This collection contains dozens of declassified documents detailing the rapid growth of the secret U.S. nuclear weapons research, development and production complex during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations (1945-1960), as the White House poured billions of dollars into the complex after the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in August 1949, followed by the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950. After the beginning of the Korean War, the Truman administration quickly removed all restraints on the growth of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.^[79]

On October 9, 1950, President Truman approved “a sharp increase in the production of fissionable materials and weapons.” Pursuant to this directive, a series of new fission weapons were ordered placed into production immediately, and the bombs already in the nuclear stockpile were ordered retrofitted with new equipment to improve their reliability and performance. Truman also ordered Los Alamos to begin work on the development of the world's first thermonuclear weapon, which was referred to within the U.S. government simply as the “Super.”^[80]

The ensuing growth of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex during the 1950s was staggering in its size and scope, and probably could not be duplicated today because of the extraordinary costs involved and the need to keep the entire undertaking secret, which in today's congressional oversight regime and the free-for-all media environment in the U.S. would be impossible to maintain.

Between 1950 and 1960, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) built a number of new plutonium reactors at Hanford, Washington and Savannah River, South Carolina, and expanded the production of weapons-grade enriched uranium at the Y-12 plant outside Oak Ridge, Tennessee for the new generation of nuclear weapons that were just beginning to come off the assembly lines. Government-owned, contractor-operated factories were hastily built in Colorado, Ohio, Missouri and Florida to produce the vast array of specialized electrical and mechanical components needed for the bombs, such as casings, fuses, detonators, initiators and plutonium pits. The AEC's only nuclear weapons final assembly plant at Burlington, Iowa was expanded, and work quickly began on building a second even larger atomic weapons final assembly facility outside Amarillo, Texas called the Pantex Plant.^[81]

All the fissile materials, electrical and mechanical weapons components, circuitry and bomb casings from all these AEC-owned plants were shipped by rail to two heavily-guarded final assembly facilities: the Burlington Ordnance Plant near the tiny town of Middletown, Iowa and the Pantex Plant, located outside the city of Amarillo, Texas.

• The Iowa Ordnance Plant, also known as the Burlington Ordnance Plant, which was located in rural southeastern Iowa, was America's first completely autonomous nuclear weapons final assembly plant. It replaced the Tech Area II at Los Alamos Laboratory as America's sole nuclear weapons final assembly plant.^[82] Between 1949 and 1951, the Burlington plant was the sole American nuclear weapons final assembly plant. During this timeframe it operated in complete secrecy, the plant's workers being barred from discussing what they were doing behind the electrified barbed wire fences that surrounded their workplace. It was not until 1951 that the AEC finally acknowledged that a portion of the Burlington plant was engaged in unspecified “classified work” for the AEC.^[83] In 1973, the decision was made to close the AEC facility in Burlington and to transfer its nuclear weapons manufacturing operations to the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. The nuclear weapons assembly portion of the plant was not formally closed down until July 1, 1975.^[84]
• The Pantex Plant, located 17 miles northeast of Amarillo, Texas, has been America's sole nuclear weapons final assembly facility since the closing of the AEC's nuclear weapons production facilities at the Burlington Ordnance Plant in 1975.^[85] Since weapons production began at Pantex in June 1952, the plant's multiple production lines have produced thousands of nuclear weapons and warheads. No new nuclear weapons have been built at Pantex since 1991, with most of the plant's work over the past twenty years being focused on weapons modification and dismantlement. The sensitivity that the U.S. government still attaches to this facility is demonstrated by the fact that since 9/11, the Department of Energy (DOE) has gone to extraordinary lengths to quietly withdraw from public circulation a number of unclassified documents regarding this facility, most of which dealt with the plant's history and/or cultural legacy.^[86]
• Immediately after the end of World War II, the few atomic bombs in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile were stored in a tunnel complex at Los Alamos Laboratory, then in a small but heavily guarded bunker complex at Sandia Laboratories adjacent to Kirtland Air Force in Albuquerque, New Mexico.^[87] But as the size of the stockpile began to grow by leaps and bounds, new storage facilities had to be built in order to securely house all the new weapons. To store and guard all these nuclear bombs, between 1947 and 1957 the AEC and the Pentagon secretly built thirteen large nuclear weapons storage sites inside the Continental United States, six of which were designated national nuclear weapons storage sites, and seven were referred to as Operational Storage Sites (OSS). The hundreds of buried nuclear weapons storage bunkers (or ‘igloos') at these thirteen bases were guarded by thousands of military troops, and their mission kept secret from everyone without an absolute ‘need to know.' Even today, the U.S. government is still trying to keep the nuclear mission of these thirteen bases a secret.^[88]

Table 2: AEC-DOD National Nuclear Weapons Storage Sites

SOURCES: USAF, Report, The History of Air Force Participation in the Atomic Energy Program, 1943-1953, 1958, Top Secret/Restricted Data; AEC, Report, Report of the Manager Santa Fe Operations, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission: July 1, 1950 to January 1, 1954, 1958, Secret/Restricted Data; Leland Johnson, Sandia National Laboratories: A History of Exceptional Service in the National Interest (Albuquerque, NM: Sandia National Laboratories, 1997).

By the mid-1950s, the AEC's nuclear weapons production complex was building fission and thermonuclear bombs almost as fast as the Ford Motor Company was building new cars at its Detroit auto plants. In September 1955, the AEC began deploying the first of the newly made Mark 17/24 Mod 1 thermonuclear weapons from its national nuclear weapons storage sites to nuclear storage facilities located on various SAC air bases throughout the U.S. and overseas. The following month, the AEC began dispersals of Mk 17/24 Mod 1 thermonuclear weapons to U.S. Navy storage facilities. The AEC, however, retained custody of the weapons.^[89] And yet, despite the massive size of this undertaking, not a word leaked out to the press about what was going on behind the barbed wire fences that surrounded these factories.^[90]

By 1960, the last full year of the Eisenhower administration, the AEC's Burlington and Pantex plants built a total of 7,178 nuclear warheads, or 19.6 fission bombs or thermonuclear weapons a day, every day of the year. This was the largest number of nuclear warheads that the U.S. ever built in a single year.^[91]

The size and production capacity of the AEC's nuclear weapons production complex hit its peak during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the early to mid-1960s. At its height in the mid-1960s during the Lyndon Johnson administration, the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex was a vast, albeit very secretive, industrial enterprise, employing almost 200,000 government employees and contractor personnel in dozens of research laboratories, testing grounds, and production complexes spread across the U.S.^[92]

The 1960s were the “Golden Age” of America's nuclear arsenal. Between 1961, the first year of the Kennedy administration, and 1967, the year in which the Lyndon Johnson administration decided to reduce the size of the nuclear weapons stockpile, the Burlington and Pantex plants built a staggering 24,000 nuclear bombs and warheads, or 9.3 nuclear weapons built every day of the year, most of which were warheads for the first American intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) and a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons meant to be deployed to Western Europe and, to a lesser degree, the Far East.^[93]

The Size of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Stockpile

Thanks to President Bill Clinton's open-minded Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, in April 1994 the Department of Energy for the first time released a year-by-year breakdown of the total number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but only for the period 1945 to 1961. Despite its limitations, this was the first time that the U.S. government had ever officially disclosed how many nuclear weapons it had. A copy of this historic DOE document is contained in this collection.^[94]

Since Secretary O'Leary's 1994 release, the U.S. government has continued to release more and more information about the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, bringing these numbers up to the present day. The Defense Department and the DOE have also declassified and released information about the total number of nuclear weapons deployed by the U.S. Navy at sea from the Cold War period to the present day. A complete year-by-year inventory of the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile is contained at the end of this essay in Annex I.^[95]

The declassified DOE data shows that the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile reached its all-time peak in 1967, when there were 31,255 strategic and tactical nuclear warheads deployed with U.S. forces at home and overseas. In 1968, towards the end of the Lyndon Johnson administration, the U.S. began a substantial reduction in the number and types of tactical nuclear weapons, the majority of which were deployed overseas in Western Europe, but at the same time began increasing the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads.

At the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, declassified documents show that the U.S. nuclear stockpile stood at 22,217 warheads and bombs. At the time the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) was signed two years later in 1991, which was the same year that the Soviet Union collapsed, there were 19,000 warheads in the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, half of which were classified as tactical nuclear weapons. The documents also reveal that the U.S. has built no new nuclear weapons since 1991.^[96]

Over the next two decades, the size of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile fell sharply. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush ordered a dramatic reduction in the number of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons stored overseas, including ordering the immediate removal all nuclear weapons from South Korea, the removal of all tactical nuclear weapons from all U.S. Navy warships, and the immediate dismantlement of all U.S. Army nuclear artillery shells and ballistic missiles. All that was left of the U.S. tactical nuclear arsenal after these actions were completed were a couple of hundred B-61 nuclear bombs deployed in a small number of NATO countries.^[97]

Over the next twenty years, tens of thousands of American nuclear weapons and warheads were quietly returned to the Pantex Plant outside Amarillo, Texas to be dismantled and their fissionable components recycled.^[98]

As of 2009, the year that President Barack Obama took office, there were only 5,113 nuclear warheads in the U.S. stockpile, the vast majority of which were strategic nuclear weapons. As of 2016 (the date of the latest information released by the Pentagon), the U.S. nuclear stockpile consisted of 4,018 warheads, most of which were mounted on ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.^[99]

While no new nuclear weapons have been built since 1991, the DOE has modernized hundreds of existing warheads in order to improve their safety and reliability, as well as extend their lifetime by several decades. In recent years the DOE has revealed that it wants to build a new version of the B-61 tactical nuclear bomb, claiming that it is only a modification of an existing weapon rather than a new nuclear weapon. The future of this program remains cloudy as the Trump administration has not yet indicated whether it intends to proceed with this multi-billion dollar project.^[100]

Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Europe and Asia

While much has been written over the years about the development of American strategic nuclear weapons (ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and manned strategic bombers), comparatively little has been written about the U.S. military's much larger stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons, which were designed to be used on the battlefield against Soviet and Chinese conventional forces. Several hundred documents contained in this collection deal with the origins of tactical nuclear weapons, their design, production, and deployment in Europe and Asia.^[101]

Despite the transparency shown by the U.S. government over the number of weapons in the American nuclear arsenal, the same cannot be said about the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Western Europe and Asia during the Cold War. These numbers remain secret, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future.

But do not despair. A significant number of the declassified documents contained in this collection provide hard-to-come-by data on the numbers of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Europe and Asia, as well as detailed information about which countries hosted these weapons during the Cold War era.

The documents reveal that the first American tactical nuclear weapons arrived in Europe in April 1952, when over one hundred of the new lightweight Mark 7 and Mark 8 tactical nuclear bombs were flown from the U.S. to RAF Sculthorpe airfield in England. By the fall of 1952, the USAF had built brand-new nuclear weapons storage facilities at RAF Alconbury, RAF Sculthorpe, RAF Wethersfield and RAF Woodbridge to accommodate the 130 tactical atomic bombs that were now deployed in the UK.^[102]

Next came West Germany, where the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force intended to deploy several thousand tactical nuclear weapons to counter the huge Soviet conventional military forces based in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In May 1954, the U.S. ambassador in Bonn secretly told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that the U.S. military intended to deploy nuclear weapons to Germany beginning in 1955, but provided the German leader with few other details (such as the number of weapons involved or where they would be stored). After months of negotiations, the first of several hundred Mark 7 and Mark 12 tactical nuclear bombs began arriving by air from the U.S. at Bitburg Air Base in West Germany in March 1955. These bombs were followed in April 1955 by several hundred nuclear warheads for MATADOR surface-to-surface missiles and atomic artillery shells for the five battalions of massive 280mm atomic artillery guns then deployed in West Germany, then in May 1955 by several hundred more nuclear warheads for the U.S. Army's HONEST JOHN rockets. By the end of 1955, Germany had become the single largest overseas storage site for American nuclear weapons in the world.^[103] As of 1961, 60 percent of all the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were deployed in West Germany.^[104]

By the end of the Eisenhower administration, over 2,500 nuclear weapons and warheads were deployed in Western Europe for the use of American forces in wartime. As of September 1957, the following nuclear delivery units and the associated nuclear warheads were assigned to U.S. military forces based in Western Europe: six CORPORAL missile battalions, six 280mm atomic cannon battalions, three HONEST JOHN rocket battalions, six NIKE HERCULES SAM battalions, three MATADOR missile squadrons, and forty nuclear-capable fighter bomber squadrons. By 1960, the planned strength of these forces was: five CORPORAL missile battalions, six 280mm artillery battalions, three HONEST JOHN battalions, three REDSTONE missile battalions, six LACROSSE rocket battalions, ten NIKE HERCULES SAM battalions, three MATADOR squadrons, and 37 nuclear-capable fighter bomber squadrons.^[105]

In the Far East, the first nuclear bombs were deployed to Kadena Air Base on the U.S.-controlled island of Okinawa in July 1954, a fact which the Japanese government was not informed of. By the end of the 1950s, several hundred fission and thermonuclear weapons were being stored at Kadena Air Base for use by both Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers and by USAF tactical fighter bombers.^[106] In February 1956 and September 19546 respectively, a small number of nuclear bombs were deployed to two former Japanese islands: Iwo Jima and Chichi-Jima. Again, the Japanese government was not informed of this move.^[107] Nuclear bombs and nuclear ASW depth bombs were deployed to the Philippines in December 1957, MATADOR nuclear-capable missiles were sent to Taiwan in January 1958.^[108] But the biggest move came in January 1958, when the U.S. military secretly began deploying hundreds of nuclear weapons to South Korea. According to declassified documents, the U.S. Army sent nuclear warheads for HONEST JOHN ballistic missiles, the 280mm atomic cannon and 8-inch howitzer, and atomic demolition munitions (ADM) to South Korea in 1958, a move which the State Department opposed. In March 1958, the USAF deployed nuclear bombs to two South Korean airfields.^[109]

Most American tactical nuclear weapons were deployed to Europe between 1958 and 1964, with the surge of weapons being shipped to Europe taking place during the Kennedy administration from 1961 to 1963. For example, on May 5, 1962 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara revealed at a NATO ministerial meeting in Athens, Greece that the U.S. had deployed in Western Europe more than five thousand tactical nuclear weapons.^[110]

In December 1963, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara informed a NATO ministerial meeting that the number of strategic nuclear warheads in the U.S. alert force had increased by more than 100 percent over the past two years to almost 2,800 warheads. U.S. tactical nuclear weaponry was also being expanded and modernized. “New tactical bombs for aircraft delivery are now on hand in large numbers, replacing older types. LACROSSE and the 280mm projectiles are on their way out. The SERGEANT missiles have come into operation in Europe; and the United States alone will have approximately 200 on the continent next year. Deployment of the longer range PERSHING is scheduled to begin next March... Among the smaller weapons, the number of atomic demolition munition [ADM] warheads has gone up nine-fold in the last year, and 155mm howitzer nuclear projectiles will be introduced into the forces during 1964. The number of tactical nuclear weapons on this side of the Atlantic has increased by almost 60 percent since early 1961.”^[111]

In November 1965, the New York Times revealed that more than five thousand tactical nuclear weapons were deployed in Europe, and that this number would be increased by about 20 percent over the next six months. This would represent a doubling of the number of nuclear weapons deployed in Europe over the past five years.^[112] In 1967 the number of tactical nuclear warheads deployed in Europe reached over seven thousand weapons, with Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford publicly revealing in October 1968 for the first time ever that the U.S. had 7,200 tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Western Europe.^[113]

Table 3: The U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons Stockpile: 1970

In addition to the above, about 2,500 tactical nuclear warheads and 1,100 ASW/AAW nuclear warheads were stored in the United States, bringing the total size of the U.S. tactical nuclear weapons stockpile to 16,500.

SOURCE: National Security Council, Report, U.S. Strategic Objectives and Force Posture: Executive Summary, January 3, 1971, Top Secret, p. 35, NSC FOIA

Storing and guarding the nuclear weapons deployed in Europe was an extremely manpower intensive and costly endeavor. As of 1975, a report revealed that over six thousand U.S. Army and USAF personnel were engaged in providing nuclear weapons support to the NATO countries at an annual cost of 83.8 million dollar, not including operations and maintenance costs or host nation financing. U.S. Army nuclear weapons support was provided by ten U.S. Army field artillery groups with about five thousand personnel assigned, while USAF nuclear weapons support was provided by fourteen munitions support squadrons deployed throughout Western Europe with 1,100 assigned personnel. Pay and allowances for these personnel came to about 17 million dollar.^[114]

The number of American tactical nuclear warheads in Europe remained stable at about seven thousand warheads for the next twenty years until the early 1980s, when America's NATO allies finally relented and allowed the Pentagon to remove a thousand old and obsolete nuclear warheads for the HONEST JOHN rocket from Europe.^[115]

But the declassified documents in this collection reveal that there were many more American nuclear weapons available for use against targets in Europe if required, with a declassified CIA report disclosing that as of November 1970, the U.S. and Great Britain together had committed a total of 9,400 nuclear warheads for use in Europe, with most of the overage being accounted for by warheads mounted on POSEIDON ballistic missile submarines that were committed to strike targets in Europe if war were to break out.”^[116]

Table 4: The U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons Stockpile: 1983

SOURCE: Richard Halloran, “Report to Congress Provides Figures for Nuclear Arsenal,” New York Times, November 15, 1983, p. A15

Nuclear Weapons-Related Agreements With NATO Nations

Between 1957 and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. and most (but not all) of the NATO member nations signed several dozen highly secret agreements relating to nuclear weapons, including agreements for the U.S. to provide nuclear weapons support for the armed forces of NATO and all its member armed forces, agreements allowing the U.S. to provide classified nuclear weapons information to the NATO member nations, agreements permitting the U.S. to store nuclear weapons on the territory of NATO member nations, agreements requiring joint consultation on the use of nuclear weapons, as well as transport nuclear weapons through the airspace of NATO countries. Many of these secret agreements are still in force today, and the U.S. government and the NATO nations are extremely reluctant to permit the declassification of any details whatsoever about these agreements for a variety of political reasons.^[117]

Despite the extreme secrecy surrounding these bilateral nuclear weapons agreements between the U.S. and its NATO allies, dozens of documents were discovered in the U.S. National Archives and the Presidential Libraries detailing the nature and extent of these agreements. Pertinent details of these agreement for each NATO country follows:

