A New Type Of Chemical Warfare

Russian authorities only wanted to put them to sleep. And the 700 odd hostages did go to sleep, as did their captors. But 116 never woke up.

 Most of the survivors are still in the hospital, held hostage to a state military secret that has now slipped out.

This ‘rescue’ of the Moscow hostages may have been accomplished using a powerful new type of chemical weapon, a calmative chemical that instantly sedates its victims, rendering them unconscious. The US Ambassador to Moscow told the Washington Post yesterday that Russian officials informed him that a ‘calmative’ chemical was used. Russian officials are keeping silent on exactly what the chemical was.

It is increasingly likely that the chemical used by the Russian troops was based on new medical research into the transformation of popular sedative drugs into incapacitating chemical weapons. Valium, Buspar, Zoloft and even animal tranquilizers are being studied for their ability to sedate and tranquilize the political enemies of powerful states. Russia has deployed a similar substance, to disastrous effect.

Some of this research is also happening in the United States, in apparent violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, signed into law by the US government in 1997. 

That’s what a US NGO has been saying for months, but few have been listening. It has taken one hundred and sixteen dead Russians to wake the world up to the latest issue in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The newest field of combat is medicine itself.

The Sunshine Project accused United States of violating the Chemical Weapons Convention in early October at the Hague meeting of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Ed Hammond, the project’s director has amassed a collection of documents that implicate the US Marines and American academics working with them to develop  these sedative drug weapons. The US government considers the work legal.

“We view that our denunciation of the Pentagon work on non-lethal weapons as an important test of the OPCW, and what we are going to test here is if the Chemical Weapons Convention is able to react, and to evenly enforce what the law says when it’s a large and powerful country like the United States that is apparently violating it,” said Ed Hammond in early October.

The US government subsequently kept Hammond and the Sunshine Project out of the OPCW meetings, denying them accreditation. This was unprecedented.

Previously only Taiwanese NGO delegates had been excluded from such meetings – by China.  Washington strong-armed the Hague gathering, a fact few would find unusual now. But the new Empire on the Potomac could not control the development of historic events, or put the genie back inside its little pill bottle.

Washington helped free the genie in the first place.

In November 2000, the US Marines’ Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) conducted joint war games exercises with the British Amy in which they agreed that they needed to put civilians to sleep, and that the Chemical Weapons Convention stands in the way. One can read the entire document on the Sunshine Project’s website, along with many other interesting papers. The US Army’s Edgewood chemical facility was researching sedative drug weapons as early as 1994.

The US Marines have now stopped releasing documents to Hammond under the US Freedom of Information Act.

It’s no wonder. The documents that have been released show the programme in the unflattering light of day.

A JNLWD power point presentation describes Serbian children protesting NATO bombing as terrorists.  Palestinian children throwing rocks also come in for special mention.

The Commander of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate was quoted in the New Scientist as stating. “I would like a magic dust that would put everyone in a building to sleep, combatants and non-combatants.” That commander, Col. George Fenton was present for the London war gaming exercise where these new chemicals were discussed – and where the Chemical Weapons Convention was described as a challenge to their development.

Another study, conducted by three researchers at the Applied Research Lab at Penn State University, explores the potential of sedative drugs to be transformed into chemical weapons.

“The Advantages and Limitations of Calmatives as a ‘non-lethal technique’ explores the delivery these sedative drugs via novel means including “drinking water, topical administration to the skin, spray inhalation,” and “a drug filled rubber bullet”.

The Penn State scientists described a potential target for these new weapons as a crowd of refugees that was ‘agitated and unwilling to wait’ for the distribution of emergency food.

The three scientists who authored the report chose to allow a public affairs officer for the University of Pennsylvania to answer all questions related to their research. That officer would only say that the report was ‘designed to list possible alternatives to deadly force for crisis situations,’ a purpose that would be familiar to hundreds of Moscow residents who are either awaiting news from their stricken loved ones, or mourning their deaths.

Paul Root Wolpe is also a professor at Unniversity Of Pennsylvania, and is the Director of bio-ethics for NASA. For Wolpe, the problems posed by the development of this new technology are similar to those brought up by the development of nuclear weapons. A new, medical arms race will now begin, once terrorists or other governments understand that medical knowledge could be used to put their armies to sleep without a shot being fired.

He says, “This question has been debated for thousands of years. The classical philosophy, the Hippocratic corpus and Socrates discuss the question of whether a physician should help the state. The general consensus was that a physician should help the state insofar as the state is promoting public health. They should not be helping the state in any other kinds of activities, especially war making activities if they can be cast in an ethical light.” For Wolpe, research into drug weapons falls into an ethical grey area.

The Penn State researchers and JNLWD both assert that the drug weapons study was only conducted for the personal interest of the researchers, and not for JNLWD or the Department of Defence. They noted that ethical considerations were beyond the scope of their research.

Purely by coincidence, two of the Penn State researchers also work for the Human Effects Laboratory. This lab studies the effect of non-lethal weapons on people – for JNLWD.

Other studies conducted by this lab have included the effects of new blunt trauma weapons on human cadavers and pigs.

Joe Rutigliano, a lawyer for the US Marines’ Judge Advocate’s office states that “The JNLWD receives hundreds of proposals every year for non-lethal capabilities from third party laboratory organizations. What you’re seeing in many of those documents are unsolicited proposals.” He states that JNLWD is not funding research into new sedative drug weapons.

Rutigliano was present at the November 2000 war games in where the US and British military agreed that the US Department of Justice and the Department of Energy were permitted to engage in such research, whereas the DoD was not.

Professor Julian Perry Robinson of the University of Sussex is one of the world’s top experts on chemical weapons. He’s authored over 400 papers on the subject, and advised the UN, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the WHO and the British Government. He’s a chemist and a lawyer. Robinson says that these new substances fall under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and should be banned.

“The Sunshine Project is pointing out a serious problem with the chemical weapons convention. A leading state party has suddenly got hooked on the crazy idea that non-lethal weapons technology, and it sees the CWC has standing in the way of the full development of this idea,” says Robinson, referring to the United States.

The Sunshine Project has taken the position that states should abide by existing international law. “If the United States is going to go around the world pointing its finger at other countries for violating chemical and biological arms control law, it better make sure that it has its own house in order. Our work can demonstrate concretely that the US’s own house is not in order,” says Ed Hammond. In today’s current political climate, the statement almost seems radical.

Hammond is preparing to push for a public inquiry into the development of these new weapons. “The gas used in Moscow is the Russian equivalent of the US programme to produce so-called non-lethal or incapacitating chemical weapons. They can incapacitate to the point of causing mass death,” he says.

He also warns of a deadly new arms race. “If governments do not muster the political will to condemn the use of gas in Moscow, then we are going to be faced with a very dangerous situation; the much broader use of chemical weapons.”

The Sunshine Project’s Website is available at www.sunshineproject.org

JNLWD’s website is at http://www.jnlwd.usmc.mil/