The C Team

Sh-Boom, Sh-Boom, Chemical warfare is back.

Yadada-dadada, dadada-da, Sh-Boom, Shhh...Boom!

OK, Not the eve of destruction but the day after, and it is all over, finished, done, kaput—though probably, here and there, it is possible to spot scattered maniacs happily dedicated to rearming for World War Four with sticks and stones. And yet somewhere, high above the carnage, some careful historian or ASCAP underling is attempting to give credit where it is due: Who, he asks, is the author of this mess?

Probably, he will scribble down Pentagon on the Western side and Pentagonsky or whatever (continued on page 138)The C Team(continued from page 105) on the other and that will take care of the boom, but what of the shhh—which, in case it has not been brought to your attention, is merely the sound fatal nerve gas makes when it causes tens of millions of human beings to be caught in the embarrassing position of jerking around on their backs with their limbs waving erratically in the poisoned air like so many Raid-beset Blatta orientalis under your kitchen sink? Should not the Pentagon be credited for that, too? No (nyet), it should not. The credit lines for World War Three will have to be awarded according to strict rules: You do not get credit for even a part of the end of the world as we know it unless you at some time seriously considered that the muck you were playing with would be used. Having your muck get a couple of brief plays as the flip side of Nuclear Holocaust just because you pushed that muck on the President of the United States so you could get bigger and bigger budget allocations—that won't do.

Now, there are men in uniform who are working on nuclear warfare, and they are serious (to say the very least). They figure that one day their stuff may come into play. Right or wrong, we do seem to be involved in a kind of schoolyard grin-down with the Russians, and if it turns out that more and more nuclear missiles and nuclear bombs won't prevent World War Three, then it is at least possible to say, "Well, back to the drawing board." Which is to say that our nuclear warriors may be cynical, but they are working from an idea—a hope, even. To compare them with the Pentagon's C Team (C is for chemicals, though the connotation of mediocrity has not gone unnoticed) would be strenuously unfair to all the serious people in our military establishment who have been staring fixedly at the next American battlefield since the last one didn't turn out so well.

What the C Team has been staring fixedly at is only a hot new way to spend up to 20 billion dollars. Since most of the money will come, as usual, from people who buy their own socks, it is possible to take it very personally. What we are talking about happens to be about the same as one fifth of this year's expected Federal deficit. Of course, the C Team does not propose blowing this in one shot. Probably, it will take ten years or longer, though current official estimates of what it will cost to replace our present nerve-gas weapons with shiny new ones are only a quarter as high.

When Richard Nixon stopped production of all chemical weapons in 1969, and then in 1975 when the U.S. finally got around to signing the 1925 Geneva Accord banning their first use (like almost everyone else, we retained our right to retaliate in kind), it was widely considered to be the end of the road for the Army's chemical corps. On the other hand, the kind of political muscle that for 50 years could keep us from signing a treaty we had proposed must have something to say for itself.

That muscle expressed itself again in 1981, when the Pentagon (A) persuaded President Reagan to OK the resumption of chemical-weapons production and (B) got Congress to approve money for a place to make the stuff by fast-balling the bill through Congress as part of a much larger military package. The plant, at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was supposed to produce what some witless Defense Department flack insists on calling, in print, the "binary family of nerve-gas weapons." What the binary part really means we shall shortly see, but what it is supposed to mean is a "safe" artillery shell or bomb in which the lethal ingredients stay unmixed until the weapon is fired. The family part refers to a new 155mm shell (Poppa Binary?) that is intended to deliver to the enemy a sufficient dose of what is called GB gas to cause him to act like everyone's favorite cockroach as it wanders into an insecticide zone, inhales and, in a matter of minutes, untouchingly dies; a 500-pound glide bomb called the Bigeye (Momma Binary, no doubt) that is meant to lay down a sticky, oil-thick blanket of the nerve agent known as VX, doing the same job on said Communist roaches as the GB, only with more persistence; finally, the pitter-patter of little binary feet, expected to be led off by a long-range missile intended to make life rather too interesting at Soviet ports, airfields and, perhaps, industrial cities, where other human cockroaches—plus subtactical dogs, cats and canaries—will find their bodies in the midst of a kind of infernal communications explosion.

Under your kitchen sink, that is precisely what happens to real cockroaches: Nerve gas was developed in 1936 by a German scientist doing, yes, insecticide research. He found a way to paralyze the enzyme controlling the cessation of message traffic across the synapse, the space between nerve endings. Convulsed by a flood of nonstop messages to their nervous systems, victims go to their reward maniacally switched on, like blinking, shitting, vomiting, sweating laboratory animals—it is a death whose only saving grace (for some) will be a persistent erection that outlasts asphyxiation to remain firmly in place even after burial. For those hoping to die with something more than a boot on, that thought may be pleasant. But since the same recipe exists in the Soviet arsenal, maybe not.

If that tableau seems to indicate that one day we will have us a nice, healthy nerve-gas war, the likelihood is not so at all. The Pentagon's C Team may not even have considered the possibility of use. Since those hoary days of World War One, when gas masks were being fitted for horses, its battles have tended to be budgetary, not military, and the agent most often discussed is neither GB nor VX but cold cash. Considering the fact that the Army's chemical lobby happens to conduct its affairs as though acting out a script of Heart of Darkness as rewritten for The Three Stooges ("The horror! The horror!"—but declaimed in a high, nasal giggle as a board is swung against someone's skull), it may be best to ignore Von Clausewitz, who said that the object of war is to impose one's will on the enemy, and have a look at Von Floorspace: The object of the peacetime Pentagon, into whose 6,500,000 square feet you could easily shoehorn several copies of the entire Federal legislative branch, has always been to impose its will on Congress. Which is—need I say it?—us.

