"Chemical Demilitarization" is the process of getting rid of chemical munitions, chemical warfare agents, and the infrastructure that made them. In the USA, this has been a lengthy effort by the US Army that has gone on for many decades. (2 / ±500)
This thread will take me all day, and I will build it in stages. Happy to answer questions, but please reserve them until the end as I may very well answer your questions along the way.
It is genuinely hard to tell where to start with this story. So, let's go back to the late 1960s.
We are all familiar with the US/French/British versus the Soviet Union nuclear arms race that characterised the cold war. There was a similar, but less well known chemical arms race between East and West throughout much of the cold war.
I should add that the UK pretty much opted out of the offensive chemical weapons business mid stream in the cold war as it was very costly.
The United States Army built up a large arsenal of chemical weapons during the cold war. I'm going to focus on the lethal agents here. There's a whole other story on tear gas / riot control agents and defoliants. But I'm going to focus on blister and nerve agents in this thread
There's also a story to be had about an incapacitating agent called BZ. But I'm going to focus for now on the deadly stuff.
So, let me give you a tour of the old offensive chemical arsenal. The cold war US Army lethal chemical warfare agents in the active inventory were of 3 types: H/HD ('Mustard Gas' - a bit of a misnomer) , GB ('Sarin'), and VX.
The Army had previously had other chemical warfare agents as well, such as Lewisite, Phosgene, and Chlorine. But the massive cold war arsenal was Mustard, Sarin, and VX.
So, let me give you a tour of the chemical weapons program at what I'd probably consider its high water mark (at least in terms of inventory) - Approximately 1969.
First digression - was all of this legal? Yes. The Chemical Weapons Convention did not exist yet. The Geneva Protocol had been in effect for some time. It did not ban possession or manufacturing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol…
The Geneva Protocol effectively banned first use. The US policy (and Army doctrine and training) was never to be the first to use chemical weapons but to reserve the right and capability to retaliate in kind. So, during WW2 and the Cold War, US policy was deterrent in nature
So, let's look at what the US Army had in its arsenal at the high water mark in 1969. (More on why 1969 is significant later).
First, Mustard. Even by 1969, the US Army's Mustard was old much of it had been made during the second world war. It had been kept in the arsenal as a stop-gap persistent weapon until the US was able to field a persistent nerve agent weapon.
Even in 1969 the Mustard was largely considered obsolete and the Army was getting rid of lots of it. More on that later too. (Damn, this is going to be an all day story).
By 1969, Mustard was stored in bulk containers (the erroneously named "1 ton container" and in mortar and artillery shells. No aerial bombs or rockets or silly things like grenades. (A mustard grenade is fairly pointless).
Here's what a 1 ton Mustard storage container looked like. It held 1700 pounds of H/HD/HT (HT is a thickened mustard).
There were thousands of these 1 ton containers as the reserve supply of Mustard. The purpose of these 1 ton containers was to be a future stock to fill weapons at some future date. By 1969 there were no such plans.
The rest of the Mustard was already filled into mortar and artillery shells. At one point, the Army's primary Mustard weapon was the 4.2" (that's diameter - ±107mm) mortar shell, the M2/M2A1
By 1969, this 4.2" artillery shell was obsolete in practical terms. The US Army Chemical Corps used to have "Chemical Mortar" Battalions to fire this shell. But after the Korean war, the 4.2" mortar went to the infantry. And the infantry pretty much ignored the chemical mission
There was the M60 artillery projectile. It was 105mm and was designed to be fired by the Army's Field Artillery 105mm self propelled or towed howitzers.
It contained a relatively tiddly amount of chemical agent - 3 pounds. You'd have to fire a lot of them to contaminate a grid square. And by 1969 this had been largely rendered obsolescent by VX artillery rounds
There were the very similar M104 and M110 155mm Mustard projectiles. Also for artillery use. Also by 1969 being made obsolete by newer VX
So, Mustard, which had been the standard chemical interdiction / area denial / persistent contaminating agent, but one not actually very good at killing anyone, had fallen out of favor. But a lot of it was hanging around.
The next warfare agent was GB. Also known as "Sarin". Originally invented by the Germans. It took a lot of serious effort for the US to figure out how to mass produce it. The Nazis hadn't figured out how to make it efficiently at scale.
The US Army built a Sarin factory at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, outside of Denver, Colorado.
