Killing Kim

"Thank you," Diogenes said to me as I came in this morning.

"For what?"

"For being patient with my recent catharsis. I truly had not understood how the proximity to VX had traumatized me until the episode of Kim Jong-nam arose. And thank you for your patience with my putting you off regarding that unfortunate gentleman. I am now ready to discuss his case."

I sat, all ears.       

"As you know, Kim Jong-nam was accosted in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport on February 13 of this year by a woman who approached him from behind and smeared a substance which is believed to have been VX nerve agent on his face. He requested medical attention and was taken to the airport clinic. An ambulance was called but Kim died en route to hospital.

"Let me remind you briefly of the qualities of VX. It is odorless, tasteless and ranges in color from clear to light brown. It can be mistaken for many innocuous substances--mineral oil, for example. One of the alleged assassins said she thought she was putting baby oil on Mr. Kim's face.

"The lethal dose of VX is estimated to be approximately 10 milligrams, absorbed through the skin. There's no good way to translate that into more familiar terms, but here's an extreme approximation: If the assassin applied approximately a half-teaspoon of the agent to Mr. Kim's face, he received more than 2,000 times the lethal dose. Put another way, had that amount of VX been spread throughout the airport, on seats, door handles and vending machine buttons, for example, it would have been sufficient to kill more than 2,000 people.

"Why attack this particular person? It's known that his half brother, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, has had a "hit" out on him for years. Perhaps the killing was a means of fulfilling that contract. But there is good evidence that this assassination was carried out by agents of North Korea. Such an operation could have been undertaken at almost any time, so another question that must be asked is, 'Why now?'


"It's possible that Kim Jong-un simply wanted to remind the world that he has effective means of killing people even if his long-range missiles don't seem to work very well. His estranged half-brother, who had no presence on the world stage, may well have been a simple demonstration piece--a way to put North Korea temporarily back into the spotlight.

"If that was the case, then why not simply disperse enough of the material to kill dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of people? Kim Jong-un probably has no scruples about doing so, but he is not stupid. He knows there are lines that, if crossed, would bring the wrath of many nations, including his ally China, down on him. So he rids himself of a disliked relative and raises the specter of chemical warfare without doing enough harm to bring about retribution.

"The Chemical Weapons Convention, which went into force in 1997, banned the use of chemical weapons and called on the world's nations who had stockpiles of such weapons to destroy them. A handful of U.N. member nations, including North Korea, have not signed the treaty, and even considering those who have, one has to question whether the 100% destruction they claim is factual.

"VX was not conceived of as an anti-personnel weapon, but its effectiveness as such has now been demonstrated, and the fact that neither of the alleged assassins nor anyone else at the airport was seriously affected makes it clear that safe handling is possible, if risky. Having seen the efficacy of a small dose on a selected target has surely put the idea of using it into a number of heads--not all of them necessarily terrorists.

"VX is not difficult to make in a well-equipped chemistry laboratory, especially if one is indifferent to the health of the technicians, as tyrants tend to be. In state-of-the-art labs with NIOSH Level A protection--such as those operated by a number of federal agencies--production would be a snap.

"Some time ago* I suggested that in Trump some tyrants might have 'met their match in stubbornness, hardheadedness and unreasoning assurance of being in the right.' I did not include Kim Jong-un in the list because the post was about the Middle East, but he certainly belongs on it.

"The Great Pretender has shown disregard for more political and social norms than I can name. His only interests are himself and his agenda. He has set aside treaties, agreements, conventions and other presidents' executive orders and sought to overthrow laws because they are not consistent with his vision of Trumpland. With his obsessive need to have his own way and to accomplish goals as expeditiously as possible, who's to say he might not look on VX as a convenient tool for doing away with evildoers? Might the thought of infiltrating a CIA agent with a small amount of VX into Bashar Assad's household already crossed his mind?

"Think about it."

*4/8/17

--Richard Brown





 

Death in the Backyard: Part 4

“‘ Just 58 miles west of Indianapolis, the Newport Chemical Depot houses enough of the nerve agent VX to kill every person on earth.’ ” 

Wearing a Cheshire cat grin, Diogenes hit me with that quote this morning before I had even had coffee. I blinked at him.