Suddenly wide-awake, the 1982 Congress voted against giving the military funds to actually start making weapons (in the plant the 1981 Congress had approved for that purpose), because sufficient members of our sometimes comatose legislature did their homework and learned that the Army had been systematically leaving its chemical weapons (millions of shells, plus bombs, land mines, grenades) out in the rain to rust so that they could be declared non compos militiae and be replaced by new weapons that had never been tested—had never once been fired—and so might not even work, which hardly matters, because our allies do not want them on European soil, where a chemical war would probably take out some 4,000,000 to 40,000,000 civilians, all of them Europeans and most of them children. But such an investment in production may start a nerve-gas arms race with the Russians (who are not known to have added to their own chemical arsenal since 1970) that may, indeed, lead to those new weapons' being used—though in the event of a war they would have no effect whatsoever on troops wearing gas masks, protective clothing, gloves and bootees, because, as Arkansas Senator David Pryor noted somewhat sourly, "Nerve gas doesn't kill soldiers. It kills civilians." And, finally, does it or does it not seem that the Pentagon's campaign to get Congress to fork over money to replace weapons—of which it already has enough—comes tripping rather too merrily along on the heels of a State Department (continued on page 172)The C Team(continued from page 138) campaign to nail the Russians for using gas warfare in Southeast Asia and in Afghanistan, which campaign could be (1) the inexorable march of history, (2) coincidence, (3) absurd coincidence, (4) none of the above but something more sinister?

For answers, it may be worth while for those of you in possession of gas masks to put them on—not because of any danger but simply to protect yourselves against the stench—while we descend into the all-consuming comedic ineptitude of military-chemistry land to wonder, first off, If the stuff is so good, how come it hasn't been used on a real battlefield since World War One?

•

That question is so alarming to Pentagon chemocrats that they have devised a single answer: fear of retaliation. They hope that will end the discussion, but it won't. As Amoretta Hoeber, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army and the Pentagon's chief chemical theologian, has already tactlessly admitted, "Military commanders have little inclination to use any type of chemical weapons." That lack of interest has not had much to do with treaty obligations and far less to do with moral restraint. Perhaps the clearest indication of the military nonutility of gas came during the closing days of World War Two, when the least morally restrained individual in recent history, Adolf Hitler, who did not blink at using gas to asphyxiate millions of naked civilians, could not sell the idea to his general staff as a last-ditch effort to stop the Allied armies on their march to Berlin. With the exception of brilliantly executed surprise attacks on limited targets, there are, in fact, only two times when gas may be considered: when you're winning and it's not raining; when you're losing and ditto. In the former instance, there is no need, and in the latter, woe unto you. The Japanese, who in the Sino-Japanese war used gas against Chinese holdouts, later gave orders not to use it against the Americans, because, in the words of one historian, "They were generally unsatisfied with the performance of the chemical agents."

Ah, you say, but aren't the new nerve agents a hell of a lot more lethal than the mustard gas of World War Two? They are—breathing VX is 300 times more toxic; allowing it into your blood stream, 2000 times more toxic—but protective clothing is now so sophisticated that military planners talk about a less than five percent risk to troops, and that only if they suit up too slowly or tear their clothes. Until the new generation of hoodlike masks was developed, another risk was facial hair. When some Israeli units went into battle in 1973, soldiers were ordered to shave their beards to make a better seam between rubber and skin. However, protection is now considered complete. Saul Hormats, who for 12 years was in charge of the U.S. Army's chemical program, says, "Against a good mask, no gas is effective."

So for what, beyond the efficient removal from life of any civilians sufficiently unlucky to be downwind, is gas good?

In a battle between technically advanced forces, not much. Where each side has full protection and the ability to send enough gas going the other way so that the enemy will be forced to wear it, chemical warfare becomes a matter of compelling the enemy into the same sort of hobbled degradation as your own troops are stuck with. That situation, like trading queens in a chess game, is not something any commander wishes, for one specific reason: Full protective gear all but destroys the chain of command. A secret weapon that knocks out radio communication can be circumvented by whispered orders passed by motorcycle runners dashing down from division, but once those rubberized, carnal snouts are in place—once everyone is decked out in what one colonel has called "nightmare drag"—even your own sergeant, ordering you to keep your dumb head down, sounds like someone 40 miles away eating oatmeal. During one exercise in full chemical regalia, U.S. officers were spotted throwing stones at U.S. soldiers to get their attention. A battlefield where captains are indistinguishable from corporals (also from the enemy) is going to call for a large supply of stones. If that seems like The Three Stooges aided and abetted by Abbott and Costello doing "Who's on first?" directed by Jerry Lewis falling down a flight of stairs as Laurel and Hardy blink their way into toyland, be advised that the toy in question is still poison gas, which is fatal to people reading a newspaper in the same country but not dressed for Halloween. Although it is unlawful to test the stuff on human beings, nerve gas has been shown, to paraphrase tooth-paste tubes, to be an effective form of life-preventive chemical that can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of zap. In fact, applied zap is what got us out of the nerve-gas business into which we are now again being dragged. In 1968, a faulty valve in a spray plane released enough VX to knock off more than 6000 sheep in Utah.

Although it could have been worse—Salt Lake City was only 80 miles away—the situation was bad enough to get President Nixon to note the beginning of what would become a frenzied national resistance to anything that smacked of poisoned air, soil or water and to take us out of the chemical business. The U.S. stopped producing nerve gas and nerve-gas weapons—it was considered that we had more than enough, anyway—and the Army chemical corps was allowed only one last gasp. That was the Vietnam war, for which the chemical corps bought enough riot-control gas to blanket 80,000 square miles of a country with only 66,000 square miles to its name, though all the uncontrolled rioting was Stateside. After that, the chemical corps was disbanded and the chemical-warfare school at Fort McClellan, Alabama, was shut down. Even Nixon could hardly have predicted a Reagan Administration that would bring both back to life, with soldierly advertisements announcing Your career as a chemical officer and the Army pressing Congress for funds to make new weapons that are merely what the irrepressible Amoretta Hoeber, telling the truth yet again, calls "an old weapon in a new package emphasizing safety and security."