All of the US Army's Sarin inventory was made at this facility between July 1952 and March 1957. After 1957 work continued on refining Sarin (some of the older stuff needed refining) and filling into weapons.
Sarin was a far more deadly agent than Mustard and was the Army's nonpersistent lethal agent designed to rapidly cause lethality and incapacitation on the battlefield. It was the primary focus of the Army's CW program in the 1950s and early 1960s
I reckon something like 9000 tons or so of Sarin was made. (I know what the inventory was in the 1980s so have to do some cocktail napkin maths)
Sarin (always called GB, not Sarin, in the Army), was in a number of weapon systems. These include the M360 105mm artillery shell which held a relatively small 1.6 pounds of GB.
There was the M121, which had a respectable 6.5 pounds of GB in a 155mm artillery shell. (Photo is of otherwise identical VX shell)
There was also the M426, which was ammunition for the 8 Inch artillery. It was filled with about 14 and a half pounds of GB.
I'm pausing to make lunch.
There was also some Sarin in aerial bombs of several different types, principally the Weteye and MC-1
There was another Sarin weapon, which was the M34 Cluster Bomb.
The US also dabbled in possible Sarin warheads for missile systems but ended up not having many of these. The bomblets were fiddly and leaky. Fiddly and leaky is a problem.
Then there was the M55 Bolt rocket. This thing was (and still is) a pain.
Then there was the reserve supply, thousands of 1 ton containers, each with ±1500 pounds of Sarin in each.
There was also some Sarin in tanks and such at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, the factory. I don't have the greatest inventory records of that stuff to hand. (I'm working off a late 1980s inventory sheet)
The other nerve agent was VX. VX is very persistent and was meant to replace Mustard as it was similarly good at area denial and contamination, but more toxic, so one could interdict more terrain with far less agent.
The Army made VX in Indiana at the Newport Army Ammunition Plant from 1962 through into late 1968.
More about Newport here: https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/newport.htm…
VX was in a narrow variety of munitions in the chemical arsenal. It was in 155mm artillery shells and 8 inch artillery shells that looked basically just like their GB/Sarin.
There were also M55 rockets filled with VX.
And, like the others there was also a reserve stock stored in 1 ton cylinders. These contained ±1600 pounds of VX. Pictured, the very last one of them...
Also, almost forgot, there were aerial spray tanks, the TMU-28, used for VX. They were generally stored empty
And there was the M23 VX-filled landmine. It was a bit of a bastardised weapon.
I wrote extensively about the M23 VX landmine in @CBRNe World magazine some years back.
There were some other odd bits and bobs, but that's the TYPE of stuff that was in the arsenal. Where was it, though?
Unlike thousands of nuclear warheads, which were ready for immediate use, the US chemical arsenal was locked away. The majority of it was in the continental USA, far away from potential battle fronts in Europe and Asia. Let's step through the inventory and storage
First, there was Black Hills Ordnance Depot. I don't have good figures on it, as it was closed in the 1960s and the chemical munitions were moved elsewhere by the "1969 high water mark" that I am using as my benchmark. It was in South Dakota. Note the distinctive "Igloo" storage
By the way, I've got records of all of the movements of this stuff if anyone has any questions.
Edgewood Maryland has long been the home of the US Army's chemical laboratories. It housed around 1800 one ton containers of Mustard in reserve supplies in an open storage yard, not in bunkers.
My movement records show that some weapons were stored at Savanna (no h) Army Depot in Illinois, but seem to have been moved out.
Umatilla Army Depot in Oregon held a wide variety of munitions.
I've got the late 1980s inventories at these sites, by the way. I won't bore you with the stats for all of them. But as ONE example, let me tell you the inventory of the next site: Anniston Army Depot, in Alabama.
Here's Anniston Army Depot. Note distinctive storage igloo, right.
My late 1980s inventory of Anniston's chemical inventory: 9600 155mm Sarin shells 74040 105mm Sarin shells 16026 8" Sarin shells Slightly under 43000 Sarin rockets
258912 Mustard 4.2" mortar shells 23064 105mm Mustard shells 17643 155mm Mustard shells 108 one ton containers of Mustard
139,581 155mm VX shells 35,662 M55 VX rockets 44,131 VX landmines
All told, that's a lot of stuff in the igloos.
You can see where I'm leading with all of this. Getting rid of all this stuff is fixing to be a pain...
Many thanks, by the way, to Albert Mauroni, where much, but certainly not all, this info derives. He did a lot of archival work.
