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Post-World War II |
| Ancient
Times to the 19th Century | 19th
Century and World WarI | The Inter-War
Years | World War II |
Disarmament and proliferation | The
Terrorists | |
| The development
of the atomic bomb and its use against Japan seemed to bring the world to
the edge of the Apocalypse, and as the Cold War became colder, the two sides
prepared to use just about any weapon they could think of. Anti-aircraft
missiles carrying nuclear warheads were developed for use against massed
bomber formations, the US developed the Davy Crockett, a recoilless rifle-like
weapon that fired a nuclear round for use against massed tank formations.
The round had a lethal blast radius about the same size as the maximum range
of the weapon. This atmosphere of fear and paranoia that would allow the
development of such weapons. Chemical and biological weapons fitted in almost
seamlessly and neither side was willing to be caught unprepared. |
|
When the victors learned of the existence
of nerve agents at the end of the war in Europe, they immediately began
research into similar compounds while simultaneously producing the German
agents (identified in the West by a series of two-letter codes beginning
with "G"). The post-war research lead to the discovery of several
other nerve agents, known as the V (allegedly for"Victory")
agents.
|
| The major powers
refrained for the most part from the use of chemical weapons during the
Cold War, although there were persistent rumors that the Soviets were using
them in conflicts in isolated areas of Asia and Afghanistan. However, the
post-war years saw the use of chemical weaponsin regional conflicts, notably
by Egypt in Yemen in 1967,and by Iraq in its conflict with Iran (as well
as against internal opponents.) |
Although the
"G" in G-agents is thought to stand for "German" these
designations had been used by the Germans on artillery shells containing
the agents GA (Tabun), GB (Sarin), GD (Soman), GE, and GF (cyclosarin). |
| Field tests of
chemical and biological agents continued throughout the 1950's and 1960's.
The United Kingdom studied the dispersal of biological agents from ships
off the coast of Scotland and in the Caribbean. The United States carried
out a series of tests with live agents at isolated attolls in the Pacific
and with simulants (harmless agents with properties similar to a given agent)
in a number of US cities. Zinc cadmium sulfide, a moderately toxic substance
that could be detected by its green fluorescence, was used to study the
behavior of air-dispersed chemical weapons over cities including San Francisco
and New York. Biological agents spread in cities was simulated using a nominally
harmless bacterium, Serratia marcescens (The same as the Micrococcus
prodigiosus supposedly used by the Germans before World War II.) This
microorganism has the advantage of being readily identifiable because it
forms red colonies on when grown on solid culture media so its spread was
easy to track. However, there were several cases that appeared to be caused
by infection with S. marcescens including at least one death. Suspicion
fell on the tests, but they used a specific form of the microorganism that
was never recovered from any of the victims. |
| The take-home
lesson from all of these tests was that there was no way that a major city
could be defended from a determined biological or chemical attack. |
| The Soviets used
an open air test range in an island (known variously as "Resurrection,"
"Rebirth" or"Rennaissance" Island) in what was then
the middle of the Aral Sea and now almost a part of the mainland as the
Aral Sea continues to be used to irrigate cotton crops in Central Asia.
One of the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet economy is that the
island cannot be properly decontaminated and there are grave concerns about
the consequences of this. |
| At about the time
the the U.S. conducted its first live agent test at Dugway Proving Ground
in Utah during the Korean War, the North Koreans and Chinese made a number
of allegations of the use of biological weapons in North Korea and the Chinese
border regions. Although one set of investigators quickly debunked the accusations,
another found them credible. The story has surfaced from time to time in
the intervening years, but post Cold War studies in Soviet archives have
found that the accusations were false. |
This was not the last
allegation of illegal use of chemical or biological weapons by the United
States. In 1999 CNN aired a story about possible use of nerve agents in
Vietnam. The story was quickly discredited and it lead to the departure
of several CNN staff members, including the highly regarded reporter Peter
Arnett. |
| In the course
of the 1950's, there were a number of cases where chemical agents were used
on a small scale by the Soviets in a manner harking back to the Italy of
Machiavelli. At least two assassinations of Ukrainian nationalists in Germany
were attempted using hydrogen cyanide, nitrogen mustard was used against
a West German electronics specialist who had been checking the West German
embassy in Moscow for bugs, and in one case the poison appears to have been
radioactive thallium. In 1978, the Bulgarian defector and BBC World Service
journalist Georgi Markov was the victim of a bizarre assassination in which
he was killed by being injected with the toxic protein ricin
that was delivered using a hypodermic built into an umbrella tip. |
| One of the major
thrusts of chemical weapons research in the period was psychoactive drugs.