“Gets your attention, doesn’t it?” he asked, handing me a magazine. “That’s the lede from an excellent and well-balanced story in Indianapolis Monthly. It’s the November 2001 issue. It was timed perfectly, as everyone was still jumpy about terrorism.

“Somewhere in the Operations Office of the Newport plant was a map of the region, divided by concentric circles centered on the Newport Depot. The central circle wasn’t red like a target. It was black, and it was called the Dead Zone. In the event of a major accident it was the area the powers that were had decided would have to be written off because there would be no way to evacuate and/or save those within it.    

“While my cousins—and I when I was visiting—were playing tag and baseball and swimming and riding bicycles and learning to dance and having picnics and campouts and birthday parties and big family Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings and trying to understand algebra and going to drive-in movies and parks and discovering sex and puzzling out conjugations of Latin verbs and having not a care in the world—and right on through maturity and falling in love and getting married and having children—we never knew we could be snuffed out in an instant. We worried a little about ICBM attacks, but not about ‘friendly fire’ death floating in across the river. We were in the Dead Zone! For almost half a century! And no one knew! Can you begin to understand why this angers me?”

This last he almost shouted, he was so heated. I’ve never seen him so exercised about an issue.

I was silent for a moment, partly out of respect for his emotion, and partly from the shock of hearing about his childhood. Until then I wasn’t sure he had had one.

Finally I ventured, “But you’ve said the plant wasn’t secret. Surely there was some knowledge of the facts.”

“It’s true that the plant itself wasn’t secret, and neither was the nature of its products, but the civilian workforce was strongly urged not to discuss their work or anything they knew about the plant. And such was the longstanding friendly relationship between the plant and its neighboring towns that the employees seem willingly to have acceded to that charge.

“My uncle was well placed in his community and had a great many contacts. He hobnobbed with politicians, law enforcement personnel and several people who worked at the plant, and if he knew anything he kept his silence.

“In the 1980s when the truth began to come out the army was forced to mount a sort of public relations campaign. There were public meetings held mostly to assure the locals they were in no danger, and some people began disputing that point. As more information emerged the public became more engaged, and some very heated meetings took place. 

"When the army’s plan to destroy the VX by incineration became public people became even more active. Incineration had proven problematic in the past, and the knowledge that the agent could be spread by fire helped to support arguments against the process. Finally, after some head butting between army personnel and activists, the incineration plan was dropped and chemical neutralization was agreed upon. It was at the beginning of the neutralization program that the spills I discussed last time happened.

“Let me draw a worst-case scenario for you. Let me stress that this series of events would have been statistically virtually impossible, but the real world does have a tendency sometimes to ignore statistics. The circle that was the Dead Zone had a 30 mile radius. It would have been near impossible for any accident to affect the entire area. Prevailing winds would have caused one vector to suffer while the rest would likely be spared. But humor me.

“Imagine a bright summer day with no clouds and no wind. It’s Sunday and only a minimum staff is at the plant. The army has agreed to allow CSX to park a half-dozen tank cars filled with LPG on a siding until the gas can be transferred to a holding tank on Monday. The siding is between two bunkers that hold ton containers of VX.

“Early that evening an off-duty guard is strolling the grounds, enjoying the evening air and a cigarette. As he crosses the siding with the tank cars he tosses his cigarette butt in their direction—and under, as it happens, a car with a leaking valve. The hapless guard is vaporized in the ensuing explosion, which also rips open the bunkers and ruptures a dozen or so VX containers. The nerve agent is carried upward by the firestorm thousands of feet higher than the visible fireball, expanding as it goes. At about 12,000 feet it stops and begins descending in a circle into the Dead Zone. No wind, remember?

“When the VX reaches ground level it immediately contacts a few hundred people within a few miles of the plant who have come outside to look at the fireball. The explosion destroyed the plant’s communication center, so the system that should have sounded an alarm is never activated.

