The morning of November 7, 1952, was cloudless in Tooele, Utah, with a slight chill in the air. From the north, wind whispered across the Dugway Proving Ground, a vast Army facility in the Great Salt Lake Desert. A jet sped across the sky. Its wing tanks were filled with a hundred gallons of sarin—a colorless, odorless nerve agent many times more lethal than cyanide. The pilot had been ordered to spray the deadly chemical over a target site in the remote proving ground, but at 8:29, before the mission was completed, the aircraft malfunctioned. Its tanks, still filled with ninety gallons of the nerve agent, were jettisoned at two thousand feet. When they smashed into the salt-encrusted earth, they burst, spreading a high concentration of sarin across thirty-eight thousand square feet of desert. For the purpose of the test, the chemical had been tinted with red dye. When an Army inspection and decontamination crew rushed to the scene, it found the area suffused with a scarlet mist. One crewmember was so severely poisoned that the Army decided to study him; no American exposed to the chemical had ever come so close to death.

 

The document featured here, “Case Report of a Severe Human Poisoning by GB,” was published by the Army Chemical Center in December, 1952, a month after the sarin accident at Dugway. It provides a vivid account of one American’s exposure to the nerve agent during the Cold War. Using a Freedom of Information Act request, The New Yorker obtained the case report during research for Raffi Khatchadourian’s piece, “Operation Delirium,” about Cold War chemical-weapons experiments. To our knowledge, neither the incident nor the report has been made public before.

Click-through for more from Betsy Morais on the Army’s Cold War case studies on sarin and other nerve agents, and to see the official documents: http://nyr.kr/UUacb1

Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of a war without killing…

In this week’s issue, Raffi Khatchadourian illuminates the history and the contested legacy of a secret Cold War experiment that tested chemical weapons on thousands of American soldiers. “The drugs under review ranged from tear gas and LSD to highly lethal nerve agents, like VX, a substance developed at Edgewood and, later, sought by Saddam Hussein,” Khatchadourian writes. Some veterans of the tests believe that they sustained permanent damage. Next year, a San Francisco law firm will bring to trial a class-action lawsuit against the federal government, on behalf of former test subjects. 

After the Second World War, the American government acquired the formulas for Nazi chemical weapons and brought scientists and doctors to the Edgewood Arsenal, a secret Army research facility near the Chesapeake Bay, to study them. In the mid-nineteen-fifties, the research gained a new component, as the Army began searching for “compounds that would create the same debilitating mental side effects as nerve gas, but without the lethality.”  

Khatchadourian speaks with Colonel James S. Ketchum, now eighty-one and the most prominent defender of Edgewood, who will presumably be the star witness in the class-action suit. Ketchum, who was involved in human experiments at the arsenal for nearly a decade, eventually becoming the head of the Clinical Research Department, “went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel,” Khatchadourian writes.  Ketchum “insists that there was never any ambiguity about the drug experiments during the recruitment process,” Khatchadourian writes. Even though soldiers were told that they could excuse themselves from an experiment, many felt that they could not back down on a commitment to a superior officer. And the volunteers, after their stay at the arsenal, “were blindly pushed back into the Army at large, with no follow-up care.” 

The Army has determined the “fundamental impracticality” of psychochemical warfare, and has not employed the drugs that were tested at Edgewood in combat. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, “the secret clinical trials are a faint memory,” Khatchadourian writes. “But for some of the surviving test subjects, and the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” For his part, Ketchum tells Khatchadourian, “I struggle with these things. But I have always had the feeling that I am doing more the right thing than the wrong thing, here.” 

Follow this link to read “Operation Delirium”: http://nyr.kr/UjBXFJ

Will Bashar al-Assad use chemical weapons against his own people? Jon Lee Anderson on why the international community should pay attention to the Syrian sarin threat: http://nyr.kr/TL3h15

Photograph by Moises Saman/Magnum.