Belgium: On January 22, 1960, U.S. and Belgian officials signed an exchange of notes confirming the ratification of an Atomic Stockpile Agreement. A secret supplement to this agreement was signed in Brussels on June 30, 1960. This was followed by separate bilateral nuclear agreements with the U.S. Army on April 7, 1960, and the U.S. Air Force in Europe (USAFE) on October 4, 1960, which was referred to as the PINE CONE agreement.^[118] On January 12, 1962, after two years of waiting, the secret 144b Atomic Cooperation Agreement was finally initialed by the Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Henri Spaak and the U.S. ambassador to Brussels Douglas MacArthur II without any publicity. The document was formally signed in Brussels on May 17, 1962.^[119]

France: On May 7, 1959, the U.S. and French governments signed an unclassified 144b Atomic Cooperation Agreement, whose official title was the Agreement for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes. As with the Dutch 144b agreement (see below), there were two classified annexes to the French 144b agreement which were not publicly disclosed, a secret Technical Annex and a confidential Security Annex. On September 6, 1960, U.S. and French officials signed a Third Party NATO Atomic Stockpile Agreement allowing the U.S. to provide nuclear weapons support to French forces stationed in West Germany.^[120] On July 27, 1961, the U.S. and French governments signed the Agreement for Cooperation in the Operations of Atomic Weapons Systems for Mutual Defense Purposes in Paris. The treaty entered into force on October 9, 1961, and paved the way for the U.S. to provide French military units based in West Germany with nuclear weapons support.^[121] The U.S. withdrew all nuclear weapons support for the French military in June 1966 after President Charles de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO and ordered all U.S. forces out of France.^[122]

Germany: On March 27, 1959, the U.S. and West German governments signed an Atomic Stockpile Agreement in Bonn. As part of what was called the WAGON TRAIN agreement, USAFE and the German Minister of Defense exchanged diplomatic notes calling “for the establishment of a NATO Special Ammunition storage program in Germany” for nuclear support for nuclear-capable West German Air Force (Luftwaffe) strike fighter units. The agreement stated that “Atomic weapon support will be provided to GAF strike squadrons in support of NATO defense plans. The timing of deployment of U.S. custodial detachments to custodial storage sites will be dependent upon the attainment of operational readiness of GAF delivery units, the availability of storage facilities and other support as mutually agreed upon.” On April 7, 1960, a bilateral stockpile agreement was signed by USAREUR and the German Minister of Defense permitting the U.S. to provide nuclear weapons support to the West German army (Bundeswehr), followed three days later on April 10, 1960 by the signing of a bilateral nuclear stockpile agreement between USAFE and the West German Luftwaffe.^[123]

Great Britain: On May 3, 1954, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson informed the JCS that “The UK has accepted the introduction of complete atomic weapons by the U.S. into the UK.” On July 26, 1954, the JCS stated that “The JCS recommends the immediate deployment of nuclear components to the UK half-line deleted. Also requests dispersal of additional non-nuclears to the UK.”^[124] On December 14, 1956, USAF Chief-of-Staff General Nathan Twining proposed to the Chief of the British Air Staff, Sir Dermot Boyle, to provide U.S. nuclear weapons to the RAF “in the event of general war and to coordinate the nuclear strike plans of the USAF and the RAF.” This agreement was memorialized in January 1957 in an exchange of letters between British Minister of Defense Duncan Sandys and American Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson.^[125] On May 24, 1957, the USAF and RAF signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) whereby the USAF agreed to provide RAF Bomber Command units equipped with VALIANT, VULCAN and VICTOR bombers with a number of Mk 5 nuclear weapons in the event of a general war with the USSR. In addition, both parties agreed to coordinate their respective atomic strike plans.^[126] On February 22, 1958, a U.S.-UK Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed which governed how the THOR missiles deployed in the UK could be used based upon a joint governmental decision and a dual-key control system.^[127] On June 7, 1958, procedures for carrying out the basic understanding concerning joint consultation before use of U.S. nuclear weapons based in the UK was arrived at with the signing of the Murphy-Dean Agreement. The agreement was subsequently approved by President Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. The agreement applied only to RAF V bombers carrying U.S. nuclear weapons, the RAF Thor IRBM force which was not yet operational, and USAF SAC bomber units based in the UK.^[128] On August 4, 1958, the U.S. and British signed a 144b Atomic Cooperation Agreement, formally known as the "Agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for Cooperation on the uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes”. On August 3, 1961, the U.S. and UK governments signed a NATO Atomic Stockpile Agreement, which provided for the storage of nuclear weapons in the UK for U.S. and UK forces committed to NATO, as well as NATO-committed British forces stationed in Germany. There was an option to include at a later date NATO forces in the UK. The agreement did not apply to those U.S. and/or UK nuclear forces stationed in the UK who were not committed to NATO, such as the SAC rotational strategic bomber units in Britain.^[129]

Greece: On December 30, 1959, the U.S. and Greek governments signed a secret nuclear stockpile agreement which permitted the U.S. military to begin construction of nuclear weapons storage and support facilities in Greece. On May 3, 1960, a nuclear stockpile technical agreement was signed by USAFE and the chief of staff of the Greek Air Force (this agreement was amended on August 28, 1961) permitting the USAF to provide nuclear weapons support to the Greek air force.^[130]

Italy: On December 3, 1960, the U.S. and Italian governments signed an agreement entitled “Agreement for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes.” The agreement immediately ran into fierce opposition from the powerful Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), which opposed giving the Italians access to classified nuclear weapons information and technology because of deep concerns about the security of the Italian government and military.^[131] On January 13, 1962, the U.S. and Italy signed a bilateral NATO Atomic Stockpile Agreement, which was effected by an exchange of notes between the charge d'affaires at the U.S. embassy in Rome and the Italian Foreign Minister, Antonio Segni. On April 1, 1963, a supplemental agreement between U.S. and Italian militaries was signed which permitted the storage and use of nuclear weapons in Italy.^[132]

Netherlands: On January 26, 1960, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, Chris Young, and a senior Dutch government official signed an Atomic Stockpile Agreement in The Hague allowing for the storage of U.S. nuclear weapons in the Netherlands. The U.S. agreed to pay all of the costs of building the necessary storage and maintenance facilities for the weapons in the Netherlands. On May 18, 1960, a “Technical Agreement” between the U.S. Army and the Royal Netherlands Army was signed permitting the U.S. to deploy nuclear weapons to the Netherlands in support of the nuclear-capable artillery units of the Dutch Army. On March 11, 1961, U.S. and Dutch officials in The Hague signed a Third Party NATO Atomic Stockpile Agreement allowing the U.S. to provide nuclear weapons support to Dutch forces stationed in West Germany. Finally, on February 27, 1968 a ‘technical agreement' was signed by the U.S. and Dutch navies regarding technical modifications to the SP-2H Neptune maritime patrol aircraft belonging to the RDN 320 Squadron at Valkenburg to allow them to deliver nuclear depth bombs. The agreement also called for training of the Dutch crews in nuclear delivery techniques. From 1969 onwards the U.S. Navy allocated a small number of Mark 57 nuclear depth bombs to the Dutch navy.^[133]

Portugal: To date, the only document found relating to the Portuguese government's approval of the deployment of nuclear weapons to Lajes Air Base in the Azores is an August 2, 1960 letter from the Portuguese Minister of Defense indicating that Lisbon had no objections to the presence of American ‘special weapons' on the Azores.^[134]

Spain: There does not appear to have been a formal atomic stockpile agreement between the U.S. and Spain, although nuclear weapons were present in Spain as early as the late 1950s when Strategic Air Command bombers were based at three Spanish air bases, followed in the early 1960s by POLARIS ballistic missile submarines at Rota naval station in southern Spain. The U.S. government, however, did not offer to provide nuclear weapons support or training to the Spanish military, and the amount of information provided to the Spanish military was also kept to a minimum until Spain formally joined NATO in the 1970s.^[135] As of 1976, all of the SAC bases and the POLARIS ballistic missile submarines had been withdrawn from Spain, leaving only a small number of nuclear ASW weapons still stored at Rota Naval Air Station.^[136]

Turkey: On December 6, 1954, the U.S. and Turkish governments signed the so-called “Joint U.S.-Turkish Air Technical Annex,” a Top Secret supplement to the 1954 facilities agreement which allowed unfettered access by nuclear-armed SAC bombers to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. A separate agreement was signed five years later on February 28, 1959, between the Turkish General Staff and the U.S. Army, which permitted the U.S. to deploy to Turkey nuclear warheads for Turkish nuclear-capable artillery and missile systems. This agreement was amended on March 17, 1962, permitting the U.S. to deploy nuclear weapons to Turkey in support of the Turkish air force.^[137]

Beginning in 1958, the U.S. military began secretly building a large base infrastructure throughout Western Europe to store several thousand nuclear weapons meant exclusively for use by America's NATO allies. According to one declassified February 1958 document, the U.S. military initially planned to build 63 nuclear weapons storage sites and six large command and support facilities in ten Western European countries in order to support the soon-to-arrive nuclear warheads meant for use by non-U.S. NATO countries. By mid-1961, the plan was to have constructed a total of 147 nuclear weapons storage sites in Europe servicing 175 NATO nuclear delivery units. Most of these nuclear storage facilities were to be located in West Germany. An estimated 2,750 American military personnel would be required to man and guard these extremely sensitive bases. At the time the U.S. already had forty nuclear weapons storage sites in Western Europe holding nuclear weapons and warheads meant exclusively for the use of U.S. forces in Europe. Construction of the first four NATO nuclear weapons storage sites began in the fall of 1958 at four British air bases in West Germany, which were to house CANBERRA bomber squadrons equipped with U.S. nuclear weapons, plus a site outside Paderborn, Germany, which was to house a British Army nuclear-capable CORPORAL missile regiment.^[138]

Canada: This collection contains over one hundred documents concerning U.S.-Canadian nuclear weapons relations, most of which are available not from the U.S. National Archives, but rather from the Canadian National Archives in Ottawa. And what is contained in this collection is just a sampling of what is available to researchers. The essence of the 47 declassified Canadian documents is that the Canadian government was exceedingly careful about collaborating with the U.S. with regard to nuclear weapons. The Canadian government demanded, and got, the agreement of the U.S. to hold joint consultations if it became necessary to use nuclear weapons over Canadian soil in wartime. It also got the U.S. military to agree to keep it informed of all SAC bomber flights carrying nuclear weapons in Canadian airspace, as well as a separate agreement that called for Washington to inform Ottawa of any transport flights carrying nuclear weapons over Canada. In addition, Canada imposed tight restrictions on the U.S. nuclear weapons deployed to Canada, which irritated Washington to no end.^[139]

Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Greenland: The only NATO countries that refused to have anything to do with nuclear weapons, including permitting the U.S. to deploy nuclear weapons on their soil or use their airspace, were Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. In the 1950s the U.S. government repeatedly tried to change the minds of these governments and allow U.S. nuclear weapons on their soil, or, at the very least, allow their militaries to train in the use of nuclear weapons. The declassified record, such as it is, shows that all three countries steadfastly refused.^[140]

But there was one serious deviation from this norm. Without informing his cabinet, in November 1957 the Danish prime minister secretly allowed the U.S. Air Force to deploy nuclear weapons to Thule Air Base in Danish-controlled Greenland. The U.S. Defense Department wanted to deploy nuclear bombs for SAC strategic bombers and nuclear warheads for Nike-Hercules air defense missiles at Thule Air Base, which required the approval of the Danish government. On November 26, 1957, State Department sent a top secret letter informing the Pentagon that based on a confidential conversation with the Danish prime minister, the deployment of nuclear weapons to Greenland could begin. The Danish Prime Minister was “adamant that there would be no publicity of any kind about this matter now or later, and he has restricted knowledge of it to himself.” This decision was to later come back to haunt the Danish government after the discovery of the presence of American nuclear weapons on Danish soil in the 1990s.^[141] In February 1958, the first SAC thermonuclear bombs were flown into Thule, but they were suddenly withdrawn between October and December 1958. In February 1959 the first nuclear warheads for Nike-Hercules SAM missiles were deployed to Greenland, but these too were withdrawn a few years later.^[142]

The Use of Nuclear Weapons During World Crises

U.S. nuclear strike units were placed on alert and thermonuclear warheads were taken out of their storage igloos and placed on their delivery vehicles during a series of world crises:

1948 Berlin Crisis: On April 1, 1948, Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols of the Military Liaison Committee (MLC) briefed the AEC on the Berlin Crisis, telling the commissioners “this situation might well cause an incident which might in turn force war. Colonel Nichols stated that the Committee had already discussed certain possible steps with General McCormack and he also wished to discuss them with the Commissioners. The following points were suggested: The Commission should assure itself that in moving weapons to Site BAKER [the Killeen Base outside Fort Hood, Texas] complete weapons should be moved instead of unrelated components of weapons. The Commission installations should be alerted to be more watchful against possible sabotage matters; The military and the Commission should check into possible arrangements for turn over of some weapons to insure that there is no fumbling or delay in the transfer; Plans should be prepared for the formation of reserve assembly teams from civilians who have had prior experience on former assembly teams.”^[143]

Korean War (1950-1953): The Truman administration considered using nuclear weapons at several points during the Korean War. The first came on the day after the North Korean invasion, when Truman's top advisors ordered the Pentagon to begin preparing contingency plans to drop atomic bombs on key Soviet military airfields in the Far East. At the time, the Truman administration believed that the North Koreans would not have invaded South Korea without Soviet approval and support. A small number of atomic bombs were readied for use, but SAC did not forward deploy any bombers to Guam or other points in the Far East in preparation for actually using the weapons.^[144] In July 1950 SAC began preparing to deploy a force of nuclear-capable B-29 bombers and a number of nuclear weapons to Great Britain to threaten the USSR with nuclear retaliation if the military situation in Korea continued to worsen.^[145] At the same time, the Pentagon and the State Department began considering the use of nuclear weapons against North Korean forces because the military situation in Korea was deteriorating rapidly.^[146] After Chinese forces intervened in the fighting in Korea in late October 1950, the U.S. government and military began contingency planning for using nuclear weapons against the Chinese military both in Korea and on key Chinese military targets in Manchuria. The Pentagon and the State Department recommended not using nuclear weapons, because it would almost certainly bring the USSR into the war. But as the military situation continued to worsen in December 1950, pressure continued to mount from the American public and within the U.S. government to use America's nuclear arsenal to save the military situation in Korea.^[147] In 1953, just before the armistice was signed ending the Korean War, the Eisenhower administration, angry about continued Chinese stalling tactics at the peace talks, warned China that it was prepared to use nuclear weapons to end the war.^[148]

Taiwan Strait Crisis 1954-1955: During the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954-1955, the U.S. military prepared a series of contingency plans to drop atomic bombs on Chinese military and civilian targets if the Chinese threatened to invade the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, which were held by Chinese Nationalist troops. There was also concern at the time that the Chinese might be preparing to invade Taiwan itself. ^[149]

1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis: When China threatened to invade the Chinese Nationalist-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the summer of 1958, the U.S. once again began preparing to drop atomic bombs on several dozen Chinese military airfields opposite Taiwan if the military situation deteriorated to the point that the atomic bombs were the only way to save the islands.^[150]

1961 Berlin Crisis: During the 1961 Berlin Wall crisis, the U.S. and NATO prepared contingency plans calling for the deployment of U.S. nuclear delivery systems and their associated warheads from their barracks and storage depots as a means of deterring the Soviets from taking further military action against the Allied-controlled enclaves in West Berlin.^[151]

1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: Over a hundred NORAD air defense fighter interceptors armed with GENIE nuclear air defense weapons were placed on alert throughout the southern and southeastern U.S. during the Cuban Missile Crisis to guard against a surprise Soviet nuclear air attack on U.S. cities by IL-28 bombers based in Cuba.^[152] The JCS directed General Truman Landon, commander of USAFE, to immediately begin loading his QRA nuclear alert force with thermonuclear weapons. The 523^rd and 613^th Tactical Fighter Squadrons of the 27^th and 401^st Tactical Fighter Wings were ordered to load thermonuclear weapons onto the sixteen F-100 fighter bombers that were then standing on 15-minute QRA nuclear alert at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.^[153]

Vietnam War: The U.S. government and military never seriously contemplated using nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War, although a series of studies were conducted to determine if these weapons could be used effectively in Indochina. The studies all concluded that nuclear weapons would not be an effective weapon in a counterinsurgency environment such as existed at the time in Southeast Asia. There were too few targets, and the targets that were available would cause no significant damage to the North Vietnamese war effort.^[154]

Security and Safety Threats to U.S. Nuclear Weapons

This collection contains over one hundred declassified U.S. government and military documents pertaining to the safety and security of nuclear weapons. These documents cover a host of highly sensitive subjects, such as faulty weapons design, vulnerability of certain weapons to theft or unauthorized use, and an alarming general lack of interest in nuclear weapons safety and security issues inside the Pentagon during the 1950s and early 1960s. The documents show that the vital question of protecting the weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal from theft or unauthorized use did not begin to receive any high level attention until the Kennedy administration (1961-1963), when the White House ordered that special security devices called Permissive Action Link (PAL) devices be installed on every weapon, especially those deployed overseas in Europe and Asia.^[155]