“Inside a couple of hours 2,827 square miles of mostly productive farmland has been rendered unusable, possibly for years, and virtually every structure will be uninhabitable. More than a hundred fifty thousand people live within the Dead Zone, and they will start to die in minutes, along with all pets, livestock and wildlife under the umbrella of death.

“Within two hours, long before the fire at the plant is extinguished, the Dead Zone is dead.”

Death in the backyard: Part 3

Replying to some comments about his most recent post, Diogenes protested, “Yes, some people call me a conspiracy theorist, but that’s nonsense. I don’t think the army established an RDX plant in 1941 with the intention of converting it to VX manufacture twenty years later. VX hadn't even been developed then.

“What I do think is that they took advantage of a trusting and credulous populace. Even though the plant manufactured weapons of war and was guarded by the military, it frankly posed little risk of enemy attack, and virtually no risk to the surrounding population.

“RDX is a remarkably stable explosive; it’s still popular for that characteristic and is the primary ingredient of C-4. It explodes when primed by a fuze or blasting cap, but is almost impossible to energize in any other way. In the unlikely event of an explosion at the plant only those working there would have been harmed, and they surely knew the risks.

“Likewise with heavy water; you could bathe in it, drink it, use it otherwise just like common H₂O, with no ill effects. It is not radioactive, and you would have to ingest a great deal of it if it were to be injurious.

“So you have a plant that, despite its purpose, had a friendly and benign reputation and relationship with its host communities. And one of the things the military does very well is to recognize an opportunity when it sees one. 

“Retooling the plant to manufacture VX was obviously less expensive than building a new one, and they had a ready-made and willing work force nearby. It would seem, as the saying goes, to be a win-win situation. Unless, of course, some VX got loose. Then no one would have won.

“Again, this goes back to the military-industrial partnership, which even such a dyed-in-the-wool conservative as Dwight Eisenhower spoke against. Both the military and large corporations are by nature impersonal, and that makes them dangerous. Their officials think nothing of writing off death and injury as ‘collateral damage’ if their goal is attained.

“In any event, after Richard Nixon frustrated the M-I alliance by shutting down all U. S. chemical weapons manufacture in 1968, there remained as much as a quarter-million gallons—yes, you heard that correctly—of VX to do something with. The Newport facility was never designed as a storage depot, and for long periods of time a great deal of VX was stored under less than ideal conditions. It was not made truly secure until after 9/11.

“Ironically, the only reported accidents took place after the neutralization process had begun. All were blamed on faulty valves or gaskets. Four of those involved the spills of the waste byproduct from the process. It’s not dangerous in the same way as VX, but is highly caustic. Across the four spills hundreds of gallons were involved, but were reportedly cleaned up with no casualties.

“The one truly frightening and potentially hazardous reported spill happened on June 10, 2005, when 30 gallons of VX—not the byproduct—was spilled. VX is a viscous liquid, not a gas (although it can be aerosolized and sprayed), but again, only a minuscule amount can be lethal. The official report claimed the spill was safely contained and neutralized, but in such a situation mightn’t it have been possible for someone to make off with a small amount? Everyone has a price.

“By now, anyone reading this series will have done some research and learned that VX is generally not dangerous to the public at large under normal circumstances. Its primary military importance was as an area denial weapon; that is, if it were applied to an area via bombs, missiles or artillery it would make that area deadly and unusable. The problem with that strategy is that it would make that bit of real estate unusable by anyone for a long time. It’s remarkably persistent.

“I mentioned before that it can be aerosolized and sprayed, but the chief danger to the peacetime public would be a fire or explosion. VX doesn’t burn easily, but an explosion or hot enough fire can ignite it and spread it for miles if conditions are right. We know that VX was released from leaky valves and ruptured gaskets, and an unrelated explosion could certainly cause that kind of part failure. Or what if a train carrying VX munitions had derailed—remember Lac Megantic—or a plane crashed at the site causing an explosion?

“If any of those things had happened, God knows how many people would have been at risk and not even known it. With the exception of employees and maybe their family members all most people knew was that some kind of chemical was made at the plant, and their long familiarity with the plant made them accepting. The nature of that chemical wasn’t widely known until 1987, and the staggering amount of VX stored at Newport wasn’t made public until 1994.