Then there was Bluegrass Chemical Depot, in Kentucky. It's still there. (More on Bluegrass later). Lots of stuff there.
Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas had a lot of stored stuff. (Also lots of WP, but that's not a chemical weapon... that's an incendiary). Pictured, old 1 ton Sarin containers.
Pueblo Chemical Depot, near Pueblo Colorado. Stored just Mustard. No nerve agents
The big daddy of them all was Tooele Depot in the middle of nowhere in Utah. Her's some technicians handling M55 rockets
There were 2 depots overseas, where some chemical munitions were stored closer to possible areas of operation.
One of these was Chibana Depot on Okinawa. Note the elegant storage solution of, erm, leaving it out.
Note that in that photo, it's conventional ammunition stored out in the open.
There were approximately 100,000 Sarin and VX munitions in Germany, at a storage depot near Clausen in then West Germany.
There was also a fair bit of Sarin and such at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, the factory complex. And there was some VX in transit or temp storage at Newport
Now you've had the basic tour of the chemical weapons estate, now came the problems of what to do with the stuff when it wasn't needed any longer. Even by the "high water mark" of early 1969, there were things that weren't needed.
A lot of things were going on, both in the world and in the smaller world of the US Army.
The Vietnam war was going on. Conventional warfare in SE Asia was soaking up the defense budget. Stockpiling chemicals for WW3 seemed low priority.
The US Army was buying and fielding small and medium sized nuclear weapons like crazy. There was a lot of, f*ck it, if the Soviets invade Europe we're using the nukes. Why mess with the chemicals.
Even within the US Army's Chemical Corps, it's efforts were taking up with lots of CS tear gas and defoliants (Agent Orange and the other rainbow agents) in Vietnam. Stewardship of the chemical arsenal was a lower priority
Artillery crews were doing very little training with chemical rounds. The chemical weapons were mostly stored in the sticks and it would take a huge mobilization effort to get them to the battlefield in the event of WW3
By the late 1960s this vast chemical arsenal was largely a symbolic deterrent against the Soviets. There were some hardcases who were CW advocates, but it was a minority view.
In the 1950s you could still reasonably argue that chemical weapons provided a lethality somewhere in between conventional and nuclear weapons. But a lot of things changed in the 1960s
Conventional US field artillery was getting more lethal in net terms. Various improvements meant that an artillery battalion could provide more conventional fire, and do it more accurately than in the past.
Somewhere about 1966 ±, there came a point when, for many desired tactical effects (e.g. suppress an enemy battalion, slow down a Soviet tank regiment), conventional fire became as effect as chemical attacks.
The other thing is that chemical weapons are very dependent on the weather. Less so the various high explosive rounds.
So, as a matter of actually fighting wars and winning battles, the scenarios where chemical weapons were actually useful to generals and colonels started to shrink quite rapidly
If you start to add in the various disadvantages of chemical weapons (more expensive, logistics, etc.) the army mostly walked away from chemical weapons unofficially decades before they walked away OFFICIALLY
Other factors were relevant as well. The M91 rocket launcher for that nasty M55 115mm rocket... it went out of service. Suddenly there were all of these rockets and no means to fire them.
The 4.2" mortar had been taken away from the Chemical Corps and given to the infantry. Which didn't bother to train with the Mustard round.
Mustard was being replaced by VX anyway. But what to do with the old mustard
The other branches of service were at best half-hearted in their support for chemical warfare. The Navy thought it was daft. They didn't want nerve agents on ships.
The Air Force half-heartedly supported aerial spray and air-dropped bombs filled with Sarin, but had to be prompted and pushed.
The Marines largely couldn't be bothered. They were ass-deep in the Vietnam war anyway.
Speaking of which, this nerve agent and mustard stuff never went near the Vietnam war.
To make it worse, a lot of the stuff started to leak. Leaking chemical munitions are a nightmare in a storage bunker.
Sarin is corrosive, over time, to both aluminium and steel. VX less so. But also, Sarin is a runny liquid, like water. VX is thicker and oily.
The US had to mess around with various additives in nerve agents to keep them from corroding too badly.
Basically, any of the thinner-skinned stuff with Sarin in it started to have some tendencies to leak over time. By the late 1980s, something like 1 in 150 of the MC-1 Sarin bombs was leaking.
