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

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.