“That’s the crux of my chagrin with the situation, even all these years later: Not the hypothetical ‘what if,’ but the plain fact that if VX got loose the local towns, including people I cared about, lacked preparedness and didn’t know what measures to take because for almost 30 years after production began they hadn’t specific information about what was there. 

"It doesn't matter that nothing happened; it matters that the government owes its own people the ability to protect themselves against danger and they did not provide it.

"That is one reason why I do not trust the word of the military establishment, nor that of most government agencies.”

I was exasperated. “For heaven’s sake, are you ever going to tell me where Kim Jong-nam comes in?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Next time.”

--Richard Brown

Death in the backyard: Part 2

I almost never dispute with Diogenes, because I never win. But in this case, with him jumping from topic to topic with no apparent connection, I had to try to get him focused. So I said, “You’re not making sense, you know. What do all these questions lead to, and what is it that’s got you riled?”

“It’s actually a personal matter that lies in the past. I was hoping to avoid making it public, but Kim Jong-nam’s death brought it up front and center in my mind.”

He took a deep breath. “All right. Here’s the context. In November, 1941—just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, which I find interesting—the army identified a site just south of Newport, Indiana, as suitable for an ammunition plant. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company was hired as the contractor, and tasked with making the high explosive RDX.

“The plant was an economic boon for the area. And after we became engaged in World War Two, jobs there were especially prized. Those who had been declared unfit for combat were especially pleased, as they were able to make a direct contribution to the war effort.

“There was nothing hush-hush about the plant. It was a huge complex set down on acres of flat farmland, approachable from all directions. It wasn’t secret like Oak Ridge or the Manhattan Project. Nor was there any secret about RDX, or any race to make it. It was used extensively by both sides in the war.

“The plant soon became part of the local background. Despite its military guard and formal name, ‘Wabash River Ordnance Works,’ it was simply called ‘the plant,’ or colloquially and ungrammatically, ‘Dupont’s.’

“In 1942-43 a heavy water production facility was added to the Newport plant to provide deuterium for the nation’s nuclear weapons and research program, including the Manhattan Project. It was shut down in 1945 but reopened in the 1950s to support the Savannah River Site. It finally closed for good in 1957.

“In 1959 the army hired a new contractor to retool the plant as a production site for the nerve agent VX—one of the most toxic substances on the planet. Throughout the 1960s the plant, renamed the Newport Army Chemical Plant, turned out the army’s entire stockpile of that nightmarish weapon.

“Munitions—bombs, rockets, mines—were loaded with VX there and shipped by rail all over the country, as well as to bases abroad. The amount of product made in Newport was measured in the thousands of tons and hundreds of thousands of gallons—and one small drop can kill a person.

“After Nixon ordered production to be stopped in 1969 the military’s entire stockpile was stored there, even though the facility was never designed for storage, and finally it was all finally destroyed between 2005 and 2008.

“At any time during that nearly fifty-year span hundreds of thousands of people could have been killed and thousands of square miles of farmland could have been contaminated by something as simple as a loose valve or a corroded gasket.

“You ask why this has been troubling me; I have family and friends in the area, and visited there many times during the VX period. At no time did anyone I knew there express misgivings about the plant.

“In 1959 the army hired Food Machinery Corporation to run the VX program. I remember my uncle had a thermometer with their advertising on it. And despite the change in contractor and mission, most people I knew continued to refer to the plant as a du Pont operation.

“Consider the army’s actions: they switched the plant’s mission from a factory for making a very stable explosive to making harmless heavy water, then quietly switched to manufacturing an incredibly lethal compound made by the innocuous-sounding Food Machinery Corporation. Today that contractor is FMC, a military megacontractor. This was a process very similar to a classic bait-and-switch, it strikes me that the army put a lot of people at high risk without informing them of the danger.

“Now do you understand why it bothers me? It’s another example of the military-industrial complex caring only for weapons effectiveness and bottom lines, with no concern for civilian safety.”

“All right, I get it. But I still don’t understand where Kim Jong-nam comes in.”

Dio sighed. “Next time.” 

--Richard Brown