US Navy Film Reveals Crazy Cold War Chemical Weapons Plans – The National Interest Online (blog)

During the early years of the Cold War, the Pentagon heavily prepared to useand defend againstnew and improved poison and germ weapons.

Now we have detailed look at those plans from a newly declassified 1952 U.S. Navy training film. Earlier in October 2015, the independent website GovernmentAttic.org posted an electronic copy of the footage. A private individual had requested the footage 15 years ago via the Freedom of Information Act.

Biological and chemical warfare have two principle objectives, the films narrator says, to reduce food by destroying his crops and his food-producing farm animals and to incapacitate the enemys armed forces and that portion of his human population that directly supports them.

This clinical and disturbing description of wreaking chemical and biological death on an opponent is accompanied by images of fields, pigs and marching Soviet troops.

The U.S. Naval Photographic Center produced the film to explain how the military planned to deliver deadly chemicals and diseases, and protect its own sailors from similar attacks. The narrator describes the results of experiments thatif they had involved real chemical weaponswould have resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. The film also details equipment designed to spray toxic particles from airplanes, ships, submarines and more.

The Pentagon put the U.S. Army in charge of cooking up the specific agents and producing them in sufficient quantities, the narrator notes. Originally formed as the Chemical Warfare Service in 1918 during World War I, the Armys Chemical Corps researched dozens of possible payloads.

The ground combat branch already had decades of experience with gases like mustard and phosgene that burn the skin and attack the lungs. The United States and the Soviet Unionas well as other allied powers on both sidesappropriated work Nazi Germany had done on organophosphates that strike the central nervous system and prevent a persons brain from communicating properly with their vital organs.

The same year the Navy produced the film, scientists in the United Kingdom invented a new nerve agent codenamed Purple Possum. After learning of the weapon, the U.S. Army started producing the substance with its own moniker, VX. On top of that, the Chemical Corps explored the possibility of weaponizing various bacteria, viruses and toxins. Pentagon experiments included work on anthrax, bubonic plague, smallpox and ricin, among others.

Lastly, as alluded to in the Navy films introduction, the Army considered various chemical and biological agents that could specifically kill crops and livestock. As a result, the Pentagon had an advanced defoliation program well before it sprayed gallons of Agent Orange over Vietnamese jungles.

With the Army in charge of these terrifying chemicals, the Navy focused its efforts on the delivery systems. The film describes weapons dispersed from ships, dropped or sprayed from airplanes or released by submarines.

According to the narrator, the Navy conducted its first ship-borne tests two years earlier in 1950. A rather crude spraying system was installed on a mine layer, which secretly cruised off California and sprayed some 50 gallons of biological stimulant along a track two-to-five miles off shore, the narrator says.

The Pentagon regularly used non-threatening bacteria or spores to secretly test how far a real germ weapon would spread. In this experiment, as in the case with chemical and biological weapons in general, weather patterns and the terrain largely dictated where the particles went.

During the California test, technicians used special collectors to determine that the spray covered some 48 square miles of total area. Had an infectious agent been used in the spray, there might have been 210,000 casualties, the narrator says.

In April 1952, the minesweeper USS Tercel sprayed more simulated toxins along the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The rather flat terrain would be favorable to wide dispersion of wind-borne particles, the narrator says in the film.

Tercel sprayed 250 pounds of zinc cadmium sulfide during an eight-hour voyage along some 100 miles of coastline. Evaluators later found evidence of the fluorescent material across 20,000 square miles spread over all three states.

But surface ships such as the Tercel would be vulnerable to attack during an actual war. Recognizing this vulnerability, the Navy planned to mount sprayers on submarines for actual operations.

After reaching periscope depth, the submarines wouldas the concept wentvent their deadly payloads into the atmosphere. If everything went according to plan, the vessels would then submerge and escape without anyone on land knowing the attack had even happened until it was too late.

The Navy also worked on underwater chemical and biological mines. A sub would lay these devices along the ocean floor and then leave the area. After a predetermined time had passed, the mine would float to the surface. A tube would then pop out of the top and release its gas or germs. Aircraft could carry the same weapons and drop them into lakes and rivers further inland.

Alternatively, an airplane with a giant spray tank could do the job. At the time, bombs loaded with noxious chemicals were hardly new, but spray tanks would be more effective and accurate for seeding large amounts of toxic agents.

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US Navy Film Reveals Crazy Cold War Chemical Weapons Plans - The National Interest Online (blog)