The US was concerned about the number of its servicemen captured during
the Korean War who had been broken by North Korean and Chinese interrogation
techniques and believed that drugs had been used, rather than just fear,
hunger, and deprivation. The US had started looking at such problems during
World War II when the OSS searched for a "truth drug" that would
breakdown the resistance of a prisoner to interrogation. They were moderately
successful, finding that tetrahydrocannabinol acetate, a derivative of the
active component of marijuana, helped to release inhibitions and to make
the user talk freely. |
Many American POWs in
Korea and Vietnam actually died under torture rather than give away trivial
information or sign false confessions. Since then, doctrine has been changed,
allowing them to save themselves without being punished upon repatriation. |
| Most of the effort
of the military project BLUE SKIES went into sedative-like derivatives of
LSD that would make the victims incapable of fighting. One of these compounds,
known as BZ or by the not terribly rigorous chemical name quinuclidinyl
benzylate, was considered suitable for use as a non-lethal agent on the
battlefield. Several tons were manufactured and readied for weapons use
before concerns about its safety and unpredictability were enough to remove
it from the inventory. There have been unconfirmed reports that the Serbs
used a BZ-like substance in Bosnia and Kosovo and Iraq is believed to have
a substance called Agent 15 that is a member of the glycollate family of
drugs that act as cholinesterase inhibitors in the central nervous system
and that has similar effects. |
| The CIA had a
parallel program, originally known as MKULTRA, that used some of the information
from BLUE SKIES on psychoactive drugs. A number of controversial experiments
were conducted on unwitting volunteers and at least one man died as a consequence
of the project. A US army chemist went into clinical deep depression after
exposure to LSD and died after falling through a window under circumstances
that aren't entirely clear. Allen Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence,
reprimanded the scientist who surreptitiously doled out the LSD for poor
judgement and no charges were filed against those who were with the scientist
when he committed suicide and the Ford Administration compensated the family
with $750,000. |
| Research continued
throughout the 50's and 60's. Candidate agents were tested and characterized
and new defense technologies were characterized as an emphasis on defensive
technologies began to build. One of the most important of these was the
development of the activated carbon-containing rubber oversuit that gave
protection, albeit at a price, against agents that acted through the skin
(mustard and nerve gases). Chemical oversuits had first appeared during
the First World War, but they were essentially robust ponchos. |
| In the West, research
ramified through military, academic and industrial laboratories with the
bulk of the effort being expended in the US. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw
Pact allies conducted research programs that are now known to have been
even more extensive. While the NATO allies were concentrating on the problems
of warfighting in Western and Central Europe, the Soviets were looking at
many moreproblems, such as making nerve agents work in the frigid temperatures
of Alaska. Such efforts were not new, the Germans had developed a mixture
of sulfur mustard and phenyldichloroarsine called Winterlost that remained
liquid in temperatures below the freezing point of mustard so that it could
be used in winter. The reason for the Soviet effort (learned of from a CIA
source in East Germany) was to disable the chain of early warning radar
in Alaska (the DEW or Distant Early Warning Line) to allow Soviet ballistic
missiles to pass over without alerting the US. |
| The Soviets often
turned to the East Germans and the imposing German chemical tradition to
solve some of their problems. Amongst other chemical feats, East German
chemists developed a number of anabolic steroids for their athletes that
were not detectable by the drug screening tests used in international competition.
They also developed a number of LSD-like compounds that were used for loosening
tongues in interrogation and looked into the development of microbial compounds
such as saxitoxin as weapons. |
| The 1960's also
saw the beginning of Operation RANCH HAND, the extensive defoliation operation
in Viet Nam that was intended to deny the Viet Cong the jungle cover they
used so well. Vast quantities of herbicides were sprayed from aircraft and
helicopters in this effort. CS gas was also used in attempts to reduce some
of the Viet Cong tunnel complexes in South Viet Nam. |
| The most significant
development of the 1960's was in the control of proliferation. In late 1969,
President Nixon decided that the US biological stockpile was not worth the
monetary or political costs and he ordered its destruction,a task that was
completed in 1971-72. Some stocks were missed - submunitions containing
long-dead brucellosis pathogens
were discovered buried at Wright-Patterson AFB in1996 - and the CIA retained
stocks of saxitoxin until they were destroyed after their existence was
acknowledged to the Church committee in 1974. |
| Nixon's bold action
gave the movement for the control of biological weapons a much-needed boost
and the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) of 1972 was the result.
Although not an ideal treaty - much of the language is weak and there is
no workable verification procedure other than declarations by the signatories,
it is a significant milestone. |
| Ancient
Times to the 19th Century | 19th
Century and World WarI | The Inter-War
Years | World War II |
Disarmament and proliferation | The
Terrorists | |