Of course, no weapon may ever be considered truly salable without the sine qua non of all U.S. military theory, which brings to defense analysis the doctrinal sophistication of second-grade readers who move their lips: See, Jack, see, Jane. Russia has gas. Russia has lots of gas. Bad Russia, bad. Come, Jack, come, Jane. Let's get gas. Let's get lots of gas. Ah, but there are always skeptical second graders skulking about who refuse to move their lips. They are induced to turn the page and see the picture. Look, Jack, look, Jane. Russia is using gas.

•

Perhaps, but if so, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have spent a lot of time and money not proving it. Beyond the sorry image of then—Secretary of State Alexander Haig standing up and accusing the Russians of using "yellow rain" on assorted Southeast Asians and for proof holding up a bit of leaf and stalk and saying "See?" the unfortunate fact is that something possibly is being used—an independent Canadian commission now says that at least some of those terror weapons have been mycotoxins, chemical agents derived from a fungus, along with the now-traditional riot-control agents; an equally independent Australian team suggests that the toxin samples are deliberate fakes. In any case, there's been no proof to connect it to the Soviets. The same toxins are easy enough for the Vietnamese themselves to produce. American and British students have produced them in bathtubs. And our blaming the Soviets for what their Vietnamese clients are doing comes uncomfortably close to the Soviets' blaming Israel's Lebanese war on us, along with Turkish political torture and a register of South American villainy too lengthy to write down. Yet where the Russians are vulnerable—in Afghanistan, into which the CIA runs agents from Pakistan on a timetable that Amtrak might envy—there has been no evidence at all. Not one poison-gas shell or shell fragment has been brought out, though, again, riot-control agents have been used widely. However unfairly, the Soviets' use of various forms of tear gas in their own Vietnam-style muck-about brings with it disturbing echoes of the original, wherein Viet Cong were flushed, coughing, from tunnels and caves so that they could be more efficiently bombed. Worse, despite a $100,000 reward for evidence of a Soviet yellow-rain-tinged shell fragment discovered in Laos or Cambodia and mercenaries of many a stripe looking to find it—we may safely assume that a similar reward is out for Afghanistan evidence—nothing has surfaced. Nor have mass graves been found for the tens of thousands of victims in question; a yellow-rain investigator working with State Department funds recently admitted that the casualty rate in Thailand is about 60 cases a month, though he did speculate that "the worst cases don't come out."

What is perhaps most alarming about tying the yellow-rain controversy to a Congressional go-ahead for binaries is that your real Cold Warrior, without much to gain whether or not a lot of people in uniform get funded, looks at the matter rather differently. One such is ex—Army major Gary Crocker, now a senior intelligence analyst in the State Department, who has not let years of trying to nail the Russians on toxins interfere with his judgment about battlefields. "If you were in a situation where the Soviets were overrunning Europe," he told me, "you'd be pretty close to a situation where nuclear—not chemical—weapons were to be used." Crocker, as we shall see, is correct, though the C Team keeps throwing the possibility of chemical war at us as though the possibility of nuclear war did not exist.

To that end, Congress has been bombarded by a wealth of statistical innuendo and fabrication about the strength and purpose of the Soviet Chemical Corps. This scary outfit, whose numbers slide from 50,000 to as high as 100,000 men (depending, it seems, on how much Congress must be scared), is thrown at the legislature unflaggingly accompanied by 8" x 10" glossies of one Lieutenant General V. K. Pikalov, its commander, who is considered so serious a threat just glaring out at you that you're not supposed to ask what the purpose of the Soviet Chemical Corps is. According to Professor John Erickson of the University of Edinburgh, an acknowledged expert on the Soviet war machine, its battlefield job is to decontaminate men, vehicles and weaponry. Other experts have noted that its function in the front line—where the U.S. keeps its own chemical-defense specialists—is to work sensors that will give advanced warning about a gas attack, so that masks and suits may be employed in time. As it turns out, Russian chemical capability is no myth, but when Dr. Theodore S. Gold, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense with responsibility for chemical affairs, went before the House Appropriations Committee last summer, you could look hard and long for full disclosure.

"The Soviet Union has large and well-trained chemical-warfare forces in all services," he told the committee members. "These Soviet troops, comprising more than 60,000 active personnel, are one of four specialized branches reporting directly to the Ministry of Defense." Now watch these moves. "We do not know very well the size of the Soviets' chemical-munitions stockpile; quantitative estimates of the Soviet stockpile are difficult to make. However, even the low estimate of usable agent tons provides a substantial military capability." In English: We don't know how much they have, but it must be a lot, so much so that only a dozen sentences later....

"The Soviet Union today possesses a decisive military advantage because of the large asymmetry in chemical capabilities."

Oh.

But never mind. The mechanism at work here is not logic. It is fear. As a major critic of the Pentagon's binary push, Professor Matthew Meselson of Harvard has said, "It is prudence, not definite knowledge, that requires that we assume the existence of a substantial Soviet chemical-weapons capability."

Or, as a key Congressional aide told me, "The question is not 'Do the Russians have enough?'—it's 'Do we?' "

As Jimmy Carter said, "One of the most serious problems we have is the inclination on the part of our military leaders to seek more money by constantly denigrating America's formidable military capability." Yes, and another is their confounded inability even to do that right. And maybe one other is that the Russians may not be far from noticing.