About 1 in 350 of the M55 Sarin rockets was leaking by the 80s. Which doesn't sound THAT bad until you realise that there were hundreds of thousands of them.
All of these factors started to come to a head in 1968-1969. People were upset about the war and the US Army was less than popular
Tear gas, napalm, and agent orange were the public-facing bits of the Chemical Corps. The US Army Chemical Corps wasn't good for PR.
There was a growing environmental movement and, face it, a nerve agent factory built to 1950s standards is, even by 1969, a bit of a figurative train wreck.
A massive big oops - the Skull Valley incident (see my book for details) resulted in the US military killing rather a lot of sheep with VX due to some vagaries in the weather
Another oops - some soldiers in that depot in Okinawa got sick - it blew the lid off the secrecy and annoyed the Japanese hosts, who'd not been asked.
Then, in 1969, Richard Nixon comes into the White House.
You can say what you want about Republicans in general and Richard Nixon in particular. But he was quite liberal in many ways. He was for greater protection of the environment and he was against chemical and biological warfare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statement_on_Chemical_and_Biological_Defense_Policies_and_Programs…
(the history of US bioweapons is interesting, but a different story - maybe even a book in a few years time - so I won't digress)
I am going to break this here and resume it either later tonight or tomorrow. I've laid the background out. And then I can explain the long saga of getting rid of the stuff.
If you’ve enjoyed this, consider dropping a tip in the hat… https://ko-fi.com/dankaszeta
As always, I have the receipts on all this chemical weapons history.
I occasionally argue with people who believe or assume that the US military secretly continues with offensive chemical weapons work.
The brutal truth is that the US gave up on it a long time ago and had to spent a lot of money to rid itself of a toxic legacy
I’ll resume this thread after lunch UK time today. Watch this space
OK. I am resuming my thread on "chemical demilitarization"... grab a seat. Pour a beverage of your choosing.
First, a word of thanks to our sponsors. Several of you gave me a tip at KO-FI. Thank you very much.
Second, a word on sources. Several have reached out and asked "Dan, how the f%ck do you know all of this?" Well, I hoard information. But there's some excellent sources on this stuff. I'm not just making it all up.
Al Mauroni's excellent book is a good history of this up to 2003:
Al, by the way, is an unsung hero in document the history of a lot of CBRN stuff.
And I highly recommend these three documents. You can find them if you look hard enough online.
So, when I left off, the US Army had a massive inventory of chemical weapons. Nixon had pretty much stopped further manufacturing. The chemical arsenal was pretty much stuck where it was. And even by 1969, there was a lot of stuff that wasn't any use, even as a deterrent
A rocket full of Sarin or VX isn't even useful as a deterrent if the launching system for it was retired and nobody was trained on how to fire it. This was literally the case.
So, to recap - Nixon says no more new stuff. There's a lot of stuff that isn't useful any longer. But a lot of it is still useful at least as a deterrent and a bargaining chip in diplomacy - Nixon was into arms control.
So, I give you "Captain Dan's Chemical Stockpile Dilemma Chart" (c) 2021
Basically every possible move on this shitty boardgame has pluses and minuses. There's no option that is (a) 100% safe and (b) free.
Now, given our modern sensibilities, you aren't going to like what the state of the art was up to 1970 in this business... It was the sink them in the sea approach.
I'm not sure anyone ever really sat down and said "this is a good idea" - the sinking stuff in the sea got reckoned as the least bad of the available options.
Now, an important feature of this whole "what do we do with chemical weapons when we don't need them" is basically a design problem. And it is a design flaw not just inherent to chemical weapons, but to other types of ordnance as well.
Military munitions tend to get designed with their ultimate end use in mind - use in battle. Few thoughts go into "how do we get of it if we don't use it".
Now, with a bayonet or a rifle, you can chop it up or melt it down using basically iron age technology. Even conventional ammunition can get shot off on a firing range.
But what, exactly, do you do with an artillery shell full of Mustard?
The lack of a non-combat end for chemical munitions led to rather a lot of stuff getting sunk in the sea.
After World War II, a lot of captured German stuff got sunk in something called Operation Davey Jones Locker
The UK got rid of some German Tabun in Operation Sandcastle, NW of Ireland. NOTE: THIS WAS NOT IN BEAUFORT'S DYKE, NO MATTER WHAT YOU READ ON THE INTERWEBS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sandcastle…
After World War 2, the US Army had a lot of the chemical warfare agent Lewisite. Lewisite was being phased out for several reasons, particularly because the role of a CWA to cause immediate lethality was being taken by GB (Sarin).
