US to clean up chemical weapons left in Panama

One of the most beautiful islands off of the coast of Panama has a dark secret that few people know about and fewer will discuss. It is an embarrassment for the United Sates War Machine for what they did here not only to the island but more so what they did  to our troops who were stationed here prior to WWII (see the following article “TEST TUBE REPUBLIC” –  not for the squeamish).  Well it looks like this may be the final chapter after many years of stalled negotiation whereby the US lives up to its responsibility and cleans up the mess.

October 7th, 2013 (AFP) – The United States will clean up mustard gas bombs it left behind on an island in Panama where it tested them, a Panamanian official said Saturday.

“The Americans will be sending in a special team to carry out the cleanup” on San Jose island on Panama’s Pacific side, under a deal expected to be finalized in a few months, said Tomas Cabal, with Panama’s foreign ministry counter terrorism analysis unit.

Cabal said the six bombs should be cleaned up and removed by the US experts at some point in mid 2014.

The United States did testing on the island ahead of its military engagements in Japan (1939-1945) and Vietnam (1964-1975).

The Panamanian official said the US and Panama reached an agreement on the issue in April but it had not been made public.

Test Tube Republic: Chemical Weapons Tests

A. Fort Clayton, 1941

The first chemical weapons test using live agent known to be carried out in Panama occurred on Fort Clayton before the United States’ entry into World War II.

Jack Cadenhead had enlisted in the Army in Greenville, South Carolina in 1940 to escape the Depression and an oppressive job in the local cotton mill. Sent to the Canal Zone, he and others in the 33rd Infantry Regiment were taken to a long narrow building on Fort Clayton one day in July 1941. There they were given gas masks, exposed to a form of tear gas and told to lift their masks and sniff it. Then the officers running the experiment asked for ten volunteers.

“They said they wanted some men who didn’t smoke,” Cadenhead recalled. He raised his hand. “It’s hot, close to a hundred degrees in Panama, with no air conditioning, especially in those chambers. They would drop stuff in a container, and it would fog up.”

The operators had gas masks on, Cadenhead said, but “they didn’t tell us a thing, they just run us through there pretty fast.” The building was long, so long that the men were forced to breathe in the mustard as they ran. The men quickly developed problems breathing, and were rushed on stretchers to nearby Gorgas Hospital. “The guy with me, Bill Hansard, almost choked to death when we got to Gorgas,” Cadenhead remembered. “I was in ahead of him. He was blue around his mouth. They said, ‘We need to get him in here.’ It was one of the medical aides, I think, and he asked the doctor, ‘What’s wrong with them?’ And the doctor said, ‘It’s that damn mustard gas!'”

“Mustard gas loves wet low places, that’s where it hangs out. It’s the same on your body, where you sweat or it’s humid,” said Cadenhead, who has had health problems ever since. It permanently affected his speech, blisters would come up on his feet as big as a half-dollar, and the end of his penis turned white. “I thought I had leprosy for awhile,” Cadenhead said. More than fifty years later, he still has problems breathing. When he wrote to the Veterans Administration, they wrote back saying that his records from Gorgas Hospital had been destroyed.

“We were all just kids, we didn’t know what was going on. After I got older and wiser, I felt we were used as guinea pigs.

Cadenhead’s experience may have reflected the decision of one or two field commanders, since widespread use of human subjects by the United States for tests of mustard and lewisite, in Panama or elsewhere, did not begin until 1943.

In June 1943, the Chemical Warfare Service, together with Army and medical units, also tested protective clothing in Panama, but it is unclear whether chemical agents were used in these tests.35

B. San Jose Project Tests

More than 130 tests were conducted on San Jose Island between May 1944 and the end of 1947.36 Many of the tests were “drop tests” involving aircraft that dropped chemical munitions into target areas. Others required troops to fire chemical mortars into the test areas, and still others involved more controlled use of munitions. In a very few cases, project reports indicate the use of chemical simulants, but in most live agent was employed.

The project divided the island into eleven areas, six of which were laid in grids for target areas. The three largest target areas, made up of overlapping squares, were about one square mile each in size. The chemical agents tested (and their military codes) included: mustard gas and distilled mustard (H, HD), phosgene (CG), cyanogen chloride (CK), hydrogen cyanide (AC), and Butane.37 One participant remembers that Lewisite was also tested.38

From available documents, the number of munitions tested are known for 18 of the 130 tests conducted on San Jose Island. Some 4,397 chemical munitions were fired in these 18 tests, for an average of 244 munitions fired in each test. Most of the munitions fired — 3,816 — were 4.2″ mortars charged with Cyanogen Chloride, mustard, or phosgene, but the chemical munitions also included bombs from 100 pounds to 1,000 pounds in weight and 105mm Howitzer shells.