Wherever I went in official Washington, the Russian face I kept seeing was not General Pikalov's, dour and threatening yellow rain, but the very real Slavic cheekbones of a tall, well-set-up man in his 30s whom I have taken to calling Agent Cardboard Suitsky. Wherever I went, he went, both of us standing in line at the copying machines of official and unofficial Washington; so before long, I got to know only too well the way his hair was cut straight across over his collar, though I soon tired of trying to figure out whether his corrugated jacket and pants were brown, gray, green or what. Suitsky and I spent hours going through unclassified Defense Department documents—though he spoke the language clumsily, his reading English was apparently just good enough—and once, when he opened his attaché case, I happened to see what it contained: zero. Not even lunch. Operative theory; well, everyone else was carrying one. Now, can a Soviet intelligence apparatus that smart be so dumb as not to know that an Army willing to spend billions to build new chemical weapons that have never, ever been fired may, indeed, be the kind of Army it could be a pleasure fighting a war against?

•

Of course, if the Russians are too lazy to attempt the simple analysis of who's pulling what strings for chemical weapons in the U.S. and why, it is possible that they've simply accepted the analyses of our allies. A recent pro-chemical-warfare study by a British expert, Squadron Leader A. F. Graveley of the Royal Air Force, set about explaining the binary issue in a British military periodical to which the Soviets, no doubt, subscribe. "Within the United States itself," Graveley writes,

the affair of the Dugway sheep and the rise of the ecology movement pushed CW even further up the unpopularity table. In the face of this barrage of criticism, the Pentagon cast around for a less contentious way of maintaining a chemical capability. By chance, work was already under way to produce the so-called binary weapons.... This was thought likely to allay public fears about the storage, transportation and disposal of chemical weapons. Accordingly, virtually the entire procurement effort was switched from the maintenance of existing stockpiles to the development of binary replacements.

That suggests but does not detail what really happened, a bit of bureaucratic sleight of hand worth dwelling on. Although binary technology had been knocking around the Pentagon corridors since 1949, the ecological writing on the wall caused the Army to revise its constantly stated claim that nerve-gas stocks were safe. Suddenly, they were unsafe— and had to be replaced. Having decided to go to binaries but with neither Congressional approval nor even Presidential encouragement, the clever fellows on the C Team decided not to bother maintaining the chemical-weapons stockpile of more than 3,000,000 rounds. Binaries would soon be on the way in, see, and, of course, letting the stuff rust unpicturesquely away in Utah, Arkansas and Alabama would sure as hell make a good reason they ought to be on the way in.

If other commands had been able to get away with that, the Army C Team was—as usual—caught with its chemical pants down. For a Comptroller General's report to Congress on the stockpile, investigators from the General Accounting Office (GAO) pulled a nasty and actually visited storage sites. "Little has been done to maintain the stockpile in a serviceable condition or to restore the unserviceable portions," the report noted. "Using anticipated approval of the binary program as a reason for not maintaining the stockpile is inconsistent with sound management. Lack of maintenance could seriously compromise U.S. retaliatory capabilities."

Thus, as far back as 1977, the same chemical warriors so worried about deterrence had been discovered systematically trashing their own stockpile. The GAO indicated that this might not be the best reason in the world to approve new weapons and suggested a degree of neglect that outside the military might be termed criminal: "The true condition of the stockpile is unknown. Its serviceability may have been greatly understated. For example, many of the unserviceable classifications are a result of minor nonfunctional defects, such as container rust, which do not affect usability. Also... entire production lots are classified unserviceable for a few defects."

If the true condition was not known then, it is today. Under pressure, the Army found the time to take care of its chemical stockpile and—guess what?—according to the Army's own 1982 Surveillance Program for Lethal Chemical Agents and Munitions, all lots of 155mm and eight-inch artillery shells are now condition Code A: They "fully meet all military characteristics, issuable without limit or restriction."

Does that stop the Army? Nope. It currently says that inside the shell casings, the chemicals are turning into something non-military, like, at a guess, chicken soup. In a panel discussion on the binary issue, Harvard's Meselson challenged the Defense Department's Theodore Gold to consider methods of testing for chicken-soupization that might be less costly than assuming it and chucking the lot. Gold did not dignify that cheap-skate approach with a reply. A check with Saul Hormats, who developed the weapons, confirmed what becomes a kind of normative ugly doubt about the C Team's forthrightness. If tests show that the chemicals are breaking down, Hormats said, their effective life can be extended at least 20 years by adding stabilizers. Chemist Meselson suggested that the nerve agents might last indefinitely, "like cognac."

Does that stop the Army? Lately, the C Team has been murmuring about "leakers" among the stocks of 500-pound Weteye bombs. Utah Senator Jake Garn, in whose state a great many Weteyes are stored, told the Senate Appropriations Committee in May 1982 that the matter was "a nonissue. The few leakers that they found were greatly played up ... and never were there any leakers that were outside the canister in which the Weteye bomb was encased." Garn said he was so sure the bombs were not dangerous that "I will walk in any one of those bunkers any day of the week." If from this Garn appears to be some sort of too-sweet binary opponent, not so. He favors binaries but—perhaps because he is not being paid to favor them—favors the truth as well.

Along with the business of leakers, the Army has actually managed to convince journalists from such insignificant papers as The Washington Post and The New York Times that the elements (precursors, in chemicalese) that are to make up binary nerve gas are "nonlethal," "nontoxic," "harmless" and even "benign." Yes, well, the active ingredient in one of those gases is so benign that its vapors cause gastric distress, a skin rash and difficulties in breathing, while the precursor in the other is as harmless as strychnine; the stuff also eats through anything not coated with Teflon. If that seems unadorned tomfoolery, it is as nought when you really get down to examining almost anything having to do with the Army's chemical program, which has been marked by such a god-awful lack of smarts that it is actually possible to feel embarrassed before Agent Cardboard Suitsky as he bumps into you here and there in Washington. If Big Brother really is watching as the U.S. plays with its chemistry set, we ought to be ashamed. Consider BZ.