Lewisite had shelf life and corrosion problems. The beautifully appropriately named Operation Geranium sunk 3150 tons of Lewisite in the sea, loaded in the ship USS Joshua Alexander. 300 miles east of Florida
Now, I am NOT defending dumping this sort of stuff in the sea. But the basic practice was good for what it was. Load it into a ship, then sink the ship in a really deep spot. Nobody's going to scuba dive down to it.
In 1958, 8000 tons of Mustard and Lewisite (not loose, in containers and munitions - nobody poured liquid into the sea) was put into the SS William C Ralston and sunk 127 nautical miles off San Francisco. https://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?231625…
At this point, I am going to do a bit of a diversion into the "certainly it's just cheaper to leave them in storage" argument. This argument held sway for many decades.
Leaks were a problem in storage. As I mentioned yesterday, some things leaked more than others. Sarin, being a thin, runny liquid was more notorious for leaking that thicker, oilier Mustard or VX
There were two problem children in the arsenal. The M23 VX mine and the M55 rocket. There's a problem of sympathetic detonation.
Now, my EOD friends like @John Sisino and @Jarami Feith💣 can explain sympathetic detonation better than I can, but basically if you have an explosive charge go off, sometimes it can make the explosive charges around it go off.
Most of the chemical munitions in the US arsenal were pretty safe in this regard. Tests showed that one of the artillery shells exploding might crack the shells next to it but not induce a sympathetic detonation.
In any case, the artillery shells that formed the bulk of the stockpile were stored without their explosive burster charge.
The problem with the M23 mine is that it would cause a sympathetic detonation. It was stored in a crate of three. It could cause the sympathetic detonation of the other 2 mines in the crate.
But tests at Black Hills Depot (oh boy did I miss a good job...) showed that mostly, they would only damage the mines in the next crate but not blow them up.
A similar set of tests on the M55 rocket was, erm, problematic. The M55 rocket became the huge bastard child of the chemical arsenal. If it weren't for the M55 rocket, I'm betting the whole chem demil effort would've been done long ago.
Where to start? Well, let me go to the manual.
The M55 rocket
There's a lot of problems with this design. The fuze, burster, solid rocket fuel, AND over ten pounds of nerve agent, are all bundled together in it. And the Sarin has a tendency to leak. 19.3 pounds of rocket fuel. A composition B burster charge. 3.2 pounds of it.
They came packed in a wood crate
Did I mention that the rocket fuel was literally a mix of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose?
Some lucky bastard got to do test explosions and test fires of these M55 shitty bastards in storage igloos in Black Hills Depot. If one of them went off, the sympathetic detonation would make the others go off.
The only GOOD news was that a lot of the Sarin would get burnt up. But not all of it.
In the 1980s, the US Army examined the situation of stuff in storage and worked out the MCE - the maximum credible event for a disaster in storage. For the sites that stored the M55, the MCE was an M55 fire
This was a big problem because for a number of the storage sites, the hazard plume from just one of these bunkers cooking off would extend off post into civilian territory under some conditions.
The M55 will keep coming up again in this story. But because of problems like this, you can see why a "oh f*ck lets put the damn things in the deepest bit of the sea that we can find" becomes, if not a good idea, the least bad one on a given day.
You'll be relieved to know that the last set of operations to get rid of US chemical weapons happened in the 1960s. It was called "Operation CHASE"
Operation CHASE stood for... get this.... "Cut Holes and Sink 'Em".... I shit you not. Some clever Chemical Corps Officer no doubt got an OER bullet for that.
Operation CHASE was also involved in significant disposal of conventional munitions as well. In fact, way more conventional stuff has been dumped in the sea than chemical.
There were 12 OPERATION CHASEs in fact, CHASE 1 through CHASE 12. Due to, erm, something. They weren't all in chronological order.
I'll spare you the whole chronology of operation CHASE, but the Wiki on it is not actually that bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHASE…
Much of the chemical portion of CHASE involved getting rid of those damned rockets. The Army realised that these were dangerous to move. Which begs the question - how the hell were the things going to get to a war anyway? Never heard a good answer for that, BTW
The Army built steel boxes that they nicknamed "coffins". The rockets were stacked carefully in the boxes and then filled them with concrete.
