Free Cassidy's Run by David Wise Page B

Edgewood.
    More important, in 1972 Soviet intelligence learned the actual formula for VX, which had been invented in Britain and shared only with the scientists at Edgewood. Full-scale Soviet production of VX started in 1972 at Novocheboksarsk.
    A dozen years earlier, Soviet scientists had read in the openly available literature that the United States was gearing up to produce soman. But the information was incorrect, although production had been under consideration.
    At Edgewood in the late 1950s Benjamin Harris had in fact urged his bosses to commit to large-scale production of soman. Harris, a chemical engineer, had served in the Army Chemical Corps during World War II. He had been an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University when he began consulting at Edgewood on how to handle the sarin that had been captured from the Nazis. “I went around to storage sites and advised people on handling the GB. How to open containers safely.” In 1949, Harris left academe for full-time work at Edgewood.
    At that time, the scientists at Edgewood and army officials were still debating which of the major nerve gases to choose for large-scale production. Harris did a study of soman (GD): “I came to the conclusion that [its] increased toxicity and other properties made it a more efficient chemical agent.”
    There was, however, a problem. Unlike sarin, which is produced with ordinary alcohol, soman relies on pinacolyl alcohol, a much more exotic substance.³ “It was a lot more expensive to manufacture, because it is a much more complicated alcohol, for which a plant would have to be built. There was no large-scale plant available in the U.S. at that time.”
    But in Harris’s view, the cost of producing the pinacolyl alcohol was outweighed by the advantages. “If one makes a cost-benefits analysis of the cost of delivery of a weapon to the target, the cost of the fill is an insignificant portion of the total. The cost of delivery is much higher.
    “Everybody knew soman was more toxic, and it is also more persistent, because the heavier alcohol makes the gas more persistent. Among the gases, GD, soman, is in the middle; it lasts longer than GB, but it’s not as persistent as VX. You can make it more persistent by putting in a thickener. I urged them to make GD,” Harris said. “I made that recommendation to Sy Silver,” Edgewood’s technical director at the time.
    “We didn’t do it. They decided to make GB. It was decided at a high level.”
    Saul Hormats recalled the decision. “Soman was not used,” he said, “because I decided GB was better, more volatile, you get a fast cloud with it. You would have to make a new alcohol for soman, and GB used normal alcohol, already available. You can’t buy a big tank-car load of pinacolyl alcohol, but you can buy one of rubbing alcohol.”
    But none of this was known at the Kirov Chemical Works in Volgograd.
    Large-scale production of sarin (GB) had begun at Volgograd in 1959 but the Russian scientists considered soman the best nerve gas they had at the time. They had first learned of it when the Soviet army captured the Spandau lab, west of Berlin, at the end of the war.
    “At first, the Russian military establishment was against GD,” said a former Soviet scientist who preferred not to be identified. “They were interested in VX. Then they changed their minds. If America had large-scale GD, we must have it.”
    And so, by 1960, the Russians had committed to large-scale production of soman, in the mistaken belief that the United States was following the same course. But they faced the identical problem of how to extract pinacolyl alcohol. Although relatively simple to produce today—it is used in the manufacture of a number of herbicides and fungicides—at the time, pinacolyl alcohol required five stages of electrolysis to produce. Work began on construction of a separate unit of the vast Volgograd complex to perform the electrolysis and begin full-scale production of