In 1961, the Army bought some 50 tons of that substance, which may be termed LSD in uniform. The idea was to cause the enemy to, well, get high. It was such a swell idea that the Army built 1500 BZ bombs and stockpiled them at Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Then, perhaps because production workers and line engineers at the factory were acting kind of strange (strange enough, some of them, to have to be wrestled away to padded cells for up to 12 hours at a time), the Army thought it might be a good idea to run tests on volunteers to see just what they had. The tests were completed in 1969 and were studied diligently for seven years. It took that long to realize that maybe BZ was not the battlefield weapon of tomorrow, or even of yesterday. The bombs were declared obsolete. Another five years went by before the Army could figure out what to do with them. No, they have not been dropped into the Pentagon's water supply; they are going to be burned at Pine Bluff arsenal, and it's going to cost only $50,000,000, which is a piddling $40,000,000 more than they cost to produce.

Exceptional? Consider chemical defense, where our needs are critical. A study released by the GAO last July noted that the Army was fielding mobile collective-protection units in Europe "without the vehicles required to move them from one location to another. Consequently, it is unlikely that the units could be moved once they are set up in wartime." Of course, we could get lucky; the Russians might gas us where the units are already parked. On the other hand, maybe not.

In that case, it might be good to suit up—but, according to the GAO, there has not been "adequate guidance on when to dispose of clothing that has exceeded its shelf life [or] wartime procedures for changing clothing in a contaminated environment." That's not to say that there aren't plans. Consider, if you will, this exchange of three years ago between Representative Larry McDonald and General Frederick J. Kroesen, who recently retired as commander in chief of the U.S. Army in Europe:

Mc Donald: Do you have any rapid decontamination washing process, or do [you do] the decontamination process out in the field?

Kroesen: The manner we are pursuing right now in Europe, sir, is to have identified for unit commanders the location of all available washing facilities, such as Schnellwasch stations, automobile-drive-in washing facilities.

Mc Donald: Our military is going to be able to requisition the civilian automobile-washing stations; is that what we are planning on using?

Kroesen: In times of crisis, we need to know where those ... facilities are.

Mc Donald: Good God.

Amen. But there's more to come. According to the GAO, the "Air Force is fielding a fourth suit [British, because ours tend to burn; cost: $24,000,000] without providing a clean area for decontaminated personnel to even change from suit one to suit two." As it turns out, that may be a good idea, because the Air Force's collective-protection unit requires the use of an oil absorber called fuller's earth to decontaminate personnel. But "because the Air Force lacks the authority to procure fuller's earth ... Kitty Litter is being used instead." The GAO is not trying to indicate that airmen are going to die of embarrassment but of confusion. The instructions don't say Kitty Litter; they say fuller's earth. Then again, embarrassment is a possibility.

Even something as basic as gas masks does not seem to be immune. DARCOM, the Army's Matériel Development and Readiness Command, has spent 13 years (and $38,000,000) trying to get the bugs out of its new model. Well, no, the XM30 doesn't slip off your head. But it does come apart in hot, humid weather; the faceplate is easily scratched, which makes sighting your weapon a bit dicey in bright sunlight; and the thing can't be decontaminated when fouled by nerve agents in the Soviet arsenal—though that should not matter much, because the faceplate tends to fall out every 46 hours. According to a reliable source, the mask the XM30 is to replace lasts 1000 hours.

Sometimes, it seems that anything connected with chemical warfare has a better than fair chance of not turning out right. One of the papers I curled up with in a military library in Washington was "Chemical Weapons: Problems and Policy Formation," put out by the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College. As usual, across from me was Comrade Cardboard Suitsky. He probably even saw me cop it. In the interests of national pride, I am ready to plead guilty to (and invention of) a new misdemeanor: embarrassment-motivated theft of document. Not only is page iv missing when it should be the back of page iii but the back of page iii is just plain old iii upside down. Does Suitsky know about the Kitty Litter?

Almost certainly, he knows about the M-8 chemical detector, a machine designed to give our troops advance warning of odorless, colorless chemical peril. Some 21,000 M-8s are deployed, and they may detect nerve gas, but one thing that is certain to set them off is the presence of diesel or jet exhausts. Now, although it is good to know if you're in the presence of a Mack truck or an F-16 fighter plane with its engine running, the Army thought it might be confusing if you were to find yourself around a military vehicle at the time of a gas attack. To fix that, $55,000,000 has been set aside for modification kits for delivery in 1984. Yes, well, but. Regarding the improved device, a Pentagon official told Congress: "If it is stuck behind the exhaust of a truck, it will still go off." Never mind: In a closed hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee last year, a general confided that there is an alternative, a litmus-paper kind of thing that is serenely unaffected by friendly military engines. Unfortunately, it is affected by nerve gas about the same time you are. "You are in contamination before you realize it," the general said. "Unless you promptly mask, you become a tragedy."

Perhaps the biggest, smelliest potential tragedy producer the Army chemical people have come up with is the infamous TAB (trimedoxine, atropine, benactyzine) injector. Discovered by the Israelis on the battlefield after their 1973 war, it was brought to the attention of the Americans, who realized immediately that the big, bad chemical bear had the drop on us again. All the U.S. had as a partial antidote to nerve gas was a heap of old injectors full of atropine. When warned of an attack for which he was not effectively prepared, our soldier was supposed to use the atropine in order to block the effect of nerve gas in his overworked synapses. But if the Russians had this TAB stuff, gee whiz, maybe we should have it, too. And have it we did, to the extent of millions of injectors. Phew. Close call. Now, years later, it has been discovered that shooting TAB into soldiers has the same effect on them as BZ. It makes them hallucinate so wildly that pilots compelled to use TAB were given fresh instructions: (1) Immediately (2) bail (3) out. The Pentagon has now ordered all TAB injectors replaced with ... atropine.