The concrete encased boxes were pretty safe. The Army tried all kinds of ways to see if someone could get into the nerve agent rockets. Soaking the concrete in high strength acids didn't do it.
Blasting it open tended to kill everyone around it, so that'd deter theft. Diamond saws didn't work - you'd end up setting off the rocket propellant. Baking the concrete until it fell apart ended up not working. This was pretty secure.
The rocket "coffins" were transported across country by rail to sea ports, where they were stacked in old merchant vessels (e.g. surplus reserve Liberty ships from WW2). Bad copy of photo here, gives the idea.
The ship would be sunk in 15,000 feet of water. Where, no doubt, the rockets are still there, pretty much unmolested.
It was eventual public opposition to this dumping stuff in the sea that brought it to a halt. Communities didn't like the idea of train loads of stuff being sneaked through in the dark of night. People didn't like the idea of stuff going into the sea.
Can't say that I blame them.
58 separate news reports on the national TV networks covered Operation CHASE 10 in 1970.
Incidents like this, en route from Anniston Army Depot to Earle New Jersey didn't help the Army's cause.
A National Academy of Sciences report in 1969 advised that, erm, dropping the stuff in the sea wasn't so good after all. This gave a lot of heft to the "don't drive it through my city to put it in the sea" arguments .
And in October 1970, the US Congress passed a law (PL91-441) that banned disposal of chemical weapons unless they were first somehow detoxified and also banned disposal of any munitions in international waters.
Drop it in the sea was off the agenda
The US was going to have to process stuff or keep it for wartime use.
Running alongside all of this is a simmering diplomatic dispute with America's ally, Japan. The US Army's secret storage of chemical munitions at Chibana Depot, without host country permission, had rumbled things.
The US desperately needed to shift the stuff off of Okinawa to save face. But the same waves of opposition to Operation CHASE scuppered the first plan.
The first plan was to ship the stuff to Oregon, to Umatilla Depot. But opposition to the transport forced the Army to change plans. https://archive.ph/20120708042936/http://ec2-50-16-227-154.compute-1.amazonaws.com/2011/10/14/crosscut-blog/20595/How-Umatilla-chemical-weapons-changed-NW-history/…
Pressure on Congress led to another law, PL91-672. This law denied funding for transport of chemical muntions from Okinawa to the USA...
The US got creative and moved the Asian chemical warfare stockpile from Okinawa to an obscure atoll, Johnston Atoll, which was pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
Operation Red Hat moved the quite large Okinawa stockpile to Johnston Atoll in a series of moves. Again, the Wiki isn't bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Red_Hat…
If you want, there's a movie on Operation Red Hat. https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.3033306…
By the way, someone has asked what happens with these chemical agents in water. This article has the answers. TLDR; they degrade. Sitting in seawater at 15000 feet depth isn't the worst thing for them.
Now, folks, I am pausing. This has turned into an EPIC thread. I've got much more, and will add to it in bits. There's more to this story to come.
I will be adding to this thread episodically over the weekend. No doubt I will have to continue to add to it tomorrow and Monday.
One or two people asked me about the (kind of stupid) M23 VX landmine. The Army had actually worked on an airburst adapter for it to make it even nastier. One must admire the artwork.
Some kid clearly avoided service in Vietnam by being a useful illustrator. (If this was a relative of yours, or even better, you, get in touch because I'm curious to talk to you)
I don't actually know if this popup device was actually fielded or not.
So, as I left the story, it was 1970-ish and the US had a lot of chemical weapons at storage sites AL, CO, IN, KY, MD, OR, UT, as well as a depot in Germany and the new site in Johnston Atoll.
There was a VX production facility in Indiana, at Newport Army Ammunition Plant that had just ceased operation. And the Army's new ban on production, filling, and moving chemicals around had trapped a bunch of VX there.
There was the Sarin plant in mothballs at Rocky Mountain Arsenal and a precursor plant in mothballs at the Phosphate Development Works in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Both had ceased production over a decade earlier.
And before I break, let me show you the dilemma diagram once again. More later
If you liked this thread so far, you will genuinely enjoy my book, published by @Hurst Publishers (UK -2020) and @OUPPolitics (USA-2021). Out soon in French
Thread paused until tomorrow due to epic headache
OK, the History of Chemical Demilitarization in the US Army resumes.
- The US Army was now in a situation where it had VX weapons that were fairly new. Most of them, aside from the nasty rockets, were to be kept in case of World War 3.