• In October 1958, USAF Master Sergeant Leander V. Cunningham, 41, one of six senior nuclear weapons technicians, locked himself inside a nuclear weapons storage bunker at RAF Sculthorpe in England and threatened to detonate a nuclear weapon with his pistol. He later gave himself up.^[156]
• The safety and security of U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey has been a perennial problem for the U.S. government because of the political instability of that country over the past fifty years, the unreliability of the Turkish military, as well as the presence of several armed left-wing and right-wing terrorist groups that operated freely inside Turkey. After two failed military coup d'état attempts in Turkey in 1960, in 1961 the newly elected Kennedy administration issued a directive entitled NSAM 143 which barred the deployment of Mark 28 thermonuclear bombs to Turkey because they were not protected from unauthorized use by Permissive Action Link (PAL) security devices. Two years later, in 1963, the Mk 28 bombs still had not been deployed to Turkey because of continuing concern within the U.S. State Department about the stability of the Turkish government and the security of American nuclear weapons in Turkey.^[157]
• A 1961 DOE document revealed that the Mk 7 and Mk 12 nuclear bombs, which at the time were widely deployed in Western Europe with U.S. and NATO nuclear-capable fighter bomber squadron standing QRA alert, had virtually no safety features to prevent these weapons from being used by unauthorized personnel. The same was true of the W49 warhead used on the USAF's JUPITER ballistic missile station in Italy and Turkey, which was manned by Italian and Turkish air force personnel but could not be used without the authorization of the small USAF nuclear custodial units stationed with the missile.^[158]
• 1967 Greek Military Coup: On April 21, 1967, in the midst of a coup d'état, Greek military units surrounded the U.S. Army nuclear weapons storage depot at Elevsis outside Athens that was controlled by the 558^th U.S. Army Artillery Group. The Greek troops were withdrawn after protests from the U.S. embassy.^[159]
• 1967 Cyprus Crisis: On November 22, 1967, the commander of TUSLOG Detachment 67 at Cakmakli, Turkey, reported to Special Ammunition Support Command (SASCOM) in Frankfurt, Germany, that “Extraordinary security precautions have been taken by this headquarters to safeguard [nuclear] weapons. Planning for various contingencies continues.”^[160]
• September 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre: Nuclear terrorism only became a subject of high interest to the U.S. government and military after the September 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack, because the attack took place in West Germany, where some five thousand U.S. nuclear weapons were stored. In the aftermath of the Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes, the U.S. Secretary of Defense ordered the JCS and the military services to conduct a worldwide survey of the security of U.S. nuclear weapons deployed overseas. As a result of these surveys a number of nuclear weapons storage sites in vulnerable locations were closed and the security at other sites was strengthened.^[161] The JCAE reported that the Defense Department had closed 97 nuclear weapons storage sites in 1974 and 1975.^[162] However, the documents in this collection show that it was not until the early 1980s, during the Reagan administration, that the U.S. government and military began spending large sums of money to secure the U.S. nuclear arsenal against terrorists.^[163]
• March 1973: Because of pressure from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) relating to security concerns, nuclear weapons were removed from QRA aircraft at an airbase in an unspecified European country.^[164]
• 1974 Cyprus Crisis: On July 20, 1974, the U.S. Air Force nuclear weapons custodial units in Greece and Turkey pulled all weapons off Greek and Turkish fighter bombers standing Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) alert, and the 558^th U.S. Army Artillery Group took all nuclear warheads off all the Greek Nike-Hercules  SAM missiles deployed around Athens. Detachments from the U.S. Marine BLT on U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet warships in the eastern Mediterranean were prepared to fly into Turkey in helicopters to secure the nuclear weapons if the Turkish military threatened to seize the weapons' storage sites.^[165]
• February 6, 1975: Senator John Pastore (D-Rhode Island), Senator Howard Baker (R-Tennessee) and Rep. George Murphy briefed President Gerald Ford in the Oval Office about the findings of their visit to Europe investigating nuclear weapons' security deficiencies. Senator Pastore urged Ford to fix the problems identified in the report as quickly as possible.^[166] Senator Pastore later publicly revealed that a two year-old secret report had detailed numerous deficiencies at U.S. Army nuclear weapons storage sites in Europe, including the fact that in 1972 more than two hundred soldiers involved in nuclear weapons' security had been relieved of duty for a variety of reasons, 83 of them for drug abuse.^[167]
• June 30, 1976: The JCAE reported that the Defense Department had closed 97 nuclear weapons storage sites in 1974 and 1975.^[168]
• March 16, 1981: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report on the status of its nuclear weapons' security enhancement program, the Long Range Security Program (LRSP), in Europe revealed that ACE's European Division was supervising work in progress at 107 nuclear and chemical weapons storage sites in five countries: West Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and the Netherlands. The LRSP upgrades included security improvements at the sole U.S. chemical weapons storage site at Clausen, Germany. These sites provided nuclear weapons support to the military forces of eight NATO countries: the United States, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Turkey, The Netherlands, and Great Britain. Site breakdown by country: West Germany: 81 sites; Italy: 12 sites; Greece: 7 sites; Turkey: 5 sites; Netherlands: 2 sites.^[169]

Nuclear Intelligence

This collection is the first comprehensive attempt to compile in one place all of the relevant declassified documents concerning the USAF's ultra-secretive nuclear intelligence gathering unit, the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC). Abhorring publicity in any form, AFTAC and its antecedents have been responsible since 1947 for operating the U.S. government's Atomic Energy Detection System (AEDS), which is responsible for detecting and analyzing all foreign nuclear weapons tests and related activities.^[170]

AFTAC's nuclear weapons intelligence collection, processing and analytic work is generically referred to within the U.S. intelligence community as nuclear intelligence (NUCINT), which includes intelligence information about nuclear events obtained from the collection of gaseous, liquid or solid nuclear materials, such as radioactive effluents, particulates, or debris. NUCINT sensors also monitor radio frequency emissions, such as wideband electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from nuclear tests; nuclear radiation emissions, such as X-Ray, Gamma-Ray, and Neutron emissions from the nuclear weapons themselves; and geophysical phenomena in order to detect and evaluate nuclear tests, including acoustic, seismic, and magnetic waves. Finally, radio frequency emitters are monitored to detect nuclear weapons tests, such as Wideband EMP and unintentional radiation (RINT).

This collection contains a number of important documents concerning the mission and nuclear test detection capabilities of AFTAC and its predecessor organizations throughout the Cold War era above and beyond the several dozen declassified documents about the AEDS already published in previous Brill document collections.^[171]

The collection also contains a sizeable number of documents describing how AFTAC established, in conjunction with Great Britain, a global network of ground-based collection units whose mission was to detect foreign nuclear weapons tests using a variety of techniques, such as sophisticated seismic and acoustic intelligence sensors, as well as a number of secret airborne units (usually using the cover of the USAF's Air Weather Service) that were responsible for conducting aerial nuclear sampling missions after each and every Soviet or other foreign nuclear weapons blast.^[172]

AFTAC started as a very small and compact organization of only a couple hundred military and civilian personnel, but slowly grew in size and sophistication as Soviet nuclear weapons tests became more numerous, and the number of countries possessing nuclear weapons proliferated. Beginning in 1964 and continuing for the rest of the decade, AFTAC and its British counterparts dramatically expanded the size of their AEDS detection networks in Asia and Australasia because of the first Chinese nuclear weapons test in 1964, followed by the move of the French nuclear test ground to the Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia in 1966.^[173]

Compared with its much larger cousins, the CIA and NSA, the AEDS has always been a relatively modest endeavor. At its peak in the early 1970s, AFTAC, operating under the covername Project CLEAR SKY, maintained a headquarters and analytic center at Patrick AFB, Florida. In comparison to the CIA and NSA staffs, AFTAC's was tiny. As of 1972, it consisted of only 1,857 military personnel and 102 civilians, who manned a worldwide network of forty manned detachments and 49 unmanned operating locations in 35 countries that monitored foreign nuclear weapons tests around the clock.

As of 1984, AFTAC's thirteen hundred military and civilian personnel were operating more than twenty manned detachments, four small manned operating locations, and more than fifty unmanned equipment locations in the U.S. and 35 countries around the world that were engaged in monitoring foreign nuclear weapons testing activities.^[174]

Table 5: AFTAC Order of Battle - 1984

Manned AFTAC Operating Detachments
23 manned operating detachments, of which three were in the process of being reduced to unmanned Equipment Locations (EL) by the end of 1986.

1. Detachment 045: Buckley ANGB, Colorado
2. Detachment 046: Falcon AFS, Colorado
3. Detachment 057: Lowry AFB, Colorado
4. Detachment 063: Patrick AFB, Florida (AFTAC HQ)
5. Detachment 301: Belbasi Seismic Research Station, Turkey
6. Detachment 313: Sonseca Seismic Research Station, Spain
7. Detachment 315: Iraklion AS, Greece
8. Detachment 348: RAF Lakenheath, UK
9. Detachment 360: Keflavik AS, Iceland (possibly EL 360)
10. Detachment 370: RAF Edzell, UK
11. Detachment 372: Ascension Island (possibly EL 372)
12. Detachment 377: Bad Aibling Station, Germany
13. Detachment 401: Clark AB, Philippines
14. Detachment 407: Yokota AB, Japan
15. Detachment 415: Chiang Mai, Thailand
16. Detachment 421: Alice Springs, Australia
17. Detachment 422: Misawa AS, Japan
18. Detachment 423: Delmonte Plantation, Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao, Philippines
19. Detachment 428: Andersen AFB, Guam (possibly EL 428)
20. Detachment 452: Camp Long, Wonju, South Korea
21. Detachment 459: Pinedale Seismic Research Facility, Boulder, Wyoming
22. Detachment 460: Eielson AFB, Alaska
23. Detachment 471: Elmendorf AFB, Alaska

AFTAC Manned Operating Locations (OL)

1. OL AX: Sunnyvale AFS, California
2. OL AY: Livermore, California
3. OL BE: Pentagon, Washington, D.C.
4. OL BN: Howard AB, Panama
5. OL FH: Los Angeles AFS, California
6. OL VE: Alexandria, Virginia

AFTAC, whose headquarters is located at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, is still going strong today, but it is much smaller than it was thirty years ago thanks to the incorporation of new technologies and a diminished threat spectrum that it needs to monitor (North Korea is the only nation still testing nuclear weapons). Today, AFTAC operates twenty-five seismic arrays and eleven single-instrument locations consisting of seismometers and associated data acquisition systems and workstations, seven hydroacoustic recording stations, a small number of specialized reconnaissance aircraft engaged in airborne nuclear particulate collection, and over a hundred sensors mounted on several dozen VELA and GPS satellites that are designed to detect the unique signatures of atmospheric nuclear weapons explosions.^[175]

Keeping U.S. Chemical and Biological Weapons Programs Secret

Virtually all Americans during the Cold War era knew that their country possessed nuclear weapons, and virtually everyone in America had some opinion as to whether they liked “The Bomb” or not. But very few Americans knew anything at all about the even more secretive U.S. programs to develop and build chemical and biological weapons. This should not come as a surprise, since the American mainstream press in those days rarely wrote anything substantive about chemical or biological weapons, and almost no one on Capitol Hill paid any attention to the subject, despite the fact that these weapons were, to some degree, far more lethal than nuclear weapons.

This is exactly the way the American presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike, who occupied the White House between 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991 liked it. The last thing Washington wanted was for a public debate over the need for these weapons, much less the morality of using them on the battlefield or against innocent civilians.

From a public relations standpoint, chemical and biological weapons were deemed to be so toxic politically that in 1946 the White House and the Pentagon ordered that everything concerning these weapons be treated as Top Secret, with only a few senior U.S. government and military officials given access to high-level policy information about these weapons.^[176] Not only was there no high-level oversight of the chemical and biological weapons programs, but the ban on the release of information about these two programs was so extreme that virtually nothing was disclosed to Congress about these activities until the 1960s. The U.S. Army, which was responsible for developing and building these weapons, did not submit a formal report to Congress about their work on these weapons until 1977, more than thirty years after the end of World War II!^[177]

The U.S. Chemical Weapons Program

Although few people realize it, chemical weapons were America's first WMD program, with the American chemical warfare program tracing its originals back over a century to America's entry into World War I in November 1917.^[178]

During World War I, the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) manufactured 5,770 tons of chemical agents and filled weapons, including 1,400 tons of phosgene gas and 175 tons of the more lethal mustard gas. Although the U.S. never deployed chemical weapons on the Western Front in Europe, it had begun large-scale production of an improved lethal gas known as Lewisite for use in an offensive planned for early 1919. By the time the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, a U.S. Army munitions plant near Willoughby, Ohio, was producing ten tons of Lewisite a day, for a total of about 150 tons produced during the war.^[179]

The horrible impact that gas warfare had made on the soldiers and the civilian populace in Europe led to international efforts to ban toxic chemical weapons. After the war, the U.S. was party to the Washington Arms Conference Treaty of 1922, which would have banned chemical weapons. The treaty, however, never was approved because the French government refused to sign it. Then there was the 1925 Geneva Convention, whose effectiveness was limited because some nations, including the United States, reserved the right to maintain stockpiles as deterrence against first use by other parties. This allowed the U.S. Army to secretly continue to stockpile chemical weapons, which by the time World War II began in 1939 exceeded 30,000 tons of lethal chemical munitions, mostly mustard gas.

Prior to Pearl Harbor, almost all of the U.S. Army's chemical weapons research, development and production activities were centered on the Edgewood Arsenal north of Baltimore, Maryland. After America entered World War II, Congress authorized funds to build vast new chemical weapons factories at the Huntsville Arsenal outside Huntsville, Alabama, the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal north of Denver, Colorado.^[180]

America's largest chemical weapons plant was the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, located on a 17,238-acre tract of land outside Commerce City, Colorado, north of Denver. The plant was built in 1942 by the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers for the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) to manufacture mustard gas and Lewisite chemical weapons. Most of the chemical weapons manufacturing facilities were concentrated on 260-acres in the center of the facility away from the prying eyes of uncleared civilians. The Arsenal produced its first batch of mustard gas on January 1, 1943. It ceased work on the production of chemical agents shortly after Japan's surrender in September 1945.^[181]

During World War II, the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare Service produced a staggering 146,000 metric tons of toxic chemical agents, primarily phosgene (CG), hydrogen cyanide (AC), cyanogen chloride (CK), and mustard gas (H). There were, as yet, no nerve gas weapons in the U.S. arsenal. The only new chemical agent that the CWS developed and produced during the war was a purer and more lethal form of mustard gas called Distilled Mustard Agent (HD), which went into production in 1945 just before the end of the war.^[182]

Most of these weapons remained inside bunkers at a small number of U.S. Army storage depots in the U.S. However, tens of thousands of tons of mustard and lewisite gas weapons were shipped from the U.S. to Great Britain, Italy and Australia during the war and were kept ready for use if needed. Fortunately, the order to employ these awful weapons was never given.^[183]

The Evolution of U.S. National Policy on Chemical Warfare

The evolution of U.S. chemical warfare policy during the Cold War was somewhat convoluted, in part because these weapons were inherently unpopular both with the American public and among many senior White House officials and top military commanders.^[184]

The fundamental tenet of the U.S. chemical weapons policy both during World War II and throughout the Cold War was the doctrine of “no first use.” In May 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the United States' policy of using chemical weapons only in retaliation, stating that if the Japanese were to use chemical weapons, “retaliation in kind and in full measure will be meted out.” A year later, on June 8, 1943, Roosevelt told the press that “we shall under no circumstances resort to the use of such [chemical] weapons unless they are first used by our enemies.”^[185] This “no first use/retaliation only” national policy was later reaffirmed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960 and again by President Richard Nixon in November 1969.^[186]

For most of the Cold War, the U.S. government's official policy was that chemical and biological weapons would not be used except in retaliation for such an attack on the United States or its allies. This basic concept was embodied in a series of Top Secret NSC directives, starting with NSC 62 in February 1950, which stated that “The United States will undertake gas warfare only in retaliation against its use by an enemy and on the decision of the Commander-in-Chief.”^[187]

Behind the scenes, however, the declassified documents in this collection show that the ‘unofficial' chemical warfare policy of the U.S. government was significantly different. The U.S. military, especially the top brass of the U.S. Army, never agreed with the “no first use/retaliation only” U.S. government policy, and they spent the entire Cold War period trying to undermine and change this policy to allow U.S. military commanders greater flexibility to use these weapons if, in the Pentagon's opinion, the circumstances warranted.^[188]

It was not until the Nixon administration took office in January 1969 that the first full-scale critical review of the U.S. government's CW and BW policies and posture was undertaken, which led to the termination of all American work on biological weapons and the suspension of the U.S. chemical weapons program. The Gerald R. Ford administration that followed continued Nixon's policy of keeping the U.S. chemical weapons program to a standby status despite fierce opposition from the Pentagon, which wanted money to build a new generation of chemical weapons called binary chemical munitions.^[189]

The Soviet Threat

The adherents of a more aggressive chemical and biological weapons policy inside the Pentagon used every weapon in their arsenal to try to convince successive administrations inside the White House of their point of view.

The first argument that the adherents of BW and CW used over and over again throughout the Cold War was that the U.S. military needed chemical and biological weapons to offset the large military manpower advantage that the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies enjoyed over the U.S. and NATO. Those individuals who made this argument did not see chemical or biological weapons as a deterrent against Soviet aggression, but rather as battlefield weapons no different than conventional artillery or bombs. Unsurprisingly, the CW-BW proponents inside the U.S. military rejected the U.S. government national policy that the U.S. would never use these weapons first, and would only use these weapons in retaliation if the Soviets or their allies were to use theirs first.^[190]

Among the top arguments the chemical/biological warfare proponents inside the Pentagon made was that the Soviets would almost certainly use their stockpile of chemical and biological weapons in the event of hostilities. Therefore, they argued, the U.S. military should do the same.^[191]

But arguably the most persuasive argument that they could make was that according to the U.S. intelligence community, the Soviets possessed a chemical and biological weapons stockpile that was vastly larger and more modern than that possessed by the U.S.^[192] A 1951 USAF report stated that the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile consisted of only 15,000 tons of chemical agents and munitions, almost all of which had been manufactured during World War II, compared with an estimated 500,000 tons of chemical agents and munitions possessed by the USSR. The Soviets also reportedly possessed 16,000 tons of newly manufactured sarin-type nerve agents, compared with only 580 tons of sarin and Tabun nerve agents that the U.S. had captured from Nazi Germany at the end of World War II.^[193]

To make matters worse, much of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile was not useable. In December 1951, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps informed the U.S. Air Force that all 317,000 of its M70 chemical bombs filled with mustard gas had deteriorated to the point that they were no longer useable, and that it would take three to five years to develop and produce a replacement bomb.^[194]

Many of these estimates held that the Soviets possessed a massive chemical weapons stockpile of between 200,000 and 300,000 agent tons, including 40,000 to 50,000 tons of nerve gas. Where these figures came from was never revealed in the estimates, nor was there any elucidation as to the accuracy of these figures or an assessment of the reliability of the source(s) for this information.

