Long, Sordid History Of Chemical Weapons Ending As Cluster Bombing Grows
It’s taken more than three decades but a ghastly chapter in American military history should come to a close today, when the world’s last and only remaining declared stockpile of chemical weapons are destroyed.
Now, it’s time for the U.S. to join other civilized nations in banning devastating cluster bombs. But more on that later.
The destruction of the nation’s trove of chemical weapons comes 53 years too late for 6,000 sheep that died while grazing in eastern Utah on a snowy, spring day in a town known, prophetically, as Skull Valley.
The first attempt to get rid of so-called “germ weapons” came in 1969, when President Nixon ordered destruction of the nation’s stockpile and restricted the use of chemical arms. Nixon did not, however, ban the use of cancer-causing defoliants like Agent Orange in the Vietnam War.
The world’s attention to end chemical weapons gained momentum in 1988 after poison gas was used to kill an estimated 5,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. Iraq and Iran, at war with each other at the time, were each considered responsible.
By 1989, the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed in principle to destroy their chemical weapons stockpiles. In 1993, more than 120 nations, including the U.S. and Russia, agreed to ban the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. Under the agreement all such weapons were to be destroyed within 10 years of the treaty’s entry into force. That date in 2003, came and went, with many chemical weapons still stockpiled.
The Senate ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, and the U.S. and other countries committed to getting rid of chemical weapons. Defense Department officials once said it would take just a few years and that it would cost of about $1.4 billion to get rid of the weapons. The final cost is nearly $42 billion and counting and a few years has been excruciatingly lengthened ad nauseam.
A leading opponent of the ratification vote of the convention was Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., the far right leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
‘’The American people are being misled by those who endorsed this treaty into believing that something is being done about chemical weapons. I hope, if we do nothing else in our opposition to this treaty, I hope that we can make the American people aware that nothing is being done for their safety by this treaty,’’ Helms said.
The weapons depot near Pueblo, Colo., destroyed its last store of weapons in June; and the remaining weapons at another depot in Kentucky will be eradicated in the next few days. The weapons include Sarin, also known as GB, a form of nerve gas, which is so deadly that a few pounds could kill thousands of people in minutes. Exposure to just one ten thousandth of an ounce in the lungs can kill. In the 1950s, the Army made thousands of gallons of Sarin, which were loaded and ready to use in the warheads of thousands of rockets.
Much of the nation’s stockpile were burned up in incinerators in Alabama, Arkansas, Oregon and Utah, and one on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific. But a public uproar led Congress to order the Defense Department to find another, less controversial disposal method. In response, the Defense Department came up with new, non-burning techniques, that now involves the use of robots to remove mustard gas and draining liquid nerve agents from warheads and incinerating the residue.
Great Britain destroyed its chemical weapons in 2007, India in 2009, and Russia in 2017. The Pentagon said that Russia, may have retained undeclared stocks. The elimination of chemical weapons did not deter rogue states like Syria, that used chemical weapons many times between 2013 and 2019. Published reports also say that fighters from the Islamic State used chemical weapons at least 52 times in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2016.
The American stockpile, built up over generations, included cluster bombs and land mines filled with nerve agent, artillery shells that could coat whole forests with a blistering mustard fog and tanks filled with poison that could be loaded on jets and sprayed on targets.
Banned chemical weapons include chlorine gas and the VX nerve agent. Chlorine gas was used extensively during the World War I battles of the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele and others in which around 8.5 million soldiers were killed and 21 million more were wounded.
In World War I, the U.S. produced 5,770 metric tons of chemical weapons, including 1,400 metric tons of phosgene and 175 metric tons of mustard gas. It may sound like a lot but the totals amount to about 4 percent of all of the chemical weapons produced for the first world war and only just over 1 percent of the era’s most effective weapon, mustard gas.
While the first world war raged, the U.S. began making an improved vesicant gas known as Lewisite, for use in an offensive planned for early 1919. By the time of the armistice on Nov. 11, 1918, a plant near Willoughby, Ohio, was producing 10 tons per day of the substance, for a total of about 150 tons of Lewisite. Lewisite creates deadly blisters and irritates the lungs. The compound has no other use than as an agent of destruction.
After the war, the U.S signed the Washington Arms Conference Treaty of 1922 to ban chemical weapons but the treaty failed because it was rejected by France.
