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

For two decades during the Cold War, the United States Army tested chemical weapons on American soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, a secluded research facility on the Chesapeake Bay. Thousands of men were recruited to volunteer; at the arsenal, they were exposed to chemicals ranging from mustard gas and sarin to LSD and PCP. In the December 17th issue of The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian wrote about Colonel James S. Ketchum, who once headed the clinical studies at Edgewood and has become the program’s most prominent defender. In reporting the piece, Khatchadourian obtained hundreds of Army documents and raw scientific data, along with archival films about the human experiments. Some of the material was provided by doctors who worked at the arsenal; some of it was obtained directly from the government, through Freedom of Information Act requests. (These requests were made with the assistance of Betsy Morais, who works on the magazine’s editorial staff.) We have compiled some of that material here, in an online package called “Secrets of Edgewood.” Click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/RSZwLo

The pinnacle of Colonel James S. Ketchum’s career in developing psychochemical weapons during the Cold War was a field test that he orchestrated at the Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah, in 1964. The test, code-named Project DORK, was designed to gauge whether clouds of a delirium-inducing drug, called BZ, could incapacitate soldiers at distances of five hundred or a thousand yards, in a realistic setting. In “Operation Delirium,” an article in The New Yorker this week about the Army’s Cold War experiments on chemical weapons, I describe the experiment in detail, as well as a film that Ketchum directed about it, called “Cloud of Confusion.” Far from the formal, airless, informational tone that one associates with Cold War propaganda movies, Ketchum’s film is uniquely loose and unpolished; it attempts to capture the mind-altering effect of the drug as much as it seeks to describe it. In his memoir, “Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten,” Ketchum explains, “It was my purpose to create a contemplative, suspenseful mood in order to heighten interest, hoping to distinguish this movie from the usual dry Army documentary.”

The video above, “War of the Mind,” compiled by The New Yorker, provides a brief look into the making of the film, and into the Army’s broader cinematic attempts to document its search for the perfect psychochemical weapon.

See also “Manufacturing Madness,” our video compilation of chemical experiments on soldiers at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal.

For decades, the U.S. Army conducted human experiments with chemical weapons at Edgewood Arsenal, a military facility located on the Chesapeake Bay. The experiments began before WWII, focussing on mustard gas; after the war, the focus shifted to nerve agents, and, later, to psychochemicals. Many of the experiments were documented on film—some for propaganda purposes, some for research—and we have compiled some of the footage here, in “Manufacturing Madness,” a companion to “Operation Delirium,” my story in The New Yorker this week.  The footage documents soldiers in various states of euphoria, agitation, or physical agony…

Watch the footage, and click-through for more from Raffi Khatchadourian on the Army’s experiments: http://nyr.kr/UcG9YT

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

A Soviet tank in Budapest, 1956, during the Hungarian revolution.

From this week’s issue, Louis Menand reads Anne Applebaum’s “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe,” a book about totalitarianism in Europe during the twentieth century: http://nyr.kr/QZywWr