In fact, the U.S. intelligence community knew virtually nothing about the Soviet capabilities in the areas of chemical and biological warfare until the very end of the Cold War. The only sources available to the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community after the end of World War II about Soviet CBW activities came from captured German and Japanese documents and a tiny smattering of former German and Japanese intelligence officers, who traded their knowledge for immunity from prosecution and a relatively decent salary (with fringe benefits) from the U.S. intelligence community. But the quantity and quality of the information these people were able to provide was low, at best, mostly taking the form of rumors masquerading as hard intelligence.^[195]

The U.S. Army Chemical Corps Takes Over the Chemical Weapons Program

After the end of World War II, the U.S. Army retained the responsibility for developing and manufacturing new chemical weapons agents and weapons systems, and the Army General Staff delegated the work to the newly created U.S. Army Chemical Corps, which replaced the former Chemical Warfare Service on August 2, 1946 .^[196]

Table 6: Chiefs of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps: 1941-1962

The new-born U.S. Army Chemical Corps inherited a bleak situation. In the postwar peacetime environment, and with America being the world's sole nuclear superpower, there was no perceived need for a large stockpile of chemical weapons by either the White House or senior Pentagon officials. Unlike for nuclear weaponry, there was no comparable high-level constituency inside the U.S. government for chemical weapons. There is little documentary evidence that any of the American presidents since Harry Truman had any personal interest in chemical or biological weaponry, focusing their attention instead of nuclear weapons. Moreover, money was in short supply, so high-level interest in spending precious fiscal resources on chemical weapons' research and development declined dramatically. In 1947, Congress cut two‑thirds of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps' budget, and the Dugway Proving Ground, the Army's principal open-air chemical and biological weapons test site, was closed.^[197]

Unlike America's nuclear weapons program, which over time has gained wide acceptance in America, the U.S. chemical weapons program never achieved anywhere near the same level of acceptance with the American public. With the exception of a small number of devotees within the U.S. Army, chemical weapons did not develop much of a supportive constituency within the U.S. government or the military. Much of this attitude stemmed from memories of the horrors of gas warfare on the Western Front during World War I, which killed or maimed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the battlefield, including thousands of American soldiers. Because of the revulsion spawned by the memories of World War I, the U.S. came close to banning the production or use of chemical weapons after the end of the war.^[198]

This meant that the U.S. military, especially the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, became the sole constituency promoting the development and production of chemical and biological weapons during the Cold War.

Despite these obstacles, somehow the U.S. Army's chemical weapons program survived the postwar period, mainly because a small number of high-ranking U.S. military officials felt that the U.S. needed to retain a large chemical weapons stockpile. A high-level Defense Department investigatory panel emphasized this, stating in its top secret final report that the "vigorous development of agents and weapons in the BW and CW fields is essential to the national security.”^[199]

Because of the cloak of secrecy covering all its work—most of the records of the Chemical Corps remain classified today—available evidence indicates that the U.S. Army Chemical Corps was able to do pretty much what it wanted with minimal interference from the Pentagon or the White House. As a result the U.S. Army Chemical Corps was allowed to continue to retain a significant stockpile of lethal chemical weapons after World War II, mostly in the form of hundreds of thousands of chemical bombs meant for delivery by USAF B-29 bombers, including 96,000 500-lb and 1,000-lb bombs filled with phosgene, hydrocyanic acid, and cyanogen chloride gas, and almost 300,000 100-lb and 115-lb bombs filled with the more lethal mustard gas. All of these weapons were fairly modern, having been manufactured during World War II. There were also hundreds of thousands of mortar and artillery shells, rockets and land mines that contained phosgene and mustard gas that were meant for use by the U.S. Army in time of war.^[200]

Research and development on new chemical weapons continued. After the end of World War II, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps shipped thousands of captured German nerve gas weapons to the U.S., so that they could be studied and reverse-engineered, thus enabling the production of American versions of these weapons. U.S. Army records show that between May 1945 and June 1947, over 40,000 tabun bombs, 21,000 mustard gas bombs, 2,700 mustard gas rockets, and 750 tabun-filled artillery shells were shipped from Germany to the U.S. and put into storage at the Deseret Chemical Depot in Utah.^[201]

By the time the Korean War began in June 1950, the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile had fallen on hard times because of a lack of money and/or high-level attention. The U.S. Army Chemical Corps had stockpiled thousands of tons of lethal chemical weapons, but relatively few of them were serviceable. In fact, many of the weapons in the U.S. arsenal at the time had been manufactured as early as during World War I or shortly thereafter.

Table 7:.The U.S. Chemical Weapons Stockpile: April 1952

KEY

• H = Mustard Gas
• HD = Distilled Mustard Gas
• CG = Phosgene
• CK = Cyanogen chloride

SOURCE: U.S. Army, Memorandum, Chemical and Biological Warfare Readiness, April 23, 1952, Top Secret.

On June 30, 1950, five days after North Korean troops invaded South Korea, a committee chaired by Dr. Earl P. Stevenson (the official name of the committee was the Ad Hoc Committee on Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare) sent a report to Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson recommending that the Pentagon resume research and development work on a new generation of chemical and biological weapons to counter the growing Soviet threat. The Stevenson Committee also urged the Pentagon to consider doing away with the policy of only using its chemical arsenal in retaliation for the use of similar weapons against the United States; in other words, allow the U.S. military to use these deadly instruments as first strike weapons in order to counterbalance the Soviets' huge advantage in military manpower.^[202]

To get the Pentagon to resume working on chemical and biological weaponry, the Stevenson Committee used the age-old method of citing what they perceived as the growing Soviet chemical weapons threat. U.S. and British intelligence estimates on the state of the Soviet chemical and biological warfare stockpile were all over the map at the time, principally because there was virtually no hard information available in the later 1940s and 1950s about what the Soviets were doing in the field of toxic chemical and biological weaponry. In June 1952, the British Joint Intelligence Committee – on what factual basis remains unknown – estimated that the Soviets had 120,000 tons of older mustard gas-type weapons and 18,000 tons of newer weaponry filled with the German nerve agent tabun (GA).^[203] An August 1952 American intelligence estimate held that the Soviets had somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 metric tons of older “mustard gas” type chemical weapons, plus another 12,000 to 15,000 metric tons of nerve gas munitions. It should come as no surprise that U.S. intelligence estimates of Soviet chemical and biological warfare capabilities were always substantially larger than those of their British counterparts.^[204]

On October 27, 1950, the newly appointed Secretary of Defense, George C. Marshall, partially approved the report's recommendations, allocating to the Army the huge sum of 200 million dollar to finance an expansion of both the chemical and biological weapons programs, and ordering the Army Chemical Corps to begin immediate construction of facilities capable of producing sarin nerve gas weapons. But Marshall, himself a veteran of the bloody carnage on the Western Front during World War I, chose not to approve the panel's recommendation that would have allowed the Pentagon to use CW and BW as first strike weapons. General Marshall's decision was to open the door for the U.S. military to quickly develop and build a wide array of new chemical and biological weapons in the decade that followed.^[205]

During the Korean War (1950-1953), the U.S. Army Chemical Corps spent tens of millions of dollars building up the staff and physical infrastructure necessary to develop and produce a wide range of chemical and biological weapons. Between June 1950 and September 1951 the Army Chemical Corp's research budget tripled from 10 million to 30 million dollar, the number of researchers working on weapon projects increased from 2,100 to 3,700, and the Dugway Proving Grounds in the remote Utah desert was quietly reopened after a five-year hiatus on July 1, 1950 to resume testing chemical as well as biological weapons.^[206]

The Chemical Corps' main focus was to develop and produce as quickly as possible a wide range of weapons filled with the deadly nerve gas sarin (GB), a highly volatile, odorless liquid developed by German chemists before World War II that turned into a gas, attacked the nervous system and killed quickly.^[207] Responding to Secretary of Defense Marshall's October 27, 1950 directive, the JCS and the Army staff gave the sarin weapons production project one of the highest priority designations in the military and even its own codeword (SKELP), which allowed the U.S. Army Chemical Corps to bypass normal U.S. government contracting and procurement channels, as well as the normal military chain of command, in order to secretly build the factories to produce the sarin-filled weapons.^[208]

The scientists and engineers working for the U.S. Army Chemical Corps quickly developed a series of chemical cluster bombs that were designed to carry the lethal nerve gas sarin to targets deep inside the USSR. By the end of September 1951, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps had nearly completed the development of America's first sarin-filled bomb, the E101. By the end of December 1952, the 1,000-lb. E101RE CW cluster bomb was ready for production, each filled with 76 E54R6 GB-filled bomblets. The Army chemical corps was also in the process of perfecting the design of new GB-filled 105mm and 155mm artillery shells, a 4.5mm GB rocket for use against area targets, and a 4.2-inch mortar shell filled with sarin nerve gas. By September 1953, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps engineers at the Edgewood Arsenal north of Baltimore had begun work on a 750-lb. cluster bomb designed specifically to dispense sarin-filled bomblets from low-flying supersonic fighter bombers, as well as a GB-filled 1,000-lb cluster bomb (E101R3), which was also designed for use with high-performance fighter bomber aircraft.^[209]

With all these new weapons having been designed, now the issue became how to turn the design blueprints into actual sarin-filled chemical weapons. In July 1950, less than a month after the North Korean invasion of South Korea, the chief of the Army Chemical Corps, Major General Anthony C. McAuliffe, ordered the immediate design of a plant that could produce thirty tons of sarin nerve gas per day. The name given to the project was Project GIBBET. In November 1950, contractors hired by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps began building two plants to produce sarin (GB) nerve gas weapons. The first plant was located on the grounds of a Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) facility at Muscle Shoals in northern Alabama (whose covername was the “Muscle Shoals Phosphate Development Works”). The second and more important complex was located at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal north of Denver, Colorado, which was to produce the sarin gas itself and fill weapons with the agent. Both plants were completed in May 1953, and the production of weapons carrying the sarin nerve agent began in July 1953 at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.^[210]

The Pentagon wanted a massive sarin nerve gas stockpile to complement the fast growing U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. And that is exactly what the U.S. Army Chemical Corps gave them. The preliminary plan devised in 1952 called for producing a staggering 22,000 tons of sarin nerve gas by July 1, 1954, which was to fill over one million 105mm artillery shells, 560,000 155mm artillery shells, almost 1.3 million 4.2-inch sarin-filled mortar shells, and over 200,000 cluster bombs. But that was not enough for the U.S. military. By 1957, the Pentagon wanted 50,000 tons of sarin-filled weapons for the Army, 76,000 tons for the Air Force, and 5,000 tons for the Navy, for an eye-popping total of 131,000 tons of sarin-filled bombs, rockets and artillery shells by the end of 1957.^[211]

Unlike nuclear weapons, which are slowly and carefully built by hand by skilled technicians, chemical weapons are produced on an assembly line by machinery – not unlike a what one would find at a Coca Cola bottling plant. Hundreds of weapons can be produced each day. So giving the Pentagon what it wanted did not pose much of a problem for the U.S. Army Chemical Corps. All the Corps needed was money to fill the Pentagon's order.

The first sarin-filled weapon produced at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was the M34 1,000-lb. cluster bomb, which contained 108-lbs. of sarin nerve agent inside 76 bomblets that were dispensed once the bomb exploded in mid-air. Between December 1954 and the end of 1957, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal produced almost 24,000 M34 and M34A1 sarin-filled cluster bombs for the USAF, which were kept stored inside dozens of munitions storage igloos at the Arsenal.^[212] The M34/M34A1 remained the principal sarin-filled bomb in the U.S. arsenal until 1959, when the Army Chemical Corps produced a lighter (750-lbs) and more aerodynamic GB-filled bomb called the MC-1.^[213] At the same time the Chemical Corps began building a wide assortment of other sarin-filled weapons for the U.S. military, including aircraft spray tanks, 105mm, 155mm and 8-inch artillery shells, a 4.5-inch rocket, and the 4.2-inch sarin-filled mortar shell, all of which began coming off the production line at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in 1954.^[214]

The number of sarin-filled weapons produced were staggering. For example, by June 1955 the Rocky Mountain arsenal had produced 14,000 sarin-filled 155mm artillery shells alone.^[215] By 1957, enough sarin-filled bombs, rockets and artillery shells had been produced that the U.S. Army Chemical Corps terminated production of the weapons and put the production lines at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal on standby status until such time as more supply of sarin was needed.^[216]

As the first batches of sarin-filled weapons began coming off the production line at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in 1954, the Department of Defense began drawing up plans to deploy these new weapons overseas. In June 1954, the JCS approved the deployment of chemical weapons to the Far East, and by implication, to Europe as well. This was followed by the approval of the Secretary of Defense for the deployment of chemical weapons to the Far East in August 1954. On August 27, 1954, the JCS informed CINCFE in Tokyo that the “Secretary of Defense has approved the shipment of toxic chemical munitions to Far East Command (FEC). Advise when shipment desired.”^[217]

But with the end of the Korean War, Washington immediately cut back on spending on weapons deemed to be in excess of requirements, which included chemical weapons. Starting in the mid- to late-1950s the U.S. government and military dramatically de-emphasized the use of chemical weapons, and focus and resources were shifted to nuclear operations in a future war. As spending on chemical weapons dropped, so did the momentum of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps' chemical weapons program. Funding for research and development of new CW weapons flatlined and began to decrease by 1955. Worse still, high-level interest within the Department of Defense and the U.S. Army senior staff in the Chemical Corps noticeably declined after senior White House and Pentagon officials decided not to deploy the new generation of nerve gas weapons overseas.^[218] By 1957, the Army's chemical warfare program had come to a near-complete halt, with one report noting that a “creeping paralysis” had taken hold at the sarin (GB) production plant at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado.^[219]

Table 8:The U.S. Chemical Weapons Stockpile: July 1958

SOURCE: U.S. Army, Memorandum, Review of Bacteriological and Chemical Warfare Planning, July 9, 1958, Appendix I Toxic Chemical Warfare, Top Secret, NARA.

VX

But the research scientists at the U.S. Army Chemical Corps devised a new “wonder weapon” that would, at least temporarily, reinvigorate interest in chemical weapons inside the U.S. government. In 1954, the scientists at the U.S. Army Chemical Corps CW laboratory at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland had discovered a new and extremely lethal nerve agent, which they designated VX. With the consistency of lubricating oil and extremely persistent, VX was a thousand times more toxic than sarin gas. Just a drop of VX on the skin would kill a person in less than fifteen minutes, which meant that just wearing a gas mask would no longer protect you from this new nerve agent.^[220]

By the summer of 1956, the Army had succeeded in developing a form of the VX nerve agent that could be produced in mass quantities and put in virtually every form of weapon system imaginable. The problem was that once the VX agent was put into a weapon, it almost immediately began to decompose and lose its toxicity. This required another year of work by the Army scientists before they could stabilize the agent. Field testing of the VX agent began in secret at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in April 1957, with the tests quickly demonstrating that even minute quantities of VX could kill thousands of people and animals in a matter of minutes. On December 12, 1957, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps declared the VX nerve agent ready for production. The only problem was that they now had to get permission and money from the Department of Defense before putting VX weapons into production.^[221]

Following nearly two years of unrelenting pressure from the U.S. Army, on April 27, 1958, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles finally approved the U.S. Army Chemical Corp's plan to produce VX nerve gas weapons.^[222] In June 1959, the Army Chemical Corps issued a 8 million dollar contract to build a new chemical weapons plant on the grounds of the Wabash River Ordnance Works in Newport, Indiana to manufacture VX and fill weapons with the agent. The plant was scheduled to go online in July 1961.^[223] The U.S. Army Chemical Corps immediately began building a separate plant at Newport to fill the following munitions with VX nerve agent: 155mm artillery shell filled with 6 lbs. of VX; an 8-inch artillery shell filled with 12 lbs. of VX; the E5 landmine holding 12 lbs. of VX; the T238 rocket; the HONEST JOHN and LITTLE JOHN rockets; the SERGEANT missile; and aircraft spray tanks for the USAF.^[224]

But the U.S. Army Chemical Corps wanted more. On June 27, 1960, a panel (the Defense Biological and Chemical Planning Board) chaired by Dr. Herbert F. York, which was comprised almost entirely of partisans of greater emphasis on chemical and biological warfare, submitted its report to the Secretary of Defense. Not surprising, the York Board's report recommended redoubling the U.S. military's chemical and biological weapons efforts with more money and a mission to develop newer and even more lethal CW and BW agents. The Secretary of Defense approved the recommendations of the York Board on August 12, 1960 without any dissent.^[225]

But by this time the Eisenhower administration was on its last legs, and in November 1960 the American people chose a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, to be the next president of the United States. The Chemical Corps was forced to play a wait-and-see game until such time as the administration decided what it wanted to do about the nation's chemical and biological weapons programs.^[226]

The Kennedy Administration Ramps Up the CW Effort

When John F. Kennedy became the President of the United States on January 20, 1961, he appointed hard-charging auto executive Robert S. McNamara to head the Defense Department. With the full blessing of the JCS (and the Army Chemical Corps), on October 4, 1961 the Pentagon approved a plan to immediately expand and modernize the U.S. chemical and biological weapons programs. This program was given the codename “Project 112.”^[227]

With hundreds of millions of dollars of new money from the Pentagon (the budget of the Army Chemical Corps tripled between 1961 and 1964), the Army Chemical Corps ordered that their dormant chemical weapons production lines be reopened and dramatically expanded in order to produce yet another series of new nerve gas weapons, the most lethal of which was the nerve agent VX. The new VX complex at Newport, Indiana began production in April 1961, and reached full production capacity in August 1961. By October 1961, the Newport plant was cranking out thousands of chemical munitions filled with the deadly VX nerve agent.^[228]

Robert McNamara's call to arms revitalized the U.S. chemical weapons program. Between January 1961 and the end of July 1962, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps produced 575 tons of VX nerve agent, which went into 5,951 M23 landmines each filled with 2-gallons of VX; 274 M121A1 155mm artillery shells filled with VX nerve agent; 68,994 M55 115mm rocket warheads filled with sarin gas; and 53,242 M55 115mm rocket warheads filled with VX nerve agent.^[229]

By the end of the Kennedy administration in 1963, the U.S. chemical weapons program had reached its peak. Lethal chemical warheads were being developed or manufactured for virtually every weapon system in the U.S. military, from landmines and artillery shells to ballistic and cruise missiles. More than forty different chemical weapons systems were reportedly developed during the late 1950s and early 1960s.^[230]

But the Chemical Corps comeback was short-lived. Interest in chemical and biological weapons began to notably diminish towards the end of the Kennedy administration in 1963, leading to dramatic cuts in funding for these programs. Weapons testing and production work declined even more precipitously after the U.S. entered the Vietnam War in 1965.

The 1969 Suspension of the U.S. Chemical Weapons Program by Richard Nixon

Ironically, one can blame blowback resulting from the growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War in Congress for the demise of the American chemical weapons program in 1969.

