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.

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

In the early eighties, the Brooklyn-born photographer Marc Asnin started taking photographs of his uncle and godfather, Charles Henschke, for an art-school assignment. Now complete in the form of a book and gallery show, Asnin’s series of gritty, black-and-white photographs offer a intimate look at Charlie’s life and struggles, and also chronicle Asnin’s evolving perceptions over three decades, from his boyhood admiration of a man he viewed as his street-savvy, gun-wielding uncle to the reality of an aging man man tormented by mental illness, drug addiction, and strained relationships. Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/Uqh7Xk

(Source: newyorker.com)

Cartoon of the night by Emily Flake. For more: http://nyr.kr/OPTpFP

In this video interview, Oliver Sacks reflects on what he learned from his experiments with drugs, which he describes “Altered States,” his article in this week’s magazine. “Although I can’t claim very lofty motives in my drug taking,” Sacks says, “it did occur to me that there might be a bonus, that the drugs might sensitize me to experiences of the sort my patients could have.” One of these bonuses, he says, is the empathy he gained for hallucinogenic disorders. He also discusses how drugs helped him to understand the behavior of rats that, in laboratory experiments, would ignore even basic survival instincts in order to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brains. “For good and evil,” he says, “I think I experienced, as many people experience, a similar sort of thing.”

This may be the scariest aspect of “Breaking Bad,” and of the drug trade itself: the more ghoulish and extreme the show becomes, the more it seems to traffic not in realism but in horror, and the more accurately it captures the reality of the cartels and their business.

Patrick Radden Keefe on the uncannily accurate depiction of the meth trade in “Breaking Bad”: http://nyr.kr/LVdeWu

William Finnegan on the “entirely expected but still somehow improbable election result” in Mexico yesterday that put the Institutional Revolutionary Party back into power: http://nyr.kr/MOSgv3

In this week’s issue, William Finnegan writes about the drug war in Guadalajara, and the steady westward march of the Zetas, “the most feared organized-crime group in Mexico,” into what had previously been one of the country’s safer cities. The Mexican photographer Eunice Adorno’s long-term project “There Is No Such Place,” which examines how drug violence has emptied the streets and shuttered the shops of Mexico’s worst-affected cities, dovetails seamlessly with Finnegan’s piece, so we commissioned her to make a new set of photographs for the article, in Guadalajara’s Jalisco state. Click-through for a slideshow of Adorno’s images: http://nyr.kr/N2wcea

Tory Tabloidism: Fox News’ Opium-Eating Great-Uncle

I happened to be in (Tory) Canada while England’s (Tory) Prime Minister was in America this week, making nice with our (essentially very Tory) President. As it happened, while I travelled I was reading a book in which it was surprising to find out a lot about the origins of contemporary English conservatism—surprising because it was, in fact, Robert Morrison’s very fine, newish (2009, actually) biography of Thomas De Quincey, the Romantic critic and poet who wrote “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” the first and still the greatest of all junkie testaments, as even later junkie testament writers like William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson have acknowledged. De Quincey is what flap-copy writers like to call a “fascinating” figure—though in this case he really is. It turns out that De Quincey, trying to make enough money to feed his habit, helped start the kind of right-wing journalism that has since made so much noise, here and over there, and that may at last be running down, what with Cameron having been at least a little caught up in the Murdoch scandals, which have involved his circle of friends and a key aide. It turns out that the grandfather of “The Rum Diaries” was also the great uncle of Fox News and the New York Post.