Last Sunday in the wonderful land of Oz one of the major networks ran a quarter hour segment detailing the horrific story of US efforts to force Australia to allow live-agent testing of nerve agents in the rail forests of Queensland. The piece featured a number of former official, some current academics and “revelations” from a number of declassified documents. Emphasis was placed on the illegality of the proposed operations, the unreasonable pressure placed on Australia by the evil Americans, plans to “lie” to the Australian public and the dangers posed to the environment. Finally there were numerous references to the threats to the health and well-being of gallant Australian diggers (slang for Aussie soldiers) who were to be deliberately exposed to these extremely dangerous chemical agents. The overall tone is one of outrage with a hint of satisfaction that the truth has now been exposed. To wit, the presenter’s opening statement that “we can reveal plans to bomb Australia with deadly nerve gas.”
As far as I can tell all subsequent reporting seems to have been based solely on the broadcast by Nine News without any effort to do additional research. This is unfortunate as the original report is chock full of inaccuracies, false or unjustified linkages, anachronisms, and profound bias. Given the inflammatory tone of the report it is worth noting that no actual tests were conducted. It is also appropriate to question the efforts to link the proposals to the Vietnam War. The original proposals for the tests appear to date back to 1962, possibly even earlier, long before Vietnam became a major US concern. Nine News makes a big fuss about the revelations contained in newly declassified documents and posts several of these on the main article page to support its contentions. Unfortunately it does not post the bulk of the documents used in preparing its report, nor does it provide an easy way to locate them independently. This makes it much more difficult to verify or challenge the claims made.
Fortunately the blogger community has been active in this area and I would like to thank Bugs n’ Gas Gal for posting links to several rather large bundles of declassified documents in the Australian National Archives.
In part at least I think that the position being taken reflects the generalized distrust of the US increasingly common in the populations of countries such as Australia; NZ has a similar tendency. Beyond that however I suspect a number of historical experiences are providing a filter through which the the discussion of this latest “revelation” is being processed.
The most important of these filters is that produced by the use of Australian territory and personnel in nuclear weapons testing by the UK in the 1950s. Many Australian, and NZ troops were deliberately exposed to radiation effects during the various test cycles as part of the British effort to develop and understand the effectiveness of their nuclear weapons capability. After the tests had been completed there was a inadequate cleanup of the site that left significant quantities of plutonium and other contaminants littering the Australian desert where it had the potential to adversely affect fauna and local aboriginal inhabitants living off the land. A fresh effort at cleaning the area was undertaken in the 1980s and provoked considerable controversy. The result has been a serious (post-facto) mistrust of the motives and intent of great power allies that have engaged in, or proposed any variety of WMD testing involving Australia or its citizens.
This distrust has been reinforced by books such as Bridget Goodwin’s “Keen as Mustard.” This 1998 book details the experiences of Australian troops that were exposed to mustard gas as part of a WW2 effort to better understand the behavior of that agent in tropical environments. As was typical for the period the test subjects were not adequately informed about the dangers associated with their participation in these trials. What seems to be missed in Australia is that Aussie troops were not being uniquely mistreated by the oppressive British colonial masters. This is clearly demonstrated by the recent cases where the British government paid compensation to former soldiers who were experimented on with nerve agents in the 1950s.
To return to the Nine News segment however, the first issue to address is the characterization of the proposed testing. There are frequent references to its illegality or lack of justification. Firstly, I am not aware of anything that would have made this testing illegal in the 1960s. The only international measure in place at the time regarding the use of chemical weapons was the 1925 Geneva Convention which was very limited in scope. Signatories pledged not to use chemical weapons in war. They did not however pledge to refrain from developing, testing or stockpiling chemical weapons. The environment for chemical warfare testing and development has become much more restrictive since the mid-60s. Legislation to protect the environment has become much more stringent over time as have requirements governing medical experiments using human subjects. In addition the Australian, and most other world governments, have signed on to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) which has had the effect of limiting, though not eliminating defensive chemical warfare research.
Regarding the issue of justification for the proposed testing the report prominently features Dr. Chris Winder, (Professor in Applied Toxicology, School of Safety Science, University of New South Wales) observing that this testing was completely unjustifiable now or at the time. Prof. Winder is billed as an expert who has researched the history of chemical weapons adding weight to his assertions that ‘fears that communist Chinese or Russian attackers might have used such weapons in a third world war “doesn’t justify it now and I don’t think it justified it then.”‘ Rather quaintly the producers, or Dr. Winder have attempted to bolster his credibility by filming him beside a small stack of books on the history of CW. As far as I can tell Prof. Winder’s expertise is in the toxicology of hazardous chemicals which would include organophospates such as nerve agents. His ability to speak on the technical aspects of how chemical warfare agents affect those exposed seems more than satisfactory and indeed he is used in this capacity early in the segment. However his grasp of the history of the development and use of chemical weapons seems rather less robust and is clearly affected by what appears to be a strong moral objection to chemical warfare. This distaste for chemical warfare is not uncommon but it is also unhelpful when discussing the process of developing chemical weapons.
The simple fact is that in the 1950s the great powers incorporated nerve agents into their military arsenals. They sat there beside biological and nuclear weapons, all of which might well have been used against armies and civilian populations in the event of war. The German development of an entirely new class of chemical warfare agent during WW2 took a little while to be fully absorbed but once it was the discovery reinvigorated what had been an increasingly irrelevant and neglected part of the military arsenal. Although the US was active in the development and production of chemical weapons its activities were not unique. The Soviet Union also produced vast quantities of nerve agents, showing a particular preference for Soman, an especially nasty G agent, and was planing to use them in the event of a conflict. As a matter of prudence the US and its allies, which also had plans for the use of chemical weapons, had no choice but t test these weapons and become familiar with their battlefield characteristics. The most important chemical warfare lesson to come out of WW1 was that unprepared troops, and by this we mean inadequately equipped or insufficiently trained, suffer dramatically higher casualty rates than those who were well prepared.
In this context some environments are more challenging than others. One of these is forest, and tropical forests are a subset of this difficult problem. The most serious problem in protecting troops against nerve agents is the absolute need to avoid skin contact. The solution has been having troops wear protective suits that fully enclose the body using impermeable layers or absorbent materials. In either case the individual must also wear a protective mask and heavy impermeable gloves. Soldiers wearing these ensembles have proven to very vulnerable to heat stress, even in relatively mild climates. Using 1950s and 1960s style protective gear in a rainforest would have been difficult at best. Anything that could minimize the amount of time that a soldier needed to spend in such gear would have been welcome.
One thing that can reduce the amout of time spent in protective gear is the ability to accurately detect chemical warfare agents and decontaminate materiel, facilities and potentially terrain. It is also important to clearly understand how long the agents persist in the local environment. This last consideration can be highly variable and tropical rainforests present a difficult situation. The frequent intense rainfall may have the effect of washing away or diluting the agents more quickly than would be typical for a drier temperate environment. Equally the high heat and humidity are likely to affect the persistence of the chemicals. But, detection may be complicated by these factors as well. The dense foliage has the potential to provide many more surfaces on which chemicals may adhere, some of which will actually shelter the agent from rainfall effects. Furthermore the canopy has the effect of blocking out the sun, reducing the effects of sunlight on the deposited agent. There is an argument that simulants would be more than adequate for testing and training purposes but this argument overlooks the need to establish baselines using the agent or material that is being simulated in the environment in which it is to be used.
This post has gotten more than a little long and so it is going to be split into two parts with the second to follow.
END OF PART ONE
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Proliferating Thoughts 