President Richard Nixon entered the White House on January 20, 1969, determined to try to salvage something from the deteriorating security situation in Vietnam. On April 30, 1969, Nixon's new Secretary of Defense, former congressman Melvin R. Laird, launched a comprehensive review of all U.S. government biological and chemical weapons policies and programs, whose goal was to take a long and critical look at U.S. chemical and biological weapons policy in the context of American national security requirements. The study was supposed to recommend possible minor changes in U.S. chemical and biological warfare policy, but it turned out that unforeseen circumstances took a hand which forced a complete reorientation of the study.^[231]

The first of these circumstances was the public disclosure that the U.S. Army had been for decades dumping unwanted chemical weapons into the North Atlantic without disclosing these activities to Congress or anybody else for that matter. This disclosure, naturally, set off a firestorm of negative publicity not only in the U.S., but also in Europe and at the United Nations.^[232]

The second came just a few weeks later, when the Wall Street Journal on July 18, 1969, reported that a chemical weapons accident had occurred ten days earlier on July 8, 1969 at the Chibana Ammunition Depot on Okinawa. A leak in a 500-pound chemical bomb injured 24 U.S. military personnel and civilians. The accident put the U.S. Army in an embarrassing predicament since it had tried to cover up the incident so as not to infuriate the Japanese government, which was in the process of negotiating the return of Okinawa to Japanese control from the U.S. government. Not surprisingly, the Japanese government, which knew nothing about the presence of chemical weapons on Okinawa, reacted with outrage and demanded that the U.S. government remove the weapons immediately.^[233]

Then in August 1969, the U.S. Congress stepped in and unilaterally initiated a moratorium on the production of new chemical weapons, cutting off all funding for any further research, development, testing or production of chemical weapons. Almost overnight, the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile had become a massive embarrassment and a liability for the U.S. government.

The question then became: what should the U.S. government do with its vast but aging chemical weapons stockpile? At the time, the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile consisted of approximately 35,000 agent tons of bulk and filled chemical munitions. According to declassified documents in this collection, 50.6 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile consisted of weapons or bulk storage containers filled with distilled mustard gas (HD); 35.6 percent of the stockpile consisted of weapons and bulk storage contained filled with sarin (GB) nerve gas; and the rest of the stockpile (13.8 percent) consisted of munitions and storage containers filled with the nerve agent VX. A one to two week operational supply of 1,585 agent tons of chemical munitions was stored on Okinawa but scheduled to be moved to Guam, and a five-day operational supply of chemical munitions (488 agent tons) was stored at Clausen in West Germany.^[234]

The Nixon's administration's solution to its conundrum was to issue a statement on November 25, 1969, that reaffirmed the U.S. government's commitment to not be the first nation to use chemical weapons, and committed the U.S. government to submitting the 1925 Geneva Convention Protocol to the U.S. Senate for ratification, which would commit the United States not to use chemical weapons. President Nixon also announced the immediate suspension of all work on developing or producing new chemical weapons, as well as the discontinuance of the American biological weapons program. The Pentagon objected violently to this action, but they were overruled by President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.^[235]

Table 9: The U.S. Chemical Weapons Stockpile: 1970

SOURCE: NSC, Interdepartmental Political-Military Group, Report, Annual Review of United States Chemical Warfare and Biological Research Programs as of 1 November 1970, November 1, 1970, Secret, p. 8, State Department FOIA

Ronald Reagan Revives the U.S. Chemical Weapons Program

Despite President Nixon's halt of the U.S. chemical weapons program in 1969, the White House did not order the weapons already in the American stockpile destroyed, nor did the Nixon administration block future modernization of the stockpile with new weapons.

This left the door open for the U.S. Army's Chemical Corps, which immediately began lobbying for permission to begin developing a new generation of chemical weapons that would be safer to store, easier to use, and more lethal than the weapons that were then in existence. The Army and its backers in the Pentagon argued that the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile was obsolete and unusable, and that the U.S. needed a credible chemical weapons stockpile in order to deter Soviet aggression. It was an old and not very original argument, but it appealed to the generals in the JCS and the elderly conservative lawmakers on Capitol Hill who dominated the congressional committees dealing with national security matters.

Thus began an epic (and virtually unknown) fifteen year battle inside the Washington bureaucracy over whether or not to build a new generation of binary chemical weapons. Throughout the Nixon and Ford administrations (1969-1977), the Pentagon kept inserting requests for money into its annual budget for developing new binary chemical munitions and for building a new plant at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to build the weapons. And every year, Congress, which was dominated by the Democratic Party, kept rejecting the Pentagon's requests. For four years (1977-1981), the Jimmy Carter administration managed to keep the binary chemical weapons issue smothered despite fierce and very public opposition from the Pentagon, which increasingly felt that these weapons had to be built in order to maintain a credible retaliatory capability on the European battlefield.^[236]

According to a November 30, 1978 NSC report, “The U.S. [chemical weapons] stockpile suffers from two major deficiencies: the number and type of munitions, and their location. The U.S. has about 30,500 agent tons of which only 7,200 tons are usable. Over the next seven years, the 7,200 tons will be reduced gradually to 2,400 tons because of obsolescence and deterioration. Of the 7,200 tons, roughly 450 tons are stored at one site in Germany. The deployment of additional chemical munitions to forward positions in Europe has not been possible because our Allies remain quite negative on this issue. Importantly, Defense has not established a requirement for a chemical weapons stockpile of a specific size. Since there is no overall concept of how chemical weapons would be employed, it is not possible to estimate consumption rates and, thus, a requirement. JCS has established a figure of 30,000 agent tons but it has not been validated in DOD. The politics within the Pentagon on the CW issue are significant. There are sharp differences between OSD and JCS. The Army Chemical Corps supported by the JCS is fighting for its very existence, and has been fanatic in its push for substantial improvement in the U.S. stockpile.”^[237]

In 1985 President Reagan sided with the JCS and the Army Chemical Corps, officially reversing the 1969 Nixon moratorium on chemical weapons development. A few months later Congress approved his request to begin production of binary VX and sarin. At the same time, due to mounting concerns about the dangers posed by the rapidly aging chemical weapons stockpile, the Reagan administration ordered many of the older chemical weapons be destroyed.^[238]

On October 16, 1987, Reagan notified Congress that he had authorized the initiation of production of the new M687 155mm binary chemical artillery shell.^[239] The U. S. produced a reported 69 tons of sarin and VX-filled M687 binary 155mm artillery shells before halting production of these weapons in 1990.^[240]

In addition, the Reagan administration approved the development and production of a number of other binary chemical weapons systems. However, these development programs were all unmitigated failures. The 500-lb. BIGEYE chemical bomb, which had been under development since the mid-1960s, never passed a single operational reliability drop test at the Dugway Proving Ground and was cancelled. U.S. Army efforts to binary chemical warheads for the U.S. Multiple‑Launch Rocket System (MLRS) were also unsuccessful, and this project was cancelled in 1990.^[241]

U.S. Chemical Weapons Production and Testing Facilities

Between 1945 and 1990, the vast majority of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile consisted of the following different types of lethal gases or nerve agents:^[242]

• choking agents, such as phosgene gas (CG);
• nerve agents, such as sarin (GB) and VX;
• blood agents, including hydrogen cyanide (AC) and cyanogen chloride (CK);
• blistering agents, such as mustard (H), distilled mustard (HD), nitrogen mustard (HN) and Lewisite (L).

Between 1950 and 1969, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps built hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons, including aerial bombs, cluster bomblets, spray tanks, artillery shells, mortar shells, rocket warheads and even toxic landmines, using the agents listed above. A number of documents in this collection provide the technical details of all the different kinds of chemical munitions built by the Army during this twenty year timeframe, all but a few of which have been destroyed over the past twenty years.^[243]

Given the large size of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile, it is perhaps surprising that all these munitions were produced at a very small number of plants located in rural areas. The following are brief profiles of the plants that produced America's chemical weapons stockpile from 1945 until the 1980s.^[244]

Edgewood Arsenal

The Edgewood Arsenal, now part of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, is situated on 38,942-acres of land approximately twenty-five miles northeast of the city of Baltimore, Maryland, and seventy miles northeast of Washington, D.C. Erected in November 1917 shortly after America's entry into World War I, the Edgewood Arsenal was America's first chemical weapons manufacturing complex. Weapons production began in June 1918, and by the time the war ended in November 1918, the Edgewood Arsenal was busy manufacturing hundreds of chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas weapons every day. When the Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918, production of chemical weapons at Edgewood stopped and the manufacturing plants were put on standby status.

Completed in 1942, the Pilot Plant Complex at the Edgewood Arsenal originally produced chemically-coated uniforms to protect soldiers from exposure to mustard gas. Production of chemical weapons followed, with the Edgewood pilot plant producing huge numbers of mustard gas bombs and artillery shells throughout World War II until this work ceased at the end of World War II. In 1950, a separate pilot production plant was built at the Edgewood Arsenal to produce the first chemical weapons filled with the nerve agent sarin (GB). This pilot plant served as the model for the two sarin production plants that the Army Chemical Corps built at Muscle Shoals, Alabama and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado. Research and development activities on chemical agents and binary chemical weapons continued until the plant's closure in 1986.

The entire Edgewood Arsenal chemical weapons manufacturing complex has been completely demolished over the past twenty years. The complex consisted of a main structure and eight support buildings. Workers demolished six of the support buildings in 1998, completing destruction in December 1999. One additional building, the Mustard Distillation and Fill Facility, was demolished in 2006.^[245]

Newport Chemical Depot

The 6,990-acre Newport Chemical Depot outside the tiny town of Dana in rural western Indiana, housed the plant that produced the entire U.S. stockpile of the deadly nerve agent known as VX. Construction of the plant began in 1959 and was largely completed in the spring of 1961. Between April 1961 and June 1968, the Newport plant produced approximately 4,500 tons of VX before being placed in standby status in September 1968. The plant continued to fill a variety of munitions with VX nerve agents until the fall of 1969 when President Nixon closed down the U.S. chemical weapons program.^[246]

A two-phased demolition project of the VX production facilities at Newport began in 1998 and was completed on April 22, 2006. The final treaty inspection report certifying that the plant had been demilitarized was signed on July 20, 2006.

Pine Bluff Arsenal

The Pine Bluff Arsenal once housed two chemical weapons production facilities. Destroyed in 1999, the BZ Fill Facility filled munitions with the agent BZ, a hallucinogen similar to LSD. The Integrated Binary Production Facilities (IBPF), built in the 1970s and 1980s, once produced DF, a GB agent precursor chemical and the M20 canister, a binary chemical munition that was deployed in small amounts in the 1980s. Demolition began in October 2003, and destruction of all these facilities was completed in December 2006. ^[247]

Rocky Mountain Arsenal

Construction of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal (RMA) was begun in June 1942 outside the town of Commerce City north of Denver, Colorado. Its mission was to manufacture and fill an array of chemical weapons and incendiary devices for use in World War II. Built on a crash basis by thousands of workers, the plant began producing chemical weapons in December 1942. During World War II, the RMA's three thousand workers produced a staggering 87,000 tons of toxic chemical weapons, principally chlorine, mustard and Lewisite gas bombs and artillery shells.

The Korean War led to a massive expansion of the plant. Between 1951 and 1953, a modern production complex was built at the RMA to manufacture and fill sarin (GB) nerve gas weapons. Construction of the new sarin production complex was completed on May 1, 1953, and sarin-filled weapons began being produced almost immediately afterwards. RMA was America's only sarin weapons plant throughout the Cold War, producing tens of thousands of GB-filled bombs, spray tanks, artillery shells, rocket warheads and other weapons systems. In Fiscal Year 1955 alone, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal produced a staggering 898,600 gallons of sarin nerve agent, which was used to fill 24,000 M34 and M34A1 chemical cluster bombs for the U.S. Air Force and 14,000 155mm artillery shells for the U.S. Army. Production of sarin agent ceased on August 16, 1957, but the plant continued filling weapons with the nerve agent until April 1958 when the sarin filling line was also closed down.^[248]

Finally, from 1959 to 1962, a separate facility at RMA produced biological weapons, principally bombs filled with the TX anti-crop agent that caused Wheat Rust. The plant ceased producing chemical and biological weapons in 1969 after President Nixon closed down these programs.^[249]

This operation was completed independent of NSCMP. RMA demolished the DC Production Facility in 1995; the Mustard (HD) Fill Facility in 2002; the HD Distillation Facility in 2001; and the GB (sarin) Production and Fill Facility in 2003. GB is the non-persistent nerve agent sarin, while DC, a precursor chemical, was used to make sarin. Mustard (HD) is a blister agent produced in the United States until the 1940s.

Dugway Proving Ground

Located on 801,505 square-miles of arid desert and scrub land about 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah, since 1942 the Dugway Proving Ground has served as the U.S. Army's principal chemical and biological weapons test center and proving ground. Testing of chemical weapons began at Dugway in the summer of 1942, followed by the first tests of biological weapons in November 1943 on a separate section of the base called the Granite Mountain facility.

At the height of the Cold War, the Dugway Proving Ground was probably the most dangerous place in America. Between 1946 and 1986, press reports indicate more than 1,100 open-air chemical weapons tests were conducted at the Dugway Proving Ground, as well as 328 biological weapons tests and 74 experiments involving highly-lethal radioactive weapons, i.e. ‘Dirty bombs' that killed by emitting massive amounts of radioactivity.^[250]

The open-air testing of chemical and biological weapons at the Dugway Proving Ground ceased decades ago, but two large laboratories located in the center of the base continue to test protective equipment and military material using live chemical and biological agents.^[251] Perhaps more importantly, large portions of the facility remain a toxic wasteland littered with the remains of hundreds of chemical and biological munitions leftover from the Cold War and the residue of the lethal agents and/or pathogens they contained.^[252]

Chemical Weapons Storage Sites in the U.S.

The number of U.S. Army munitions storage sites inside the U.S. holding America's chemical weapons stockpile was deliberately kept small and very discrete. At the time the Korean War began in June 1950, the entire American chemical weapons stockpile, consisting mostly of mustard gas, was stored at four U.S. Army-run chemical depots in the U.S: the Deseret Chemical Depot at Tooele, Utah; the Eastern Chemical Depot at the Edgewood Arsenal in Aberdeen, Maryland; the Midwest Chemical Depot at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Pine Bluff, Arkansas; and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Commerce City, Colorado.^[253]

In the early to mid-1960s, as the army's stockpile of new VX nerve gas weapons began to grow, the U.S. Army moved a portion of the nation's chemical weapons stockpile to four new ammunition depots: the Anniston Army Depot in Anniston, Alabama; the Lexington-Bluegrass Army Depot in Richmond, Kentucky; the Newport Army Ammunition Plant in Dana, Indiana; and the Umatilla Depot Activity in Hermiston, Oregon.

As of 1990, the 35,000 tons of chemical agents comprising the CW stockpile were being stored at eight special munitions storage depots in the U.S. and one remote island in the South Pacific:^[254]

• Anniston Army Depot (Anniston, Alabama): Opened in 1940 as an ordnance storage depot for conventional weapons, the first chemical weapons began arriving at the Anniston Army depot in 1963. In January 1996, the following was a summary of the chemical weapons stored at this depot: 2,253.63 tons of chemical agents (HT: 532.30; HD: 456.08; GB: 436.61; VX: 828.74) in 661,000 weapons comprising 7.36percent of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile. All chemical weapons stored at Anniston were destroyed by September 2011.^[255]
• Edgewood Area/Aberdeen Proving Ground (Edgewood, Maryland): In January 1996, the following was a summary of the chemical weapons stored at this depot: 1,624.87 tons of mustard gas (HD) agent in bulk containers and 1.30 tons of binary munitions comprising 5.31 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile.
• Lexington‑Blue Grass Army Depot (Richmond, Kentucky): The 14,600 acre Lexington-Blue Grass Army Depot held the smallest amount of chemical weapons of the Army's eight chemical weapons depots. Mustard gas-filled chemical weapons had been stored at Lexington-Blue Grass since 1944, with shipments of more modern sarin and VX-filled weapons arriving in the mid‑1960s. In January 1996, the following was a summary of the chemical weapons stored at this depot: 523.41 tons of chemical agents (HD: 90.63; GB: 305.64; VX: 127.15) in 101,000 weapons comprising only 1.71 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile. Today, according to the U.S. Army, 523 tons of nerve agents GB and VX, and mustard agent in projectiles, warheads and rockets are still stored at the depot waiting to be destroyed.
• Newport Army Ammunition Plant (Newport, Indiana): In January 1996, the following was a summary of the chemical weapons stored at this depot: 1,269.33 tons of VX in bulk containers comprising 4.15 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile.
• Pine Bluff Arsenal (Pine Bluff, Arkansas): In January 1996, the following was a summary of the chemical weapons stored at this depot: 3,849.71 tons of chemical agents (HT: 3,124.55; HD: 94.20; GB: 483.69; VX: 147.27) in 123,000 weapons and bulk containers comprising 12.58 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile and 174.72 tons of binary agent munitions.
• Pueblo Depot Activity (Pueblo, Colorado): The construction of the Pueblo Ordnance Depot (POD) began in February 1942 on 23,000 acres of arid land in western Colorado; by August, the depot was fully operational. In 1952, the first mustard agent filled munitions were shipped for storage at the depot. In January 1996, the following was a summary of the chemical weapons stored at this depot: 2,611.05 tons of HT/HD mustard gas agents in 780,000 weapons comprising 8.53 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile. According to the U.S. Army, today 2,611 tons of mustard agent-filled weapons remain at the Pueblo Depot still waiting to be destroyed.
• Tooele Army Depot (Tooele, Utah): Construction beginning in July 1942, the Tooele Army Depot (formerly the Deseret Chemical Depot) is located near the town of Tooele, Utah (sixty miles southwest of Salt Lake City) on 24,732 acres of desert scrub land. Chemical weapons storage operations commenced on July 11, 1943 in 141 munitions storage igloos built especially to store chemical munitions. Since 1943 Tooele has been the largest chemical weapons storage site in America and remains so to this day, despite the gradual destruction of many of the weapons formerly stored at the site since the end of the Cold War. In January 1996, the following was a summary of the chemical weapons stored at this depot: 13,616.00 tons of chemical/nerve agent (HD: 5,694.64, GB: 6,045.26, VX: 1,356.33) in 1.1 million weapons and bulk containers, comprising 44.5 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile and 33.58 tons of binary agent munitions.^[256]
• Umatilla Depot Activity (Hermiston, Oregon): Located on more than 19,700 acres in rural northeastern Oregon, the Umatilla Depot was opened in 1941 to store conventional ammunition. The Umatilla Depot began storing chemical weapons in 1962. In January 1996, the following was a summary of the chemical weapons stored at this depot: 3,717.38 tons of chemical agents (HD: 2,339.52 tons; GB: 1,014.01 tons; and VX: 363.86 tons) in 220,000 weapons and containers comprising 12.15 percent of the chemical weapons stockpile and 470.59 tons of binary agent munitions.^[257]
• Johnston Atoll (16-44N 169-31W): Johnston Atoll is located 717 miles southwest of Hawaii. In January 1996, the following was a summary of the chemical weapons stored at this depot: 1,134.17 tons of nerve and mustard agents (HD: 164.86: GB: 617.48; VX: 351.83) in 292,000 weapons comprising 3.71 percent of the stockpile. The last chemical weapons stored on Johnston Island were destroyed in November 2000.