The San Jose Project also tested chemical munitions on the sea off of Panama in order to determine whether chemical warfare could be effective against enemy ships.39 In addition, according to a military map drawn up in 1946, tests included chemical spray on Iguana Island, which was also used as a conventional bombing range.40

A later military summary stated that “no nerve agents were tested” in San Jose.41 One participant in the project, however, tentatively asserted that nerve agent was tested there. Eugene Reid, a professional chemist by training, was drafted into the Chemical Warfare Service and served in Florida, Dugway Proving Ground and Edgewood Arsenal, as well as on San Jose. “Besides mustard, they were also testing newer things. Nerve gases, that was the hot thing then,” Reid said in 1997. When subsequently asked for confirmation, he was less certain whether nerve agents were tested on San Jose. “I suspect very much that they were, but I can’t say for sure they were used,” he said.42

While neither the United States nor Great Britain had developed nerve agents of its own by 1945, the Allies had captured significant quantities of nerve agent from the Nazis as Germany receded before advancing Allied troops in the Spring of 1945, which is when Reid arrived in San Jose. The British felt that some of the stocks of captured German nerve agent should be “retained for possible use in the Far East” should the Allies invade Japan, an eventuality for which the San Jose Project was preparing.43

Chemical Agents Stored or Tested in Panama
Persistent agents have lethal effects for hours or days after their detonation, while nonpersistent agents act more rapidly, and in the air dissipate within minutes. Agent
(code letter) Kind Form Munitions Lethal dose Symptoms
(inhaled) Comments VX nerve agent, persistent oily liquid or aerosol mines, rockets, projectiles 10 mg (on skin) vision blurs and dims; difficulty breathing lethal: drooling, vomiting, coma, convulsions, asphyxia Sparingly soluble in water; acts on body similarly to many insecticides Sarin (GB) nerve agent, nonpersistent liquid or vapor 105 mm and 155 mm projectiles 70 mg vision blurs and dims; difficulty breathing lethal: drooling, vomiting, coma, convulsions, asphyxia Soluble in water; acts on body similarly to many insecticides Mustard (H) blister agent, persistent vapor or liquid 4.2″ mortars; 105 mm and 155 mm projectiles; Livens projectors; bombs. Stored in spray tanks, one-ton containers 1000 mg eyes: inflammation, aversion to light, blindnessskin: skin blisterslethal: resembles CG in effect on breathing In seawater forms a gel that preserves mustard agent inside; highly corrosive Phosgene (CG) choking agent, nonpersistent gas bombs; 7.2″ rockets 3200 mg lethal: coughing, frothing at mouth, asphyxia, pneumonia Caused 80% of chemical fatalities in World War I Cyanogen chloride (CK) blood agent gas 4.2″ mortars; bombs 2500 mg irritates eyes and nasal passageslethal: paralyzes nervous system Affects oxygen exchange in red blood cells Hydrogen cyanide (AC) blood agent gas bombs (from 100 lb. to 2,000 lb.) 5000 mg lethal: giddiness, convulsions, asphyxia Affects oxygen exchange in red blood cells
Sources: Julian Perry Robinson, Science Journal, April 1967; Leo P. Brophy, Wyndham D. Miles and Rexmond C. Cochrane, The Chemical Warfare Service: From laboratory to field, Washington: Department of the Army, Office of the Chief of Military History, 1959.
C. Notes on Tests with Human and Animal Subjects

Many of the tests on San Jose Island used rabbits or goats to observe how lethal various methods of attack or how effective gas masks were. “They brought goats from Ecuador,” said José Alsola, a Peruvian who worked on San Jose in 1946 clearing vegetation for paths and an airstrip. “They put those gases on them. The skin fell off the animals, they died, and they ended up cooked. The animal was red, red! Like it was cooked, burnt.”44

The Signal Corps’ 1945 film about the project shows a comparative test with three goats — one with an American gas mask, one with a Japanese gas mask, and one without any gas mask. With the goats tethered to stakes and the camera running, the area is gassed with mustard. Two of the goats writhe and fall, while the goat with the American gas mask survives “unharmed.” One of the apparent purposes of the film is to reassure the soldiers viewing it that in case of gas warfare with the Japanese, the United States would not only win, but with few casualties.