There was a lot of Sarin weapons, but again, some of it was only a decade or 15 years old but already obsolescent - leaky bomblets for cluster bombs and missile warheads. Here's a M139 bomblet
And the Army was already saddled with squillions of M55 Sarin rockets that were already problematic and not actually useful on the battlefield, seeing how the launcher was retired...
The forced (and blessed) stop of Operation Cut Holes and Sink 'Em scuppered, literally, the Army's plan to drop approximately 21,000 somewhat leaky M34 Sarin Cluster Bombs into the sea.
And, as previously mentioned, there was a lot of Mustard. The Army decided to keep some of it as a backup in case they ran out of VX, but to get rid of rather a lot of it that was excess to requirements.
Also, in fairness, I should say that the Army had some odds and ends to get rid of. There was old phosgene left over the second world war.
And the Army had over 21,000 Chemical Agent Identification Sets (CAIS). These were, erm, interesting.
The CAIS came in several varieties. It was a kit with small quantities of Mustard, Lewisite, Phosgene, Chloropicrin, Cyanogen chloride, and a Tabun simulant. These were useful for testing detection. But not actually terribly safe. And they were poorly controlled early on.
This page tells about the contents of the various kits. https://www.denix.osd.mil/rcwmprogram/references/chemical-agents-and-rcwm/index.html…
So, now we're at this point on the flow chart, circa 1971 in an office in the D-ring of the Pentagon. About 80% would stay, but 20% needed to go.
The Army did a lot of chemical engineering work at its Rocky Mountain Arsenal industrial facility to work on the issue of getting rid of chemicals. Love the artistic values.
Rocky Mountain Arsenal (hereafter referred to as RMA) was a vast site. This is the "south plant" area of RMA
This is the North Plant area, the birthplace of nearly all America's Sarin.
RMA's proximity to Denver becomes important to the story. You can tell by this view of the south plant area with downtown Denver in the background.
RMA had a can-do attitude. They made the Sarin so they reckoned they could unmake some. They reckoned that they could unmake Mustard too. If dropping stuff in the sea was off, then it was time for plan B.
Plan B is something called Project Eagle. Project Eagle is really the spiritual and technical grandparent of the Chemical Demilitarization campaign.
The National Academy of Sciences had studied the problem and said that the best way of getting rid of Mustard was by incineration and the best way of getting rid of Sarin was to chemically neutralize it. To my shame I can't find the report. I swear I have a copy of it somewhere
At this point I should give a shout out to the guy who surely would have had the report. Heck, he might have given it to me.... Rest in Peace, Julian Perry Robinson. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/51859… https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/08/julian-perry-robinson-obituary…
Julian was a joy to talk to. And when it comes to old documents, he was the Gringotts Bank of chemical and biological marginalia, pseudoepigraphia, and miscellany. COVID-19 took him from us before a vaccine came along. Raise a glass to Julian.
Now, Julian certainly had a copy of this seminal document.
For those of you who want to read the whole thing, look it up on http://DTIC.mil. As you can deduce, Eagle Phase I was getting rid of Bulk Mustard. This was lots of Mustard in those 1 ton containers, which had been schlepped into RMA.
I'll summarize the 282 pages of the Project Eagle Phase I report. [If I was a dick, I'd just tweet each page of it.]
So, how DO you get rid of a 1 ton container of Mustard in early 1970s technology??? (I dedicate this diagram to @Funranium Labs and @Casillic)
As an aside, I find the terminology rather annoying. A 'one ton container' of Mustard does not contain one ton of agent. It contains 1700-1800 pounds of agent. Full it weighed 3500 pounds. (There were several types of the cylinders)
Let me know if you want a disquisition on the taxonomy and specifications of 1 ton chemical warfare agent cylinders.
The important think to understand was that this was the easiest form of chemical warfare agents to deal with. These were basically just big steel tanks with valves on them. They weren't weapons. They were just storage. You could leave them out in a dry environment for decades
So, Project Eagle Phase 1 step 1 - heat up the container. Get the nasty mustard, which is a thick oily liquid (the oldest joke in CBRN is that Mustard Gas isn't a damned gas).
Step 2, open the valves and drain out all the Mustard. The heat helps.
Step 3, burn the living shit out of the Mustard. In the repurposed hydrazine furnace. For which I bring receipts.