The Deployment of U.S. Chemical Weapons to Europe and Asia

Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. government and military exercised extreme caution about deploying even a small portion of its chemical weapons stockpile to Western Europe and the Far East. The subject was deemed to be so sensitive that all information about the presence of American chemical weapons outside the continental U.S. was given a Top Secret classification, and the number of officials with access to this information was deliberately held to a bare minimum.

The first known instance of the U.S. military's interest in deploying chemical weapons overseas came in the midst of the Korean War, when on January 6, 1951, the commander of U.S. forces in Korea, Lt. General Matthew B. Ridgway, asked his boss in Tokyo, General Douglas MacArthur, for permission to use chemical weapons against the attacking Chinese and North Korean forces as a last resort measure in order to cover the potential withdrawal and evacuation of U.S. forces from Korea to Japan. Ridgway's request was denied (no chemical weapons were deployed in the Far East), but the fact that he made the request was indicative of how grave the military situation in Korea was at the time.^[258]

It was not until 1954, a year after the end of the Korean War, that the Pentagon began giving serious thought to deploying chemical weapons to Western Europe in order to help U.S. and NATO forces resist in wartime the much larger Soviet and Warsaw Pact military forces aligned against them on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Pentagon had wanted to send chemical weapons to Europe as early as 1952, but the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile was deemed to be so poor that the JCS decided to wait until the first sarin (GB) nerve gas weapons were slated to begin coming off the production line in 1954-1955. The Pentagon initially wanted to deploy a small portion of the U.S. chemical weapons stockpile to Great Britain, but apparently diplomatic considerations dictated that these weapons be deployed to West Germany instead.^[259] As of 1956, the USAF was planning to store more than 57,0000 chemical bombs filled with phosgene (CG) and cyanogen chloride (CK) gas at the Chize ammunition depot southwest of Paris, France, but apparently this plan also came to naught.^[260]

After several more years of debate, in early 1959 the U.S. Army secretly deployed what was described as a “token [chemical weapons] retaliatory capability” to West Germany without the formal consent of the German government, although German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was secretly briefed in August 1958 about the U.S. Army's plans. Adenauer apparently did not object to the U.S. military's plans to store chemical weapons on German soil. The 3,900 tons of mustard gas and sarin nerve gas weapons that were shipped to Germany were stored at the Seventh Army Chemical Depot, located on the grounds of the Rhine Ordnance Depot in Kircheimbolanden.^[261]

The Pentagon and the U.S. Army continued to push for permission to ship more modern and lethal nerve gas weapons to Germany to replace the older mustard gas weapons that had been sent to the continent in 1959. As usual, they got what they wanted. On June 14, 1967, a U.S. Navy merchant ship sailed from the Sunny Point Naval Pier in North Carolina for a port in Germany, carrying in its hold a shipment of 155mm projectiles filled with GB and VX nerve gas. All other details about this deployment operation remain classified, such as the number of munitions shipped, the ultimate destination of the munitions, the German port that the ship docked at, and the identification of the ship(s) used to transport the chemical munitions. All of the weapons were deployed to NATO Site 59 outside the town of Clausen in West Germany, where the U.S. Army custodial unit was the 636^th Ordnance Company (EOD).^[262] The addition of these new weapons brought the size of the chemical weapons stockpile in Germany to 488 metric tons, which was far less than what the U.S. Army thought it needed.^[263]

The presence of these chemical weapons in Germany, many of which were dangerous to store, quickly became a liability for the U.S. Army. As of June 1971, the Army was storing almost 115,000 155mm and 8-inch artillery shells filled with sarin (GB) and VX nerve agents in West Germany. The weapons were stored at a heavily guarded special weapons depot called Site 59, which was located on a treeless hilltop four kilometers east of the German village of Clausen, not far from the border with France. These nerve gas-filled artillery shells were stacked floor-to-ceiling on pallets (each containing eight artillery shells) inside fifteen huge earth-covered storage bunkers, which comes to about 7,600 artillery shells housed in each bunker. The bunkers were located within a heavily guarded exclusion area that was surrounded by a double barbed wire fence and guarded by a company of over a hundred U.S. Army MPs, who had orders to shoot-to-kill anyone who tried to enter the site without authorization. In the spring of 1971, the Army technicians at Site 59 discovered that 11,134 of the sarin-filled 155mm artillery shells stored at the site were no longer useable (the Army used the oblique phrase “operationally defective” to describe the condition of the weapons) and were in such poor physical condition that they constituted a danger of leaking. The Army quickly decided that these weapons had to be removed from Germany as quickly and as quietly as possible. Later that month, all of the defective weapons were hastily packed up and shipped in February 1972 to Johnston Island in the South Pacific for destruction.^[264]

The remaining four hundred tons of nerve gas weapons (102,000 chemical-filled 155mm and 8-inch artillery shells) were secretly shipped out of Germany beginning in July 1990 when it became abundantly clear that they were no longer needed due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. All of the weapons were removed from Germany by the end of 1990, and the Army's Clausen chemical weapons depot in Germany was formally closed on February 15, 1991.^[265]

The deployment of chemical weapons to Asia followed pretty much the same pattern as the Army's chemical weapons activities in Europe. As was the case in Europe, the inherent danger posed by these weapons proved to be their undoing.

The first formal planning for the deployment of chemical weapons to the Far East began in March 1952, when the USAF began trying to figure out how many chemical weapons and what types of weapons could be used in East Asia in case of all-out war with the USSR and/or China. The U.S. Army followed soon thereafter, formally proposing to ship several thousand tons of chemical weapons to Japan in May 1952 because of the precarious military situation in Korea.^[266] In the months that followed, the Pentagon bureaucracy went back and forth on the question whether to deploy these weapons to Japan, and if so, what types of weapons should be sent. In October 1952, the Pentagon suspended further planning because the Pentagon suddenly developed a case of “cold feet” about the potential diplomatic ramifications if the Japanese government ever got wind of the deployment of chemical weapons to Japan.^[267]

The end of the Korean War in July 1953 ended the need to deploy chemical weapons to Japan, at least temporarily. After what must have seemed an interminable number of years of debate about the efficacy of deploying these weapons to Japan inside the Pentagon, the Defense Department, the Army and the Far East Command (FECOM) in Tokyo finally concluded that deploying chemical weapons to Japan was out of the question, because they just could not find a way to inform the Japanese government about this move without generating enormous controversy in Tokyo. The decision was made to deploy the weapons to Okinawa instead. Okinawa was then not a part of Japan, but rather a trust territory controlled by the U.S. government. This decision relieved Washington of the responsibility of telling the Japanese government anything about this move. In 1955, bureaucratic inertia took over, and the Pentagon for reasons unknown chose not to authorize the deployment of chemical weapons to Okinawa until 1961.^[268]

In January 1961, the JCS authorized U.S. Pacific Command (CINCPAC) to deploy up to 16,000 tons of mustard gas and sarin and VX nerve gas weapons to Okinawa, but no one thought to inform the Japanese government because the United States controlled the island. In December 1962, a specially trained U.S. Army Chemical Corps unit, the 267^th Chemical Platoon (Service) was deployed to Okinawa to prepare and operate the facilities on the island for the storage and maintenance of the chemical weapons.^[269]

Between April 1963 and May 1965, the U.S. Army sent three large shipments of chemical weapons packed into the holds of U.S. government-owned merchant ships from the Concord Naval Weapons Station in California to Okinawa. The weapons consisted of chemical artillery shells, rockets, mines and bulk containers filled with sarin (GB), VX persistent nerve agent and distilled mustard gas (HD) chemical agents. By the end of 1965 a total of 11,000 tons of mustard gas and nerve agents were shipped to Okinawa; by the end of 1963 all 11,000 tons of these chemical weapons were tucked inside storage bunkers at the Chibana Army Ammunition Depot near the air approach to Kadena Air Base on Okinawa.^[270]

The presence of these chemical weapons on Okinawa did not last very long. As noted above, on July 8, 1969, a 500-lb. sarin-filled bomb leaked during a routine cleaning of the weapons at the Chibana Ammo Depot on Okinawa, injuring 24 U.S. personnel, none of them seriously. Press reports prompted protests and the Japanese government demanded that the weapons be removed immediately. Within a week it was announced that the chemical weapons would be removed. It took some time, but all of these weapons were transferred to Johnston Island in the south Pacific by the end of September 1971, where they sat in storage bunkers for decades until they were finally destroyed by incineration.^[271]

The Security and Safety of the U.S. Chemical Weapons Stockpile

At least one terrible accident involving chemical weapons occurred during World War II. On the night of December 2, 1943, a force of a hundred German JU-88 bombers attacked the port of Bari in southern Italy, sinking sixteen American ships – among them the SS John Harvey, which was carrying two thousand M47A1 hundred‑pound mustard gas bombs.

The presence of the chemical weapons on the ship was highly classified, and the port authorities ashore had no knowledge of it. The number of fatalities was higher than necessary as a result, since physicians, who had no idea that they were dealing with the effects of mustard gas, applied the wrong treatment.

According to the official U.S. military account of the incident, "Sixty-nine deaths were attributed in whole or in part to the mustard gas, most of them American merchant seamen,” out of 628 mustard gas military casualties. Civilian casualties were not recorded but were estimated at over a thousand men and women. The whole affair was kept secret at the time and for many years after the war.^[272] According to another U.S. Army report, 83 people were killed in the Bari incident and another 534 people (most of whom were civilians) were badly injured in the harbor area from ingesting mustard gas.^[273]

In March 1968, over 6,300 sheep were killed just outside the Dugway Proving Ground when a test of VX nerve gas went horribly awry and winds blew the nerve gas onto neighboring sheep ranches in an area known as Skull Valley. This incident became known as the Skull Valley sheep kill, and generated enormous public outrage in Utah.^[274]

On July 8, 1969, during a routine cleaning of chemical artillery shells stored at the Chibana Ammunition Depot on Okinawa, a sarin leak occurred in a 500-pound bomb, injuring 24 U.S. personnel. This incident has been described in more detail above.^[275]

The U.S. Biological Warfare Program

The origins of the U.S. government's biological weapons program can be traced back to America's entry into World War II, when the U.S. Army began a secret program to develop and produce a range of biological weapons in the belief that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were developing their own arsenal of biological weapons.^[276]

In November 1942, the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare Service was asked to take control of all of the U.S. government's secret biological warfare work, including the construction of research laboratories, test ranges, and pilot production plants to design, test and produce these weapons. In April 1943 a small U.S. Army National Guard airfield at Fort Detrick outside the town of Frederick, Maryland was chosen to be the home of the U.S. Army's nascent biological warfare program. The Army rapidly built a series of state-of-the-art research laboratories and support facilities at Fort Detrick to develop America's first biological warfare weapons. By the summer of 1944 the Army had opened a secret BW testing facility at Horn Island, Mississippi and a small BW pilot production plant six miles south of Terre Haute, Indiana, called the Vigo Ordnance Plant.^[277]

Despite all the time, money and effort the Army invested in biological weapons during World War II, it actually produced very little in the way of tangible results. In June 1945, production of the anthrax simulant Bacillus globigii, was started at the Vigo Plant. This operation was still in progress and a test batch of eight thousand pounds of the anthrax agent had just been produced in a single production run when the end of the war brought orders from Washington to immediately suspend further activities. By that time the first shipments of four-pound Mark I BW bombs were arriving from Electromaster, Inc. in Detroit. They were stored pending postwar operations.^[278]

No actual anthrax biological weapons were ever produced at the Vigo plant because of safety concerns, but the plant did produce eight thousand pounds of an anthrax simulant for training purposes. After the end of World War II the Vigo BW plant was closed down and the facility leased to the Pfizer pharmaceutical company for the manufacture of a new line of drugs.

The end of World War II almost led to the termination of the U.S. Army biological weapons program. At the time of Germany's surrender in May 1945, the U.S. Army general staff wanted to close down all BW research, development and production activities. The Army's Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) appealed the decision, begging the Secretary of War to allow them to continue some minimal peace-time research activities in order to keep the BW program alive. The Secretary of War relented and on September 13, 1945 allowed the CWS to keep open the Camp Detrick research facility. The BW weapons plant at Vigo, Indiana, was also kept open, but only in standby status.^[279] The CWS weapons testing facility at Horn Island was deactivated on November 18, 1945, and the Granite Peak, Utah BW test range was closed in October 1945; its mission was transferred to the neighboring Dugway Proving Ground.^[280]

For the next five years (1945-1950), the U.S. Army's biological weapons program remained in stasis, with very little work being done on developing or producing biologic agents or weapons. In January 1946, a short but informative unclassified report, the so-called Merck Report, was produced, detailing the U.S. Army's work on biological weapons during World War II. When the Pentagon realized what it revealed to the public, it reclassified the report as Top Secret. U.S. Army security agents were sent racing around Washington, D.C., ordering reporters and academics to return their copies of the report or face possible prosecution for being in possession of classified information.^[281]

The beginning of the Korean War in June 1950 prompted the U.S. Army to revive its dormant BW program. Following an intense lobbying campaign by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and its supporters in the Pentagon, academia and private industry, in October 1950 Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall approved the immediate expansion and intensification of the U.S. Army's BW program, based largely on the military's perception of the Soviet threat, as well as the belief that the North Korean and Chinese would use biological weapons if and when they could.

The Korean War years (1950-1953) were heady times for the U.S. Army's biological warfare scientists and engineers at Fort Detrick, Maryland. With the war raging in Korea and the threat of all-out war with the USSR and China looming, the man who headed the Army's BW research efforts, Dr. Leroy D. Fothergill, pushed his staff to quickly come up with an array of new anti-personnel, anti-animal and anti-crop BW agents that could be used for strategic strikes. Money was no object. Dr. Fothergill's BW research facilities at Fort Detrick were dramatically expanded, and in 1951 construction began on a BW weapons production facility at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in the bucolic climes of rural southeastern Arkansas.^[282]

With the massive influx of money from the Pentagon, the two thousand microbiologists and technicians working at the Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories at Fort Detrick quickly developed a number of anti-personnel and anti-crop biologic agents plus the bombs specially designed for SAC bombers to deliver them to targets inside the USSR, the People's Republic of China or even North Korea.^[283]

In 1951, the first BW anti-crop bomb filled with a pathogen called TX was produced. The TX pathogen was designed specifically to destroy cereal crops. By the end of September 1951 a new BW bomb called the E73 was ready for production, as well as the M33 BW cluster bomb, which was filled with 86 M114 BW bomblets. Both bombs were hastily developed stop-gap weapons responsive to an urgent requirement levied by the USAF for a BW bomb that SAC B-29 or B-50 bombers could drop on enemy targets.^[284]

In 1952, the scientists at Fort Detrick produced a new anti-personnel weapon and a BW weapon designed to destroy plants and crops. In April 1952 the U.S. Army Chemical Corps opened a secret research facility at Fort Terry on Plum Island, located off the tip of Montauk Point on Long Island, New York, to develop an array of pathogens that would kill livestock. Its cover was as a Department of Agriculture research station.^[285]

By the end of June 1953 the construction work on the new BW weapons production plant at Pine Bluff, Arkansas (its covername was the “X-201 Plant”) was nearly complete and the facility was ready to begin producing its first weaponry. Pilot production of the U.S. Army's first lethal anti-personnel BW agent started at Pine Bluff in late June 1953. Construction work on six more pilot plants designed to produce research and development batches of new biological weapons were almost complete at Fort Detrick, Maryland by the end of the summer of 1953.^[286]

The Pine Bluff Arsenal was established in 1941 on 14,454 acres of unoccupied land to manufacture incendiary grenades and bombs as well as manufacture, load, and store chemical weapons, such as mustard gas and lewisite. PBA was one of four plants run by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps which manufactured chemical weapons during World War II. It became the only U.S. site for the full‑scale production of biological munitions in 1953 and continued this mission until 1969. The arsenal was selected as the sole site for the Binary Chemical Munitions Production Facility in 1978; this program was active until 1990. In the 1980s, PBA served as the primary site for chemical defense equipment recertification. Approximately 12 percent of the nation's chemical weapons stockpile was stored at the Arsenal. The chemical weapon inventory consisted of 3,848 tons of lethal nerve agents, blister agents, and associated munitions.^[287]

The highpoint of the U.S. biological weapons program came in 1954. The U.S. Army Chemical Corps had four facilities engaged in the fulltime development, testing and production of biological weapons: the Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland; the X-201 BW production plant (renamed the Production Development Laboratories in 1954) at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas; the anti-animal research and testing facility at Fort Terry on Plum Island, New York; and the massive Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where all the BW weapons that were then being developed were tested.^[288]

In 1954 the Pine Bluff Arsenal began producing thousands of bombs designed to be filled in wartime with a variety of lethal or incapacitating BW agents. In June 1953, the Pine Bluff Arsenal began pilot plant production of a small half-pound bomb designated the E61; filled with the lethal anthrax virus (B. anthracis), it could kill humans and animals quickly. The anthrax bomb was placed into full-scale production at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in 1954.^[289] By the end of 1954 the Pine Bluff Arsenal was producing weaponized delivery systems using a dozen different BW agents, including small batches of the lethal  anti-personnel agents Bacterium tularense, Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis, Brucella melitensis, and Botulinum toxin.^[290]

The first Brucella suis BW  anti-personnel bombs were produced in 1954 at the U.S. Army's BW pilot plant at Fort Detrick, Maryland. In August 1958, the Army's Pine Bluff Arsenal produced 47 batches (2,200 gallons per batch) of the lethal  anti-personnel BW agent Bacterium tularense, the microorganism that caused tularemia (rabbit fever or deer-fly fever), leading the Army Chemical Corps to immediately begin building a plant at Pine Bluff to fill E120 bomblets with the agent. Tests at the Dugway Proving Ground proved that a single fighter bomber loaded with these tularense bombs would kill roughly 50 percent of all people in a sixteen square mile area (10,240 acres).^[291]

The second half of the 1950s was marked by a lack of activity on biological weapons after the Eisenhower administration slashed the budget for this program in 1955. Progress on developing new agents and BW weapon systems slowed to a crawl, as reflected in the dramatic drop in high-level correspondence within the Pentagon about the biological weapons program. Part of the reason for the slowdown on BW work was that the Defense Department just could not find a way to use biological weapons on the battlefield, no matter how hard they tried. The problem was that biological weapons, by their very nature, were impossible to control. An unanticipated change in wind direction could easily kill tens of thousands of U.S. and allied soldiers, a problem which one did not encounter with nuclear weapons.^[292] A critical September 1958 report to the JCS concluded that there simply was no practical way to use biological weapons in wartime against Soviet military forces.^[293]