Chemical weapons were not used by the U.S. or the other Allies during World War II but the Allies stockpiled them to retaliate if they were used by Germany. There was at least one reported accident on the night of Dec. 2, 1943, when German Junkers bombed the port of Bari in Southern Italy. Several American ships were sunk, including the John Harvey, which was carrying mustard gas. The presence of the gas was top secret and physicians did not know they were dealing with mustard gas and could not prescribe proper treatment. The U.S. military said there were 628 mustard gas casualties including 69 deaths attributed “in whole or in part to the mustard gas, most of them American merchant seamen.”
Large quantities of chemical weapons also were also deployed to India, where they could be delivered by B-29 bombers over Japan, if necessary. Japan surrendered after the atomic bombs were dropped. After the surrender, more than 50,000 mustard gas bombs, 10,000 phosgene bombs and other chemical munitions were dumped by the U.S. into deep water in the Bay of Bengal.
In the 1930s, the Germans conducted experiments using the chemical at the infamous IG Farben company. The Nazis later converted the chemical into nerve gases and a new series of weapons including Sarin, Tabun, and Soman. The Nazis produced large quantities of the compounds, but did not use them during World War II. British scientists later produced VX nerve agent, which was many times more potent than the variant created in Nazi Germany.
The VX nerve gas has never been used in warfare but a form of the gas was used in 1994 and 1995 by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo to poison three people, one of whom died.
In 2017, VX was used to kill Kim Jong-nam, the half brother of North Korea’s leader. In 2018, Russia was suspected of using nerve gas in an atack on Sergei V. Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter, who were found unresponsive in the English city of Salisbury. Both survived the poisonings.
In March 1968, 6,249 sheep died mysteriously in Skull Valley, an area nearly 30 miles from the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground, which covers a vast area of the western Utah desert. The sheep were found to have been poisoned by an organophosphate chemical, an ingredient in insecticides and VX nerve gas.
The incident in Utah coincided with several open-air tests of the nerve agent VX at Dugway. At first, the Army denied that VX had caused the deaths and blamed them on the farmers’ use of organophosphate pesticides on crops.
Under Congressional pressure, the Army admitted on May 22, 1969, that nerve gas killed the sheep. The Army paid the ranchers for their sheep but still made no official acknowledgment of responsibility.
The Army explained the accident happened because of a malfunction of a spraying device on an airplane. Brigadier Gen. William Stone said that a plane sprayed the nerve gas on the proving ground but a valve opened too slowly, causing the lethal substance to “dribble out” at much higher altitudes than the Army had planned. Wind caught the gas and blew it to Skull Valley. In total, almost 500,000 pounds of nerve agent were dispersed during open-air tests.
The claim against the Army by the ranchers included 4,372 “disabled” sheep, of which about 2,150 were either killed outright by the VX exposure or were so badly injured that they were euthanized. Another 1,877 sheep were “temporarily” injured, or showed no signs of injury but were not marketable because of their potential exposure. All of the exposed sheep that survived the initial exposure were euthanized by the ranchers, as even the potential for exposure had rendered the sheep permanently unsalable for either meat or wool.
The Dugway Proving Ground was built in 1942 to test biological and chemical weapons after the Army determined it needed a testing facility more remote than its Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. The facility encompasses 801,505 acres of the Great Salt Lake Desert, an area the size of the state of Rhode Island, and is surrounded on three sides by mountain ranges. Since its founding, much of Dugway Proving Ground activity has been a closely guarded secret.
The town of Dugway is a closed city, located inside the testing facility and is home to 2,016 people. The only roads leading to the town pass through military checkpoints.
In 1942, the Army began testing toxic agents, flamethrowers, chemical spray systems, biological warfare weapons, fire bombing tactics, antidotes for chemical agents, and protective clothing. In 1943, “German Village” and “Japanese Village” hamlets were built for practice fire-bombing of homes similar to those in populated areas of Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire’s Home Islands.
Other weapons of mass destruction tested at Dugway included 328 open-air tests of biological weapons, 74 dirty bomb tests, and eight furnace heatings of nuclear material under open-air conditions to simulate the dispersal of fallout in the case of meltdown of aeronautic nuclear reactors.
