain, and other meteorological conditions. For the time being then, it appears that the binaries are safe enough to store but not safe enough to test in the atmosphere.

Nevertheless, the military certainly realizes that Congress will not continue to fund the development of any costly new weapons system until it can be claimed that it has been adequately tested. The suspicion that the open-air testing of binaries is in the cards is implicit in a recent letter to Representative Owens from General Creighton W. Abrams, U.S. Army Chief of Staff. The results of simulation testing are still under study, the general wrote last March, and it may be "necessary for us to recommend to the Secretary of Defense that carefully controlled, limited, open-air tests of toxic agents be undertaken to verify the effectiveness of the ammunition before making any decision regarding production."

With all the unanswered questions about atmospheric testing, strategic need, proliferation, and ultimate cost of the proposed binary program, Representative Owens contends that there is no pressing need to rush ahead with it at this time. If we really believe in the need for a military deterrent, we already have, in addition to conventional forces, our nuclear weapons and our present stockpile of chemical weapons. As he told the chemists in Los Angeles:

"Obviously we cannot discard all of our deterrent capability; the climate of today's world is not that amicable yet. It seems to me that we are strong enough militarily to make the first real gesture towards chemical weapons arms control by delaying the adoption of the binary chemical system and devoting the talents of our best and most highly placed policy-makers to our negotiations, on both chemical weapons and nuclear arms control. We do not jeopardize the status quo of current CW capabilities by delaying the binary chemical munitions because it is the same nerve-gas agent which we currently have in our own stockpile. We do not give away any technological edge by delaying further engineering and testing of the binary; we have been working on the system for the last twenty years. We may not only encourage arms control but also discourage other nations from embarking on their own production of CW weapons if we, as world leaders, indicate our willingness to take more time to discuss this issue before committing our resources to further chemical weapons construction."