But military and civilian researchers had long believed that tests on non-human animals alone were inadequate. “In toxic warfare, the most critical point in the evaluation of an item is its toxic effects upon enemy troops,” wrote the Chemical Corps’ medical chief, Colonel John R. Wood shortly after the war. “Where possible, in field trials, enemy troops are represented by human test subjects.”45 A civilian scientist, writing about tests conducted in 1943 with blistering agents such as mustard, said that because in animals “the reactions of the skin vary so greatly from species to species… it was soon found that the only constantly reliable test object was man.”46

Several of the San Jose Project tests involved human subjects, in all cases military troops. These included “patch tests,” which called for applying drops on a soldier’s forearms, often after protective ointment had been put on one of them. “They had volunteer soldiers,” one project participant recalled. “They dropped live bombs. They would contaminate the area with gas. The volunteer soldiers would go into the area, after of course, with full protective garments… They would have a cut-out area on their forearm or wrist. They would test the effect of protection against the blistering gases.”47

One of the San Jose tests, carried out between August 9 and August 15, 1944, sought “to determine if any difference existed in the sensitivity of Puerto Rican and Continental U.S. Troops to H gas [mustard].” A preliminary test involved ten Puerto Rican troops and ten “continental” (i.e., Anglo-Saxon) troops, which was followed by a fuller test involving 45 Puerto Rican soldiers and 44 “continental” soldiers. The men, who were “unfamiliar with the use of chemical agents,” were “given a stiff course in gas discipline and the significance of H [mustard] lesions to casualty production.” The tests involved applying liquid mustard to the under-surface of the forearms of each subject, then observed for three days. A summary of the test produced by Defense Secretary William Cohen in April 1998 implied that some men were hospitalized after they “sustain[ed] severe body burns or eye lesions.” Men with less severe burns were simply returned to their barracks and expected to meet company formations.48

D. Post-1950s Tests

Reports on four tests of nerve agent-filled warheads were obtained for this study.49 The U.S. Army Tropic Test Center (TTC) conducted the tests between 1964 and 1968 “to determine the effects of environment on the storage” — and, in two of the tests, on the operation — of the warheads. Three of the tests were for VX agent weapons: 24 2-gallon mines, 29 115-millimeter rockets, and 29 155-millimeter shells. The fourth test concerned 29 sarin (GB) 115-millimeter rockets. The weapons were to be stored for approximately two years, “outdoors on pallets under ventilated cover,” and periodically tested for leaks, pressure, visual defects, and integrity of the agent. The three tests of M-55 rockets and VX rockets and projectiles were accompanied by 120 simulant-filled weapons for each test series.

However, the M55 rockets filled with nerve agent had a serious defect: they leaked. “The M55 rockets are considered the most dangerous items in the current [U.S. chemical] stockpile for a variety of reasons,” according to a 1992 report by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment. “The M55 rockets are… the source of the greatest number of leaking munitions,” the report went on.50

In the VX tests, leaking weapons were not replaced, according to the test plans, but monitored and the surface wiped clean with caustic ethanol. In the sarin test, “all warheads that show positive evidence of vapor leakage will be removed from the test program” and “used for samples of GB.” The plan does not require removal of the leaking rocket from Panama. In all cases, if the location of a leak could not be found, testers were to drain the agent from the warhead, decontaminate it, and destroy the liquid nerve agent.

Other activities involved small amounts of live chemical agents such as mustard and sarin, which were probably kept in glass vials in laboratories. From November 1960 to February 1962, the Chemical Corps’ Tropic Test Activity in Panama tested 20 kits designed to detect contamination of food by chemical agents, including sarin, mustard and cyanogen chloride. The toxic agents were dissolved in a drop of acetone to be used in the test.51

The nerve agent tests were most likely conducted somewhere within the canal area, since from 1964 to 1968 the only site outside the canal area controlled by the U.S. military was Rio Hato. A former TTC project manager believes the detonation tests of VX mines were conducted on either Empire or Piña Ranges.52 Although the TTC used a site at Rio Hato, it used 54 other sites as well, all within the canal area, while Rio Hato mostly served as an air base. One of the canal area sites is identified on a list of TTC sites as “Empire Range (Chem Grid)” and on a 1997 map as “Old Chemical Site.”53