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.
Sarin’s horrible potency may not be locked in the past. The chemical was developed in Nazi Germany, in 1938. American operatives quickly discovered its formula after the war, gave it a secret code (GB), and sought to turn it into a weapon. In the eighties, Saddam Hussein deployed sarin against his enemies. In the nineties, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin in the Tokyo Metro. Now, reports are circulating that Bashar al-Assad has prepared to use sarin gas against opposition forces in Syria. (Just before Christmas, Al Jazeera reported that Assad gassed rebels in Homs—although it may not have been sarin.) On Tuesday, the Times published a front-page story on international efforts to prevent a sarin attack in Syria—but fears persist that Assad still plans to deploy what he has already produced.
The document featured below, “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.
The Army crew that raced toward the test site after the tanks fell was made up of six men: two safety personnel, a two-person decontamination team, an aid man, and a medical officer. They drove up to the contaminated area in an ambulance. When they stepped out onto the desert they were all wearing gas masks, except for the medical officer—the report gives only his initials, J.A.—who ignored advice from his colleagues to take precautions. Three hours after the tanks had catapulted to earth, J.A. led the crew toward a crater filled with liquid sarin. Without wearing any protective clothing, he stood less than ten feet away from the crater’s edge. The wind brushed against his eyelashes. He began to feel lightheaded. Within ten seconds, J.A. clutched his chest and bolted for the ambulance. He called out for a gas mask as he stumbled forward, staggering with one arm reaching out. As he got to the car, he collapsed.
Before J.A. was rushed to the hospital, a dose of atropine, an antidote, was quickly injected into his thigh to combat the drug-induced disruption to his nervous system. He let out high-pitched screeches and low gurgles. He started convulsing, and then he became limp and unresponsive. He was given more atropine. His face relaxed, and he lay still, staring vacantly ahead. The aid man couldn’t find an arterial pulse. J.A. turned blue. According to the report, his breathing sounded like growling.
J.A. was rushed to an Army hospital where he was placed inside an iron-lung-type respirator. His breathing slowly began to improve. The blue color of his skin turned to an ashen gray. He involuntarily grabbed his throat, so his arms had to be restrained. In two hours, “he began to speak in a halting but intelligible manner,” his medical report stated. He was removed from the respirator and the report notes that he “appeared alert and oriented, although he complained of severe malaise.” His eyes were sensitive to the light; merely reading was painful. But, about three and a half hours after his initial exposure, J.A. “had essentially recovered from his poisoning.” That night, while he slept in his hospital bed, his mouth was dry; whenever he tried to take a drink, he immediately vomited. But by his third morning in recovery, he managed to read the Sunday comics without his eyes hurting.
In the following days, J.A.’s brush with death became a blurred memory. He could remember only the giddiness that he felt as he stood at crater’s edge looking into the red pool.
See more of The New Yorker’s “Secrets of Edgewood” content, including Raffi Khatchadourian’s original article, “Operation Delirium,” along with videos, more documents, and a post about the Army’s use of LSD during the Cold War.
Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress.