It's called the hydrazine furnace because RMA used to make hydrazine, and this was used to get rid of surplus hydrazine.
Once more, I have the receipts. Nominal rate was 2 gallons a minute. Not exactly fast. This is why it took many months.
I should say, that the stuff was by no means pure "Mustard Gas". Most of it had been made 25-30 years before. Some of it was H, older so-called Levinstein Mustard. It was, erm, a bit of a mess. Average composition (albeit from a document in 1988, 15 years later) of H was this
The majority of the mustard gas was HD - Distilled Mustard. A 1988 document tells me that by then it's average composition was this (sorry for the print quality)
I told you I was the Fred Dibnah of this stuff.
By the way, someone asked me how the Army kept all this shit secret at a big factory outside Denver, a large city. They didn't.
I'm also dedicating this thread to @NuclearAnthro who does a lot of this sort of work for America's nuclear weapons heritage.
Next step in Project Eagle Phase 1 - umm, what to do with the empty container. Mustard Gas is oily, sticky. It can polymerise under some conditions. A one ton container of Mustard Gas after draining is like an empty Heinz ketchup bottle. There's stuff stuck inside (photo = Heinz)
So, the Army needed to deal with the couple of gallons of Mustard Gas left in the can. Fortunately, the Army had a smaller version of this problem in the past. They had this, well, crematorium that they'd used to bake the living shit out of dirty 55 gallon drums.
Have a nice picture of 1 ton containers ready to go to the furnace.
And I have more receipts. They added more natural gas burners to the chamber.
They punched holes in the containers. The Army weighed the container - they knew how much an empty one should weigh - and the burned the shit out of it at 920F (that's like Gas Mark 13 for UK readers) for, let me do the calc, 3 hours and a bit.
They could then weigh the container to make sure the residue had been cooked out.
Now, even in ±1972 the US Army was sensible enough to understand that this shit going straight up the chimney was a bad idea.
So, to make a bit of a technical simplification, they scrubbed the shit out of the exact from all this incineration. Here's the diagram.
Read all about it in page 183 of a document that I swear, only I have ever read.
To make a VERY LONG story short, 2700 metric tons of Mustard ended up as, erm, 14 million pounds of spray dried salt. Which went to landfill. The containers were sold as scrap.
I now pause the thread for today as I must make a lamb curry for Mrs. K. Who will be hungry. Bless you all. Wear your masks. Get your vaccines.
Donations go to coffee, beer, or good deeds that need doing. https://ko-fi.com/dankaszeta
More Chem Demil history tomorrow.
In some ways this thread is a deeper dive on this one aspect than my book. Consider my book to be the swimming pool. This is a deep dive into about 15 pages of my book
So, why do I do it? Am I killing a fly with Thor’s hammer? I do this to be a strong counterpoint to some myth, misinformation and conspiracy theory
I often fight against the myth/misunderstanding/conspiracy theory that claims the USA still has an offensive chemical weapons programme.
Other times, I fight against quite dated claims like "The US makes Binary Sarin in Arkansas" and "The US has a massive stockpile of VX in Utah" that were, indeed, true at one time but aren't true now
I do bring receipts. Crates of them.
By the way, people ask about the rabbit on the cover of my book. For people in my career field on certain duties, rabbits were standard issue.
I don't actually know, but, dare I say it, this is the precise sort of, erm... rabbit hole I will jump down.
Dan Kaszeta, FRHistS, Legal Juggernaut @DanKaszetaAuthor. National security and CBRN expert. "King of Nerve Agent Twitter" Ex US Army and USSS. Liveryman of London. 🇺🇸🇬🇧 dual citizen, Anglican, #NAFO.Follow on 𝕏twitter-thread.com/t/1466403809505288213
Dan Kaszeta, FRHistS, Legal Juggernaut @DanKaszetaAuthor. National security and CBRN expert. "King of Nerve Agent Twitter" Ex US Army and USSS. Liveryman of London. 🇺🇸🇬🇧 dual citizen, Anglican, #NAFO.
Dan Kaszeta, FRHistS, Legal Juggernaut @DanKaszeta
Dan Kaszeta, FRHistS, Legal Juggernaut
@DanKaszeta
Author. National security and CBRN expert. "King of Nerve Agent Twitter" Ex US Army and USSS. Liveryman of London. 🇺🇸🇬🇧 dual citizen, Anglican, #NAFO.
twitter-thread.com/t/1466403809505288213