The U.S. General Accounting Office reported on Sept. 28, 1994, that between 1940 and 1974, the government performed “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of weapons tests and experiments involving hazardous substances.
“It is unknown how many people in the surrounding vicinity were also exposed to potentially harmful agents used in open-air tests at Dugway,” the report noted.
The malfunctioning Genesis, a NASA spacecraft, was directed to impact into the desert floor of Dugway in September 2004 because the topsoil is like talcum powder, or moondust, and would likely cushion the troubled spacecraft’s impact. The spacecraft’s accelerometer had been installed backwards, which caused the spacecraft to malfunction upon re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere, preventing the originally planned air retrieval.
The Dugway Proving Ground and about 1,200 to 1,400 people was placed on lockdown on Jan. 26, 2011. Employees were not allowed to leave, and those coming to work were not allowed in. It was later announced that the lockdown was ordered because of the temporary loss of a vial containing VX nerve agent. The lockdown was lifted on Jan. 27 following recovery of the material. The incident was described simply as a “mislabeling problem.”
The London-based “New Scientist” magazine reported that Dugway was still producing quantities of anthrax spores as late as 2015 to be used to develop anthrax testing detection and countermeasures. The anthrax production came more than four decades after the U.S. renounced biological weapons.
In May 2015, the Pentagon reported that live samples of the anthrax virus were inadvertently sent from a Defense Department research facility to labs in nine states, but there were no known incidents of exposure to the virus. Labs receiving the live samples were in Texas, Maryland, Wisconsin, Delaware, New Jersey, Tennessee, New York, California and Virginia, the Associated Press reported.
Col. Steve Warren, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said there was “no known risk to the general public” or any confirmed cases of anthrax infection in workers who potentially were exposed to the samples.
So while the nation is getting rid of one class of bad weapons, the government is approving supplying another deadly kind, cluster munitions, to Ukraine.
The decision by President Biden to provide cluster munitions bypasses U.S. law prohibiting the production, use or transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than 1 percent. The government has decided that the cluster bombs are vital to reversing the war with Russia, which is believed to already use cluster bombs.
The Pentagon’s last public assessment more than 20 years ago showed that the U.S. cluster bombs have a failure or “dud rate” of 6 percent, meaning that at least four of each of the 72 submunitions each shell carries would remain unexploded across an area roughly the size of 4½ football fields.
The Pentagon now says new assessments, based on testing as recent as 2020, show failure rates no higher than 2.35 percent. Officials said they are selecting munitions with the 2.35 percent dud rate or below for transfer to Ukraine.
A 2022 Congressional Research Service report referred to “significant discrepancies among failure rate estimates” of cluster weapons in the U.S. arsenal, with some manufacturers claiming 2 to 5 percent, while mine clearance specialists have reported rates of 10 to 30 percent.
Cluster munitions are prohibited in those nations that ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions, adopted in Dublin, Ireland, in May 2008. The United States, Ukraine and Russia are not parties to the convention and eight of NATO’s 31 members, including the United States, have not ratified the convention.
A cluster munition is an air-dropped or ground-launched explosive weapon that releases or ejects smaller explosive submunitions that are designed to kill personnel and destroy vehicles. The U.S. has determined use of cluster munitions is necessary to reduce the number of aircraft and artillery systems that are needed to support military operations.
But the many small bomblets released by cluster bombs pose risks to civilians both during attacks and afterwards. Unexploded bomblets can kill or maim civilians and are costly to locate and remove.
In Vietnam, people are still being killed as a result of cluster bombs and other objects left by the U.S. and Vietnamese military forces. Hundreds of people are killed or injured annually by unexploded ordnance. An estimated 270 million cluster submunitions were dropped on Laos in the 1960s and 1970s and around one third failed to explode and continue to pose a threat.
Within the first year after the end of the Kosovo War, more than 100 civilians died from unexploded bombs and mines. During the war, NATO planes dropped nearly 1,400 cluster bombs in Kosovo. Cluster bombs make up to 40 percent of mines and unexploded bombs in Kosovo.
Israel used cluster bombs in Lebanon in 1978 and in the 1980s. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel fired large numbers of cluster bombs in Lebanon, containing an estimated more than 4 million cluster submunitions. In the first month following the ceasefire, unexploded cluster munitions killed or injured an average of three to four people per day.