Ah, but doesn't that mean that the great big Russian chemical bear is equally dumb? After all, the Egyptians got the stuff from the Soviets, no? No. According to Meselson, the Egyptian general in charge of chemical defense happened to notice that all the atropine he had acquired from the Russians was marked Expired. Although the stuff might still have been good, he decided to find something else on the open market. TAB is what he found—in Bulgaria. Maybe it works for Bulgarians. For Americans (and for Israelis, who are now getting rid of it), it causes hallucinations, though in the bizarre world of the C Team, one hallucination more or less might not be noticed. But when the Pentagon tried to sneak through honest computers, nobody talked about hallucination.

•

What, you may well ask, is an honest computer? For a time last year, the same question exercised Congress, which then decided not to bother. The C Team, see, has this honest computer. The idea was to take all the data they could think up about binary artillery shells and binary bombs and feed it into the computer, and if the computer tells the Pentagon, "Hey, this binary is gonna work!" then, by God, that's it. Considering the honesty of its computer, the C Team still cannot fathom why Congress won't hand over the money to make the weapon the honest computer says is OK.

To find out how accurate computer testing can be, I spoke with an engineer with a doctorate in chemistry, a man whose firm is regularly employed by the Army to design computer tests. He said that such tests were good only for preliminary studies. "If you don't imagine something and feed that into the computer when you make your computer model, then you're not testing anything, really. You need the real thing." Of course, the Pentagon is forbidden by law to test the real thing in the U.S., and testing done with simulants that closely approximate the molecular structure of various chemicals has a way of being unconvincing, if not laughable.

Another engineer, no longer connected with the U.S. chemical program, merely smiled sheepishly (on second thought, perhaps not sheepishly) when he admitted what his working group had found to substitute for nerve gas. "All our research," he said, "was done with saccharin."

Turning its back on skepticism from the scientific community, the C Team has also managed to repudiate its own scientists regarding dependence on anything that hasn't been adequately tested—and here we are talking dependence, because binaries would replace the current rounds, which have been extensively tested. In a formerly confidential 1974 report, Edgewood Arsenal's Simulants / Simulation Advisory Panel cautioned that "field tests of the XM687 with GB [that's the 155mm binary nerve-gas shell] must be undertaken before it can be regarded as a proven round. Without such tests serious questions on dissemination effectiveness ... will be unanswered. To be of greatest value to the XM687 program, the field tests should be undertaken as early as possible. Thus, the current ban on open-air tests with GB should be reconsidered." Logical, but the Pentagon was hardly going to try for open-air tests in an America where people were munching granola as they jogged in and out of health-food stores. Instead, it went blithely ahead pushing an untested artillery shell with the idea of handing the thing to some artilleryman in time of war. This may terrify the artilleryman, but it is not expected to frighten the Russians. As Senator Gary Hart put it, "Untested weapons do not make strong deterrents."

Compared with that, other reservations about the binaries look minor, though each seems enough to disqualify any other weapons system. Binaries, for instance, tend to complicate battle, because the two parts have to be assembled on site, at up to three minutes per projectile under optimum conditions (not at night, not under fire and like that). Because binary projectiles must mix two ingredients, the projectile gives up as much as a third of its load to the mechanism and not the gas. Because each projectile carries less pay load, more projectiles will be needed, consequently straining resupply from the U.S.; also, binaries have a way of being self-signaling to the enemy: Because they don't sound like the current gas round, which sounds like a normal high-explosive shell, the enemy will be warned to don protective gear in time. Likewise, it's suspected the binary shell gives off an odor—the present shell does not announce itself with bad breath—and, if binaries do work, it is expected to take five seconds for the two elements in the shell to become VX, meaning that any target less than five seconds away may not get hit with nerve agent at all but with a batch of rubbing alcohol and something else. Chemists are not sure how stable the mix will be after the optimum mix time—so targets had better be hit five seconds bang on.

Finally, if we do go to binaries, something will have to be done with the standard rounds they are to replace. Gold of the Defense Department says that the technology is there to destroy the current nerve-gas rounds—all that's missing is the money. A pilot plant to "demilitarize" bulk stocks is now working, but, as Hoeber says, "At the current rate, it will take many, many years to 'demil' just the currently obsolete munitions.... Solving that problem may well be primarily a question of money." Fair enough. First, the Army allows the deterioration of its serviceable weapons; then, found out, it has to pay money to restore them to condition Code A; then it wants to spend up to 15 billion dollars in, uh, money over the next decade (up to $500,000 per agent-ton times the 30,000 agent tons the Joint Chiefs of Staff say they would need) building new chemical weapons that we don't need so that it can spend more money (four billion dollars was mentioned in Army Times) neutralizing the old weapons that the Army itself admits are still good but says may go bad. Is that only 19 billion dollars? Either cost overruns (standard Pentagon procedure) or the price of new weapons and/or defensive equipment needed as a result of a U.S.-Russian chemical-arms race could bring it to 20 billion dollars—if not more. Well, it's only money: ours.

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But, all right, we build these new shells—what to do with them? Why, send them to Europe, of course. Unfortunately, the European nations, displaying an unreasonable sensitivity to their own safety—and, further, an illogical inclination toward believing that deployment might end up leading to use—have, one by one, informed the U.S. that they do not want binaries. France, which has its own nerve-gas weapons, is not militarily a part of NATO, and the Germans, who don't want the chemical weapons already on their soil, are hoping to hell that no move by the U.S. to replace them with "safer" forms of civilian asphyxiation will bring the subject up in the press. The question remains, then: What will we do with them? At a Senate hearing in May 1982, Appropriations Committee chairman Mark Hatfield came close to losing his patience on that subject while questioning the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (atomic energy) Richard Wagner, and Richard Burt, the latter then the State Department's loudest drumbeater for Soviet culpability in the use of yellow rain.

Wagner: We believe, Senator Hatfield, that the purpose of the weapons is deterrence....

Hatfield: That is still not my question. My question is simply that these weapons, unlike many other weapons, to be effective, are required to be placed in an advanced deployed position, which would be in Europe.

Wagner: Just before they are used, they must certainly be there where they must be used.

Hatfield: I understand. We have not yet determined what the opinion of our allies is....