But in the world of weapons development, hope springs eternal, especially in the U.S. political system, where a new president takes office every four years. Starting in the spring of 1962, President Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, ordered an expansion of the U.S. Army's biological weapons program, which had fallen into a rut during the second term of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Upon taking office in January 1961, McNamara ordered an immediate increase in BW agent and munitions production, with production commencing on new BW munitions, including drone dispensers of BW agents, in the spring of 1962.^[294]

Judging the overall success or failure of the U.S. biological weapons program is difficult given the relative paucity of declassified documents on the subject. Declassified documents reveal that as of the summer of 1958, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps' biological warfare production facility at the Pine Bluff Arsenal was capable of producing twenty thousand BW bombs per month, which the U.S. Army deemed sufficient to “permit an estimated 1,000 [bombing] sorties with an estimated capability of attacking 50 to 100 targets of 35 square miles each.”^[295] What they left unsaid was that the Army Chemical Corps had only one lethal  anti-personnel pathogen (Brucellosis) ready to be loaded into the 18,600 empty BW cluster bombs that were then stockpiled at the Pine Bluff Arsenal.^[296]

We do know that during the 26 years from 1954 to the time the U.S. BW program was cancelled by President Nixon in late 1969, the Army's biological weapons laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland and the Pine Bluff BW production plant in Arkansas produced seven different anti-personnel agents, three of which were lethal, and three anti-crop agents, all of which were stockpiled in heavily guarded refrigerated, humidity controlled storage vaults or weapons igloos at Pine Bluff and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and were never used.^[297]

The problem appears to be that the size of the U.S. biological weapons stockpile was, on its face, not very impressive despite decades of work and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the program. A declassified July 1970 DOD memorandum revealed the complete size and composition of the U.S. biological weapons stockpile shortly after President Nixon ordered the destruction of all biological weapons in the U.S. arsenal. At the time, the only lethal BW agents in the U.S. stockpile were 804 lbs. of tularense (rabbit fever bacteria) and 220 lbs. of anthracis (anthrax bacteria), which if weather conditions were right and if the bombs were properly delivered to their targets, could potentially have killed tens of millions of people and animals.^[298]

Table 9: Biological Weapons Agents Produced by the U.S. Army: 1954-1970

SOURCE: U.S. Army, U.S. Army Activity in the U.S. Biological Warfare Program: 1942-1977, February 24, 1977, Secret, U.S. Army FOIA

Following President Nixon's 1969 decision to terminate the biological weapons program, the end came quickly and unceremoniously. All lethal and incapacitating anti‑personnel biological weapons stocks were destroyed between May 10, 1971 and May 1, 1972, and the laboratory at Fort Detrick was converted to a civilian-oriented toxicological research laboratory. Included in the BW weapons destroyed in this timeframe were all of the CIA's lethal and incapacitating agents that the Army had secretly made for the Agency's covert action programs. The Pentagon vigorously protested the decision, but was overruled by President Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. All BW anti‑crop agents were destroyed by February 1973, effectively marking the end of the U.S. biological weapons program. The biological weapons production plant at the Pine Bluff Arsenal was razed to the ground, and the Army's BW research laboratories at Fort Detrick were converted into civilian research facilities.^[299]

The Toxic Legacy of America's WMD Programs

What we are left with are a series of deeply troubling questions relating to the legacy left by these weapons, which remain to be addressed by future generations of journalists, researchers and scholars.

For example, there is the sobering question of how much damage was done to the environment in the rush to test and build these bombs during the Cold War. Sadly, very little has been written about this subject. In the U.S., researchers are still trying to determine how much damage has been done to the environment by decades of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons testing in the U.S. and in the South Pacific.

The Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas will remain uninhabitable for centuries to come because of the hundreds of nuclear weapons tests conducted there from 1954 to 1992. The same holds true for the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, where hundreds of chemical and biological weapons were secretly tested during the Cold War. Then there is the question of how many Americans have died prematurely or contracted various forms of cancer because of their involvement in the manufacturing or testing of these weapons during the Cold War.^[300] Furthermore, tens of thousands of chemical weapons were dumped into the North Atlantic by the U.S. Army during the Cold War, and no research is currently being conducted to determine what, if any, effect this has had on local fisheries, coral growth or the maritime environment as a whole.^[301]

There is also the human dimension that needs to be considered. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Pentagon was forced to admit that since the early 1950s it had used human guinea pigs, most of them enlisted military draftees, to test the effects of newly developed chemical and biological weapons on human beings. There has been no interest in this subject by Congress or the U.S. mainstream media since the mid-1990s, so the subject has been largely forgotten. Moreover, many of the key records relating to this secret work by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps remain classified and stored in vaults out in Nevada to keep them away from prying researchers. Sadly, the plight of the thousands of American soldiers and civilians who were exposed to high doses of radiation during nuclear weapons tests also remains untold.^[302]

ANNEX 1: Size of the U.S. Nuclear Stockpile: 1945-Present

Notes

[1].         JCS, Report, Theater Plans for Chemical Warfare, June 4, 1945, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Memorandum, Theater Plans for Chemical Warfare, June 6, 1945, Top Secret.[view]

[2].         USAF, Memorandum, Atomic Bomb Assembly Team Requirements, March 19, 1948, Top Secret;[view]
AFSWP, Memorandum, Provision of Bomb Commanders, Weaponeers, Assembly Teams, and Assembly Facilities, March 29, 1948, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Bomb Assembly Teams, June 9, 1948, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Bomb Assembly Teams, July 1, 1948, Top Secret;[view]
AFSWP, Memorandum, Assembly Team Training, December 17, 1948, Top Secret;[view]
AFSWP, Memorandum, Assembly Capability, April 21, 1949, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Cable, HQ USAF to COMGENSAC, June 10, 1949, Top Secret; USAF, Cable, CG SAC to CS USAF, July 1, 1949, Top Secret; AFSWP, Memorandum, Assembly Capabilities, July 8, 1949, Top Secret;[view]
US Army, Memorandum, Atomic Bomb Assembly Teams, August 23, 1949, Top Secret;[view]
AFSWP, Memorandum, Memorandum for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, September 9, 1949, Top Secret;[view]
US Army, Memorandum, Atomic Bomb Assembly Teams, November 9, 1949, Top Secret.[view]

[3].         AEC, Report, Atomic Energy Commission - Military Liaison Committee: Minutes of Fourteenth Conference, August 13, 1947, Top Secret;[view]
US Army, Memorandum, Emergency Protection of Facilities (Armed Forces Special Weapons Project), December 31, 1947, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Special Weapons Air Strips - Camp Hood, Texas and Camp Campbell, Kentucky, February 6, 1948, Top Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Camp Campbell and Camp Hood Air Force Base Construction Program, November 9, 1948, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Diary, Commanding General’s Daily Diary, April 11, 1950, Top Secret.[view]

[4].         USAF, Report, [extract] Commanders’ Conference Notes: General LeMay, March 28, 1952, Top Secret.[view]

[5].         USAF, Memorandum, Airstrip, Camp Hood, Texas, February 17, 1948, Restricted;[view]

USAF, Memorandum, Airstrip, Camp Hood, Texas, February 17, 1948, Top Secret;[view]
AEC, Report, Atomic Energy Commission - Military Liaison Committee Minutes of Twenty-Eighth Conference, April 1, 1948, Top Secret;[view]
AEC, Memorandum, Increasing Number of A Bombs for Joint Maneuvers, September 3, 1948, Secret;[view]
USAF, Report, Daily Diary, December 16, 1948, Confidential/Restricted Data;[view]
USAF, Diary, Commanding General’s Daily Diary, April 11, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Report, Presentation by the Strategic Air Command, April 25, 26, & 27, 1950, Top Secret.[view]

[6].         USAF, Report, Presentation by the Strategic Air Command, April 25, 26, & 27, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Air Force Council Meeting, April 4, 1952, Top Secret/Eyes Only.[view]

[7].         JCS, Report, Evaluation of Current Strategic Air Offensive Plans, December 21, 1948, Top Secret;[view]
US Army, Memorandum, Memorandum by the Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force, on Evaluation of Current Strategic Air Offensive Plans, January 14, 1949, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, The Atomic Bomb as a Weapon of Tactical Air Warfare, July 20, 1949, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Report, Evaluation of the Target System for Implementation of Joint Outline Emergency War Plan, November 14, 1949, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Report, Operational and Planning Conference, January 16, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Report, Commanders Conference, April 25, 26, & 27, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Report, Deficiencies Affecting Combat Capability, October 1, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
US Army, Memorandum, Report on TDY to Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, December 26, 1950, Secret.[view]

[8].         DOD, Letter, Bush to Bradley, April 13, 1950, Top Secret; USAF, Memorandum, Landon to Vandenberg, Letter From Dr. V. Bush to General Bradley, June 13, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Report, Responsibility for the Continuing Selection of Targets and Target Systems for the Strategic Air Offensive, July 27, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Report, Target Selections for the Strategic Air Offensive, August 10, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Report, Target Selections for the Strategic Air Offensive, August 12, 1950, Top Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
US Army, Cable, Bolte to MacArthur, December 21, 1950, Top Secret/Personal For; US Army, Cable, CINCFE to DA, December 24, 1950, Top Secret/Personal For; USAF, Letter, LeMay to White, May 7, 1951, Top Secret; USAF, Cable, Vandenberg to Norstad, July 16, 1951, Top Secret; USAF, Letter, Norstad to LeMay, August 11, 1951, Top Secret; USAF, Cable, HQ USAF to CGSAC et al., August 23, 1951, Top Secret; USAF, Cable, Norstad to Vandenberg, August 25, 1951, Top Secret; USAF, Cable, HQ USAF to CINCAIRCENT, September 11, 1951, Top Secret/NOFORN; USAF, Letter, White to LeMay, October 9, 1951, Top Secret;.

[9].         USAF, Memorandum, Use of Atomics and BW-CW for Retardation in Europe, March 26, 1952, Top Secret.[view]

[10].       USAF, Cable, HQ USAF to CG AMC et al., March 7, 1952, Top Secret; USAF, Cable, CG AMC to HQ USAF, March 13, 1952, Top Secret; DOD, Report, Report on Chemical and Biological Warfare Readiness, July 1, 1952, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, BW-CW Logistics Out of the ZI, August 18, 1952, Top Secret.[view]

[11].       USAF, Memorandum, Logistic Support for SAC in BW, Phase I, August 26, 1952, Top Secret.[view]

[12].       USAF, Cable, HQ USAF to CG AMC et al., December 12, 1952, Top Secret; USAF, Cable, CGSAC to CGAF 15 et al., December 17, 1952, Top Secret; USAF, Cable, CG FEAF to CG MATS, February 14, 1953, Top Secret; USAF, Memorandum, Memorandum for Record, September 1, 1953, Top Secret.[view]

[13].       JCS, Memorandum, Overseas Deployment of Toxic Chemical Agents, March 12, 1953, Top Secret;[view]
State Department, Report, Substance of Discussions of State - Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting, March 27, 1953, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Memorandum, Overseas Deployment of Toxic Chemical Agents, April 2, 1953, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Memorandum, Overseas Deployment of Toxic Chemical Agents, April 15, 1953, Top Secret;[view]
State Department, Report, Substance of Discussions of State - Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting, April 24, 1953, Top Secret.[view]

[14].       JCS, Memorandum, Shipment of Chemical Warfare Munitions to the Far East, May 25, 1954, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Memorandum, Shipment of Chemical Warfare Munitions to the Far East, July 8, 1954, Top Secret.[view]

[15].       State Department, Report, Substance of Discussions of State - Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting, April 10, 1953, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Memorandum, deleted [sale of sarin nerve gas to Great Britain], April 14, 1953, Top Secret;[view]
State Department, Memorandum, Aide-Memoire, April 16, 1953, Top Secret;[view]
U.S. Army, Memorandum, UK Request for Nerve Gas Under MDAP, August 10, 1953, Top Secret;[view]
US Army Chemical Corps, Memorandum, British Request for GB (JCS 1837/47), March 1, 1954, Top Secret.[view]

[16].       USAF, Cable, COMDRSAC to COFS USAF, February 4, 1954, Top Secret.

[17].       Office of the Chief Chemical Officer, Annex to Summary of Major Events and Problems: FY 1954, September 1954, Top Secret, p. 2, CMH.

[18].       USAF, Cable, COMSAC to COFS USA, April 3, 1954, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Briefing Given by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to CINCFE, CINCPAC and COMSAC Planning Representatives, April 16, 1954, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Memorandum, Strategic Air Command Far East Outline Plan No. 8-54 (SAC-FEOP 8-54), July 23, 1954, Top Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
USAF, Cable, COMFEAF to CS USAF, November 18, 1954, Top Secret; US Navy, Cable, CNO to CINCPAC, November 24, 1954, Top Secret/Eyes Only; US Navy, Report, CINCPACFLT OP-PLAN 51-Z-55, February 1955, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Report, Limited Effect Target System for Communist China, March 1955, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Capabilities of Entire USAF Considering Atomic vs H.E. Weapons - Specific Inference to Matsu and Quemoy Applications, March 31, 1955, Top Secret;[view]
US Navy, Cable, CHMAAG Formosa to CINCPAC, April 8, 1955, Top Secret; US Navy, Cable, CINCPAC to CNO, April 9, 1955, Top Secret; State Department, Memorandum, Memorandum for the Secretary, March 25, 1956, Top Secret.[view]

[19].       USAF, Letter, LeMay to Twining, June 6, 1955, Top Secret.

[20].       State Department, Cable, Paris to Secretary of State, November 4, 1955, Top Secret; State Department, Memorandum, Nuclear Deployment in France, January 17, 1956, Top Secret;[view]

State Department, Memorandum, Deployment of Nuclear Weapons in Italy and Metropolitan France, January 19, 1956, Top Secret;[view]
State Department, Memorandum, Deployment of Nuclear Weapons to Italy, April 10, 1956, Top Secret;[view]
State Department, Memorandum, Dillon Proposal re Training French Air Squadron, June 2, 1956, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Cable, CINCUSAFE to CSAF, June 27, 1956, Top Secret; DOD, Letter, Gray to Murphy, October 10, 1956, Secret; State Department, Memorandum, Military Atomic Energy Cooperation with France, December 7, 1956, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Cable, CINCSUSAFE to COFS USAF, February 13, 1957, Top Secret; State Department, Memorandum, NATO Atomic Stockpile, July 1, 1957, Secret;[view]
State Department, Memorandum, Aide-Memoire, September 18, 1957, Top Secret;[view]
State Department, Memorandum, Background for General Norstad’s Talk With General Ely and Decourcel, October 22, 1957, Top Secret;[view]
State Department, Memorandum, NATO Atomic Stockpile Negotiations With the French, June 27, 1958, Top Secret;[view]
State Department, Letter, Thurston to Timmons, December 22, 1958, Secret; AEC, Report, Proposed Mutual Defense Agreement for Cooperation With the Government of France, May 1961, Secret.

[21].       US Army, Memorandum, Information on CW and Discussion of the Minimum Destruction Concept of Warfare, June 8, 1956, Top Secret, NARA.[view]

[22].       State Department, Memorandum, Memorandum for the File, March 21, 1956, Secret;[view]
USAF, Cable, COFS USAF to CINCUSAFE et al., July 3, 1956, Top Secret.

[23].       US Army, Index Card, CINCSAC Weapons Programming, September 23, 1957, Top Secret.[view]

[24].       US Army Chemical Corps, Report, Estimate of CBR Situation Top Secret Supplement, January 1, 1958, Top Secret;[view]
US Army, Report, Review of Bacteriological and Chemical Warfare Planning, July 9, 1958, Top Secret;[view]
US Army Chemical Corps, Report, Estimate of CBR Situation Top Secret Supplement, January 1, 1959, Top Secret.[view]

[25].       US Army, USNMR to DEPTAR for JCS, February 4, 1958, Top Secret; NATO, Cable, SGN WASH DC to SGREP Paris, August 7, 1958, NATO Secret; NATO, Cable, SGREP Paris to SGN WASH DC, August 8, 1958, NATO Secret; NATO, Report, [extract] History, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe: 1958, 1959, Cosmic Top Secret.[view]

[26].       NATO, Cable, SGREP Paris to SGN WASH DC, August 21, 1958, NATO Secret; NATO, Report, [extract] History, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe: 1958, 1959, Cosmic Top Secret.[view]

[27].       JCS, Memorandum, WSEG Report No. 31, “A Reappraisal of Biological Warfare”, September 16, 1958, Top Secret.[view]

[28].       U.S. Army, Index Card, Shipment of Toxic Chemical Munitions to Germany, August 21, 1958, Top Secret;[view]
US Army Chemical Corps, Report, Biological and Chemical Capability, August 31, 1959, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Memorandum, Negotiations for Storage Rights in USEUCOM, December 17, 1962, Top Secret; JCS, Memorandum, Action to Improve CBR Capability, December 31, 1962, Top Secret.

[29].       US Army Chemical Corps, Report, Estimate of CBR Situation Top Secret Supplement, January 1, 1959, Top Secret;[view]
US Army Chemical Corps, Report, Biological and Chemical Capability, August 31, 1959, Top Secret.[view]

[30].       DOD, Memorandum, Evaluation of the Mustard Weapon System, January 22, 1962, Secret.

[31].       DOD, Report, History of the Phase Out of Large Yield Weapons, September 14, 1967, Secret;[view]
USAF, Report, [extract] History of Strategic Air Command: January-June 1968, February 1969, Top Secret/NOFORN/Restricted Data.[view]

[32].       NATO, Report, Joint Meeting of the Foreign and Defence Ministers, May 5, 1962, Cosmic Top Secret; NATO, Report, Statement Made on Saturday 5 May by Secretary McNamara at the NATO Ministerial Meeting in Athens, May 5, 1962, Cosmic Top Secret; DOD, Speech, Remarks by Secretary McNamara, NATO Ministerial Meeting, 5 May 1962: Restricted Session, May 5, 1962, Top Secret.

[33].       DOD, Letter, Nitze to Johnson, July 27, 1962, Top Secret.

[34].       JCS, Report, Further Study of Requirements for Tactical Nuclear Weapons, April 1963, Top Secret/Restricted Data.

[35].       State Department, Report, Working Group on NATO Capabilities: Trilateral Talks, November 2, 1966, Top Secret.[view]

[36].       DOD, Cable, CINCSTRIKE to Amconsul Dacca, August 9, 1967, Secret; DOD, Cable, CINCSTRIKE to Amconsul Dacca, August 18, 1967, Secret.