Burt: Mr. Chairman, we simply don't see the need or the necessity to do that at present.... Since it is a totally hypothetical issue, they have not told us and we have not asked.

Sure, hypothetical as all get out, except that it might be good to have some place to put hundreds of thousands of new shells. In the spring of 1982, Hoeber asserted in public that Great Britain should be compelled to accept cruise missiles stationed there with chemical warheads. She made her statement to a correspondent for Reuters. The ensuing noise in the U.K. could be heard as far off as Washington.

Has the U.S. been pressuring its principal NATO partner to accept its chemical arsenal? Julian Perry Robinson, senior fellow in the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex and one of the few recognized nonmilitary experts on who has what in chemical warfare, says that in the U.K., "The government will tell Parliament that no, there has been no such request; but a level into the administration, down into the brigadiers and colonels, you'll find rather a different picture—rather a lot of nudge-and-wink-type thing but nothing committal." I suggested to Robinson that there must be something going on. The binary program indicates deployment of hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds, bombs and missiles. They must be headed somewhere.

"Well, I'm not sure you've got things the right way around," Robinson said in a tone that signified that he was talking to a hopeless naïf. "The chemical corps has the need, for institutional reasons, for weapons; otherwise, its raison d'être starts getting called into question."

Starts? It was blooming called into question and it did blinking stop existing.

"Well," Robinson explained, showing infinite patience, "it fought that off, largely on the strength of the binary program. Then, you've got to have somewhere to keep [the weapons] physically."

Are you saying that ...?

"You can keep them in Utah or Colorado or whatever, but then people are going to start laughing at you and saying you don't really need those weapons at all, and what good is a lot of nerve gas in the middle of a desert or whatever? Well, then you've got to demonstrate that there is a need, in Europe."

Excuse me? Administrative need? Bureaucratic lust? Those are reasons? Well, maybe not good ones, though they do seem to be the only ones around. But how do they hold up? For an answer to that one, I paid a call on the one man who would be sure to know: Dr. Strangegloves.

•

Strangegloves is, of course, not his name, but it will do. By profession, he is a defense analyst, which is to say that he is paid a great deal of money to attempt to see through what both sides are doing or might do, considering that each has the stuff to do it with. Strangegloves' stock in trade is a deep personal detachment, and if he is American, he is American the way Kissinger or Brzezinski is: American by choice, as once there were Romans by choice who grew up in some odd corner of the empire, saw carnage and suffering at rather close range and figured it was safest at the center. Then the center was Rome. Now it is Washington. Although Strangegloves manages to sound like Walter Matthau doing Henry Kissinger doing Walter Matthau doing Henry Kissinger, what he says has elegance. He is fond of elegance.

"Chemical weapons are going to be," he says, "verrrry important. You have noticed there is a complete lack of enthusiasm in the military at large? Yet there are formidable Soviet forces. But there is a problem. We know they have pervasive capabilities, perrrrvasive, but those that we have seen always have been defensive. Always. And we have verry good evidence that they have quite a lot of chemical weaponry stored. But, alas, you do need training to wage offensive warfare. This is a mystery, wouldn't you say?"

We've never seen them carrying out offensive training?

"Neverrr." He waits me out.

Finally, I give in, falling unwittingly into his pattern of speech. To this mystery, I ask, there is a solution?

"An elegant solution," he says. "In the Soviet system, offensive use is now limited to special forces: They treat nuclear and chemical warfare as one, calling them both weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear weapons, therefore, are under K.G.B. control. So are chemical weapons. And the K.G.B. does have the offensive capacity: the K.G.B., the GRU and the Air Assault Brigades—commando troops under the K.G.B., specialists, but not found among the 180 divisions at large that are always spoken of."

I ask for the scenario. Defense analysts maintain scenarios the way other men have this thing for the redhead in 2-B.

"This is the scenario," Strangegloves says, all but rubbing his hands together. "Picture a midnight classic assault by special forces under K.G.B. control on selected targets, using chemical weapons. Selected targets. Because chemical weapons have been used, NATO counterattacks on a broad front; that is, against the 180 Soviet divisions. Ah, but these are totally defended! What you have here is not a blitzkrieg along a broad front but paralyzing surprise strikes."

On what?

"NATO airfields. The Soviets, you see, have no great respect for our ground forces, but they are terribly worried about our air capabilities. They will use chemical weapons to kill pilots. Aircraft can be re-supplied and airfields repaired, but pilots are irreplaceable. An elegant assault."

Perhaps, but it is a nasty elegance and, worse, it makes sense. In the matter of taking out pilots, the Russians will have far fewer problems than does the U.S. Should they wish to take out airmen—and not air bases—all they might have to do is drive through the gates in a laundry van or a garbage truck. The level of security surrounding the more than 400 U.S. nuclear-capable fighter bombers stationed in Europe is not known (the Air Force didn't want me snooping around), nor is it known for the 28 Tactical Air Command fighter squadrons stationed there (ditto). But something is known of what passes for security at home. According to Congressional testimony last year, a deputy director of the GAO found that protection for several hundred planes at the Army airfield at Fort Bragg was left to a gate guard and a one-person patrol during each shift. But, you say, surely in Europe, especially in Germany, bang on the front line....

Don't say it. Listen, instead, to the curious tale of Brian P. Fentiman, a private first class whose job it was to prepare orders for personnel of the 709th Military Police Battalion wishing to travel from Frankfurt to Berlin. To help Fentiman and others like him, the Army provided a poster showing how to prepare the orders. On the poster was a life-size photograph of a military I.D. card with the word Specimen where the photo would normally go. Fentiman was intrigued. He cut the card out of the poster, pasted his own photo over Specimen, typed out his particulars and signed it. Of course, it had nothing on the back, so Fentiman, an enterprising type, merely slipped it behind a clear plastic window in his wallet and began walking in and out of "various high-security military installations [in] Heidelberg," including the Keyes Building, wherein sat General Kroesen. "If I were a terrorist," says Fentiman, who received a commendation for exposing the lax security, "I could have murdered General Kroesen."

"To the Pentagon," says Strangegloves, "defense is not bureaucratically sexy."

Speculation about what would really happen if the great Russian bear launched a chemical attack in Europe has always had to face a sad predictability. Unprepared, we would be zapped. Worse, in the words of Hormats, "Retaliation in kind would be a symbolic gesture that would hurt only our allies' civilian population. You don't respond to a horror like a nerve-gas attack with a symbolic gesture.... If they use gas, it's for real."

To discover what might happen if the Soviet Union did, indeed, launch a chemical attack, it is necessary to have a peek at the first top-secret global war game undertaken by the U.S. Government since 1956. It occurred in the spring of 1982.

Directed by former Secretary of State William P. Rogers, who acted as President, and by Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, who played Vice-President, it was called—in case you, too, have wondered who really runs this country—Ivy League. For a game, it was rather realistic, with more than 1000 civilian and military players—including two Reagan Cabinet officers—being moved around the world, while Reagan and Vice-President George Bush (who got to choose their own stand-ins) and Haig, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, National Security Advisor William P. Clark, Jr., and other officials looked on. It lasted five days, by the end of which time the Soviets, using missiles, had managed to drop some 5000 megatons of destruction on the U.S., abolishing Washington, killing the President—Helms, as Vice-President, took over in what has been called the Doomsday Plane, a specially equipped Boeing 747—and ultimately making a bloody mess of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Details are obscured beneath a cloak of security that could cover Indianapolis, but one thing is known: Chemicals came early into play.

According to the single source cleared to talk about the war game, after relations between the two countries had deteriorated to the point at which U.S. forces came under attack in Europe, South Korea and Southwest Asia, war was declared. Immediately, chemical weapons were used on U.S. forces overseas, resulting in heavy casualties (to the Pentagon, defense is not bureaucratically sexy, amen). Now, class, was the U.S. reaction (A) chemical counterattack, (B) tactical nuclear response, (C) a mad rush for Schnellwasch stations, (D) none of the above, (E) all of the above?

Sorry, the correct answer is (B) tactical nuclear response, which led soon enough to bigger and better blasts, wherein the entire question of gas warfare became as outdated as, well, gas warfare. It is not known whether or not the U.S. bothered to forward deploy its chemical weaponry at all. Hell, it could have been raining. Chemicals just do not work well in the rain. It happens to rain a lot in Europe. Somehow, your garden-variety, war-fighting, hell-for-leather general is unlikely to see the joke: war called on account of rain. From the moment that this war went chemical, then, it went nuclear. In what can only be described as the highest-intensity signal to the Russians since the Kennedy-Khrushchev glare-down over Soviet missiles in Cuba, President Reagan made a conference call to all the Ivy League players, telling them, "The lessons learned will help us prove that our adversaries have nothing to gain by such an attack."

In case the Soviets were not tapping the line, Reagan later made the statement public. Could this be the same man who had given approval, for the first time in more than a decade, for the U.S. to begin the process of making new chemical weapons? If our response is to be "more than symbolic"—if it is to be nuclear—then spending billions for binary weapons that will not be used in order to replace current weapons that are adequate but will not be used, either, becomes something more than a non sequitur of almost cosmic proportions: It verges on doing violence to American political self-respect.

On top of that, it endangers any chance of controlling what must be the most despicable of tactical weaponry ever. Even nuclear warfare kills some soldiers; chemical battle in Europe will avoid them. These useless 155mm artillery shells, untested but ultimately ineffective against prepared Soviet troops, and the new Bigeye bomb, also untested but certain, if it does work, to cause wholesale destruction of the innocent, because there is no way you can drop a bomb and know which way the wind will be blowing when it falls—this concoction brought forth out of the sterile lust of the Pentagon's chemical bureaucracy, stimulating itself with a public-relations job that blames the Soviets for what the Vietnamese are doing in Southeast Asia and for what the CIA has not been able to prove the Soviets are doing in Afghanistan—this poisonmongering now threatens whatever chance the U.S. and the Soviet Union have to outlaw the stuff.

With a biological-weapons treaty agreed upon since 1975 (U.S. and Russian biological and toxic weapons are now considered "destroyed"—though defensive research continues and laboratory samples can breed war-level quantities in the space of a month), both countries have been meeting off and on to find some way to dump chemicals, too. On-site inspection, which the Soviets resist, remains the problem. However, last summer, for the first time, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, in a rare Russian initiative, formally proposed the "possibility of carrying out systematic international on-site inspections." Unfortunately, on-site may end up simply meaning what the Soviets call "national means of verification," or, "Trust me, I'll inspect myself." Also being considered is mutual witnessing of chemical-stocks destruction. But, as Crocker of the State Department says rather glumly, "Even if the Russians were to agree to get rid of stocks, you still should reach a point of on-site inspection, but they've never permitted that." Worse, I tell him, there's nothing to prevent the Soviets (or the U.S.) from destroying 90 percent of what each has and withholding the nastiest ten percent, which is all that would be needed for a crippling strike. And were all to be destroyed, the closed nature of Soviet society would mean that chemicals could bo immediately put together in existing chemical plants and secretly loaded in existing munitions factories—taking us back to where we started.

Which is where we sit, staring into cold coffee in the State Department cafeteria, until Crocker half-smiles and purses his lips. "There is a scheme," he says slowly, "not to operate on banning the agents but to outlaw defensive equipment, gas masks, clothing, decontamination." He pauses. "Two superpowers bare-ass, with no protection. It is kind of interesting, isn't it?"

"Victims go to their reward maniacally switched on, like blinking, vomiting, sweating animals."

"The Army chemical corps was allowed only one last gasp. That was the Vietnam war...."