[37].       DOD, Report, U.S. Strategic Nuclear Force Capabilities, February 14, 1969, Top Secret.[view]

[38].       AEC, Report, Preliminary Information Regarding Fire at Rocky Flats in Buildings 776-777, May 16, 1969, Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
AEC, Letter, Seaborg to Holifield, May 22, 1969, Secret/Restricted Data; AEC, Letter, Seaborg to Holifield, June 13, 1969, Secret/Restricted Data; AEC, Letter, Hollingsworth to Holifield, June 25, 1969, Secret/Restricted Data.

[39].       CIA, Memorandum, Nerve Gas Incident on Okinawa, July 18, 1969, Secret;[view]
State Department, Cable, Amembassy Tokyo to Secretary of State, July 19, 1969, Secret; State Department, Cable, Secretary of State to Amembassy Tokyo, July 19, 1969, Secret; State Department, Cable, Amembassy Tokyo to Secretary of State, July 25, 1969, Confidential; State Department, Memorandum, Okinawa/Japan: Nerve Gas Incident Causes Furor, July 25, 1969, Confidential/NOFORN;[view]
State Department, Cable, Secretary of State to Amembassy Dkakarta, July 27, 1969, Confidential. See also Richard A. Hunt, Melvin Laird and the Foundation of the Post-Vietnam Military, 1969-1973 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2016), p. 337; “Okinawa Nerve Gas Not Going to Ore.,” Japan Times, May 25, 1970; “U.S. Completes Gas Transfer,” Japan Times, September 10, 1971).

[40].       State Department, Cable, Amembassy Bonn to Secretary of State, July 30, 1969, Top Secret; State Department, Cable, Secretary of State to Amembassy Bonn, July 31, 1969, Top Secret; State Department, Cable, Secretary of State to CINCUSAREUR, August 1, 1969, Top Secret; State Department, Cable, Secretary of State to Amconsul Lahore, August 1, 1969, Top Secret.

[41].       CIA, Briefing, The Warsaw Pact Forces, November 17, 1970, Top Secret.[view]

[42].       NSC, Report, [extract] U.S. Strategic Objectives and Force Posture: Executive Summary, January 3, 1971, Top Secret.[view]

[43].       State Department, Cable, Amembassy Tokyo to Secretary of State, July 19, 1972, Top Secret.

[44].       State Department, Memorandum, Department of State Position on NSSM 192, US Chemical Weapons Posture, July 16, 1974, Top Secret.[view]

[45].       CIA, Report, The President’s Daily Brief, December 5, 1974, Top Secret/For the President Only.[view]

[46].       GAO, Report, [extract] Need to Reexamine Some Support Costs Which the U.S. Provides to NATO, August 25, 1975, Unclassified.[view]

[47].       JCS, Memorandum, Increase of US Army Forces in Korea, February 21, 1968, Secret.[view]

[48].       NSC, Memorandum, SCC Meeting on PRM-37 - Chemical Weapons, November 30, 1978, Secret.[view]

[49].       US Army, Report, [extract] Building for Peace: U.S. Army Engineers in Europe: 1945-1991, 2005, Unclassified.[view]

[50].       White House, Directive, U.S. Policy on the New Zealand Port Access Issue, October 21, 1985, Secret.[view]

[51].       US Army Chemical Corps, Report, Report of Temporary Duty in Europe, 26 February - 31 March 1950, April 13, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
CIA, Estimate, The Possibility of Soviet Employment of BW and CW in the Event of Attacks Upon the US, January 10, 1951, Top Secret;[view]
US Army, Memorandum, Brief of “The Probability of Soviet Employment of BW and CW In the Event of Attacks Upon the U.S., January 22, 1951, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Report, Staff Study: BW-CW Program in USAF, June 11, 1951, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Memorandum, Estimate of Soviet Capability for Waging Biological and Chemical Warfare, February 1, 1954, Secret;[view]
CIA, Article, The Enigma of Soviet BW, Spring 1965, Secret;[view]
CIA, Estimate, Soviet Capabilities and Intentions With Respect to Chemical Warfare, August 19, 1965, Secret;[view]
State Department, Letter, James to Weiss, September 16, 1965, Top Secret; NSC, Report, U.S. Policy on Chemical and Biological Warfare and Agents (NSAM 59), November 10, 1969, Top Secret;[view]
NSC, Report, NSSM 59 U.S. Policy on CW-BW: Analytical Summary, November 10, 1969, Top Secret;[view]
CIA, Report, Soviet Offensive Chemical Warfare Capabilities: A Preliminary Reassessment, June 1970, Top Secret [codewords not declassified];[view]
NPIC, Report, Comparison of Production Buildings at Shikhany, Dzerzhink Rulon 148, and Vologograd Beketovka 91, USSR, September 1970, Top Secret Chess Ruff;[view]
State Department, Report, Summary of the NSSM-157 Study, February 2, 1971, Secret;[view]
DOD, Memorandum, Chemical Warfare Policy, June 29, 1972, Top Secret;[view]
State Department, Memorandum, Recommendation for Consideration by 40 Committee, November 26, 1973, Top Secret;[view]
NSC, Memorandum, Briefing on Chemical Warfare, June 20, 1975, Secret;[view]
DOD, Memorandum, DSB Summer Study on Chemical Warfare, November 25, 1980, Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Draft Paper for Interagency Working Group (IWG) on Chemical Weapons Modernization, January 19, 1982, Secret/NOFORN;[view]
NSC, Report, The Threat, February 10, 1983, Secret/NOFORN;[view]
GAO, Report, Chemical Warfare: Many Unanswered Questions, April 29, 1983, Secret;[view]
DIA, Report, Continuing Development of Chemical Weapons Capabilities in the USSR, October 1983, Unclassified;[view]
DIA, Report, Soviet Chemical Weapons Threat, 1985, Unclassified;[view]
CIA, Estimate, Soviet Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, August 1986, Top Secret [codewords not declassified];[view]
DOD, Report, Ams Control Briefing Book for Secretary of Defense Visit to European Capitals: 21-31 October 1989, October 19, 1989, Secret/NOFORN;[view]

[52].       US Army, Article, Wave of Change: Army Transformation at Aberdeen Proving Ground Reaches Technical Escort Unit, Winter 2005, Unclassified.[view]

[53].       USAF, Cable, HQ USAF to USCINCEUR, March 2, 1956, Top Secret.

[54].       White House, Memorandum, Mr. Strauss, February 14, 1957, Secret, DDEL.[view]

[55].       US Army Chemical Corps, Memorandum, Chemical Corps Project Program for 1949, April 13, 1949, Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Porton Anthrax Investigation, July 23, 1952, Top Secret.[view]

[56].       JCS, Memorandum, Biological Warfare, February 13, 1952, Top Secret.[view]

[57].       US Army, Report, Information on CW and Discussion of the Minimum Destruction Concept of Warfare, June 8, 1956, Top Secret.[view]

[58].       US Army, Briefing, Status of the BW Program, April 23, 1956, Top Secret.[view]

[59].       Department of Defense, Memorandum, Public Information Program CEBAR, July 21, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
DOD, Directive, Policy on Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare, November 28, 1951, Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Briefing for General Yates, April 27, 1953, Top Secret.[view]

[60].       JCS, Memorandum, Clearance of Shipment of Toxic Chemical Warfare Munitions to the Far East, April 16, 1954, Top Secret.[view]

[61].       State Department, Memorandum, Suggestions for Publicity on Air Defense Weapons, January 4, 1957, Secret;[view]
State Department, Memorandum, Nuclear Weapons for Air Defense Purposes, January 15, 1957, Secret.[view]

[62].       See for example RAND Corporation, Memorandum, On the Risk of an Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation, October 15, 1958, Confidential/Restricted Data;[view]
AEC, Report, A Survey of Nuclear Weapons Safety Problems and the Possibilities for Increasing Safety in Bomb and Warhead Design, February 1959, Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
USAF, Report, Ammunitions Letter: Summary of Nuclear Weapons Incidents (AF Form 1058) and Related Problems: Calendar Year 1958, June 23, 1960, Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
DOD, Letter, Howard to Holifield, April 22, 1966, Secret/Restricted Data; AEC, Report, Summary of Air Force Nuclear Accidents, February 6, 1968, Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
USAF, Report, USAF Nuclear Safety, January - March 1970, Unclassified;[view]
DOD, Report, Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving U,S. Nuclear Weapons: 1950-1980, April 1981, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, A Review of the US Nuclear Weapon Safety Program - 1945 to 1986 , February 1987, Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
DOE, Report, A Summary of Accidents and Significant Incidents Involving U.S. Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Weapon Systems, June 2, 1990, Secret/Restricted Data.[view]

[63].       AEC, Report, A Survey of Nuclear Weapons Safety Problems and the Possibilities for Increasing Safety in Bomb and Warhead Design, February 1959, Secret/Restricted Data.[view]

[64].       USAF, Report, Nuclear Armament: Its Acquisition, Control and Application to Manned Interceptors 1951-1963, 1964, Secret/Restricted Data.

[65].       AEC, Letter, Bradbury and Schwartz to Starbird, January 5, 1961, Secret/Restricted Data.

[66].       White House, Letter, Kennedy to Holifield, May 3, 1961, Secret.

[67].       State Department, Memorandum, Briefing for Mr. Acheson on Safety and Stability of Nuclear Weapons, February 21, 1961, Top Secret/Restricted Data.

[68].       State Department, Memorandum, Davy Crockett Deployment, June 18, 1962, Secret; DOD, Memorandum, Views of Dr. Enthoven on Tactical Nuclear Waerfare, February 7, 1963, Top Secret; State Department, Memorandum, Davy Crockett Deployment, June 18, 1964, Secret;[view]
DOD, Report, History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 Through September 1977, February 1978, Top Secret/Restricted Data.[view]

[69].       US Army Chemical Corps, Report, Biological and Chemical Capability, August 31, 1959, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Memorandum, Reappraisal of Biological Warfare, November 4, 1959, Top Secret;[view]
JCS, Report, Chemical and Biological Warfare, May 31, 1960, Top Secret;[view]
White House, Memorandum, Memorandum for Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, October 22, 1969, Top Secret;[view]
NSC, Report, NSSM 59 U.S. Policy on CW-BW: Analytical Summary, November 10, 1969, Top Secret;[view]

[70].       AEC, Report, Weapons Program of the Los Alamos Laboratory, May 14, 1948, Top Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
AEC, Report, Report of the Manager, Santa Fe Operations, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission: July 1947 to July 1950, November 1, 1950, Top Secret/Restricted Data; DOE, Report, Sandia National Laboratories: A Product of Postwar Readiness: 1945-1950, April 1988, Unclassified.[view]

[71].       Department of Energy, Report, The Office of Military Application, November 1978, Unclassified.[view]

[72].       Necah Furman, Sandia National Laboratories: The Postwar Decade, (Albuquerque, 1990), Unclassified, p. 132. See also David Alan Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945 to 1950,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 38, no. 5 (May 1982), p. 29.

[73].       US Army, Memorandum, Organization of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, July 8, 1947, Secret, NARA;[view]
US Army, Memorandum, Organization of Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, August 21, 1947, Secret, NARA.[view]

[74].       Sandia, Memorandum, Fuzing, September 26, 1949, Secret/RD, OSTI.; JCS, Report, [extract] The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy: Volume II: 1947-1949, 1996, Unclassified.[view]

[75].       Atomic Energy Commission, Report to the President of the United States From the Atomic Energy Commission: January 1 - April 1, 1947, April 3, 1947, Top Secret, Chuck Hansen Collection, Box 11, Folder: 1947, National Security Archive; L. Wainstein et al., The Evolution of U.S. Strategic Command and Control and Warning: 1945-1972 (Arlington: Institute for Defense Analysis, June 1975), Top Secret/RD, p. 34; Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Atomic Energy), History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 Through September 1977, February 1978, Top Secret/RD, p. 12, DOD FOIA. See also David Alan Rosenberg, “U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, 1945 to 1950,” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, May 1982, p. 27.

[76].       Defense Nuclear Agency, Report, Operation SANDSTONE 1948, December 19, 1983, Unclassified, DTRA, p. 18.

[77].       L. Wainstein et al., The Evolution of U.S. Strategic Command and Control and Warning: 1945-1972 (Arlington: Institute for Defense Analysis, June 1975), Top Secret/RD, p. 34; Lee Bowen and Robert D. Little, Air University Historical Liaison Office, A History of the Air Force Atomic Energy Program, 1943-1953, 1958, Top Secret/FRD, Vol. V Atomic Weapon Delivery Systems, p. 6, USAF FOIA.

[78].       (L. Wainstein et al., The Evolution of U.S. Strategic Command and Control and Warning: 1945-1972 (Arlington: Institute for Defense Analysis, June 1975), Top Secret/RD, p. 34; DOE, Summary of Declassified Nuclear Stockpile Information, 1994, Unclassified.

[79].       For the detonation of the USSR’s first atomic bomb, known within the US government as JOE I, see AEC, Letter, Pike to McMahon, August 31, 1949, Secret; White House, Report, [draft report regarding Soviet nuclear test], undated but circa September 1949, Top Secret; CIA, Memorandum, Hillenkoetter to President, September 9, 1949, Top Secret Control/US Officials Only; CIA, Report, Status of the USSR Atomic Energy Project, October 1, 1949, Top Secret;[view]
USAF, Memorandum, Implications of Soviet Explosion, October 5, 1949, Top Secret.[view]
For the impact of the Korean War on the nuclear weapons program, see NSC, Memorandum, Lay to Secretary of State et al., August 8, 1950, Secret; USAF, Cable, HQ USAF to CG SAC, October 6, 1950, Top Secret/Restricted Data; JCAE, Memorandum, Memorandum for the Files, November 28, 1950, Top Secret;[view]
AEC, Report, Progress Report to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: June Through November 1950, Part III - Weapons, December 15, 1950, Top Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
AEC, Report, Weapons Part of Progress Report to the Joint Committee - December 1950 Through May 1951, May 28, 1951, Top Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
AEC, Report, Preliminary Examination of the Work Load at Santa Fe Operations, December 7, 1951, Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
AEC, Report, Progress Report to the Joint Committee, June Through November 1951: Part III - Weapons, December 17, 1951, Top Secret/Restricted Data.[view]

[80].       NSC, Memorandum, Lay to The President, October 2, 1950, Top Secret/RD, HSTL; AEC, Progress Report to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: June - November 1950, December 15, 1950, Part III: Weapons, Top Secret/RD, NARA.

[81].       AEC, Report, Program Status Report, June 30, 1954, Top Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
AEC, Report, Program Status Report, June 30, 1955, Top Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
White House, Memorandum, Memorandum of Conference With the President, February 12, 1959, Top Secret;[view]
DOE, Report, The Office of Military Application, November 1978, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, The United States Nuclear Weapon Program: A Summary History, March 1983, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, History of the Production Complex: The Methods of Site Selection, September 1987, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, A Short History of the U.S. Nuclear Stockpile: 1945-1985, January 2, 1991, Secret/Restricted Data;[view]
US Army, Report, [extract] Army Ammunition Production During the Cold War (1946-1989), April 2009, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Press Release, DOE Facts: Declassification of the United States Plutonium Inventory and Release of Report, “Plutonium: The First 50 Years”, 1994, Unclassified.[view]

[82].       DOE, Report, Tech Area II: A History, July 1998, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, Historical Context of W Site, Technical Area 41, September 2004, Unclassified.[view]

[83].       US Atomic Energy Commission, Monthly Summary of Activities: July 1948, August 31, 1948, Secret, Hansen Collection, Box 12, Folder 1948, National Security Archive; Atomic Energy Commission, Quarterly Progress Report: July - September 1948, November 19, 1948, Top Secret/RD, Chuck Hansen Collection, Box 12, Folder 1948, National Security Archive; Atomic Energy Commission, Monthly Status and Progress Reports for March 1949, April 19, 1949, Secret/RD, Chuck Hansen Collection, Box 12, Folder 1949, National Security Archive; Atomic Energy Commission, Monthly Status and Progress Reports for July 1949, August 19, 1949, Secret/RD, Chuck Hansen Collection, Box 12, Folder 1949, National Security Archive; Atomic Energy Commission, Monthly Status and Progress Reports for October 1949, November 22, 1949, Secret/RD, Chuck Hansen Collection, Box 12, Folder 1949, National Security Archive; Atomic Energy Commission, Monthly Status and Progress Reports for November 1949, December 21, 1949, Secret/RD, Chuck Hansen Collection, Box 12, Folder 1949, National Security Archive AEC, Report of the Manager, Santa Fe Operations: July 1950 to January 1954, January 1954, Secret/RD, p. 50, RG-326, NARA; AEC, Report, Project History of Line I Operations at Iowa Ordnance Plant: January 1, 1947 - July 1, 1954, October 1954, Secret/Restricted Data.[view]
See also Ann Arnold Lemert, First You Take a Pick & Shovel: The Story of the Mason Companies (Lexington, Kentucky: The John Bradford Press, 1979), pp. 160-168.

[84].       ORAU, Report, Technical Basis Document for Atomic Energy Operations at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant (IAAP), March 14, 2005, Unclassified;[view]
US Army, Report, [extract] Army Ammunition Production During the Cold War (1946-1989), April 2009, Unclassified.[view]
See also Ann Arnold Lemert, First You Take Pick and Shovel: The Story of the Mason Companies (Lexington, Kentucky: The John Bradford Press, 1979), p. 184.

[85].       ERDA, Environmental Impact Statement, Pantex Plant, Amarillo, Texas, June 1976, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, A Manual for the Prediction of Blast and Fragment Loadings on Structures, November 1980, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, Final Environmental Impact Statement: Pantex Plant Site, Amarillo, Texas, October 1983, Unclassified; DOE, Report, History of the Production Complex: The Methods of Site Selection, September 1987, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, Energy Technology Review: Dismantling the Cold War Arsenal, November-December 1993, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, [extract] Linking Legacies: Connecting the Cold War Nuclear Weapons Production Processes to Their Environmental Consequences, January 1997, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, Report, Transparency and Verification Options: An Initial Analysis of Approaches for Monitoring Warhead Dismantlement, May 19, 1997, FOUO; ORAU, Report, Technical Basis Document for the Pantex Plant - Site Description, March 20, 2004, Unclassified;[view]
NIOSH, Report, Pantex Plant Site Expert Interview Summary, July 2011, Unclassified;[view]
DOE, PPT Presentation, Pantex History, date unknown, Unclassified.[view]