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Armed Forces: Cut Holes and Sink ‘Em

4 minute read
TIME

For two tense days the twin strings of steel cars loaded with deadly nerve-gas rockets cautiously wove through seven Southern states. On board, teams of chemical specialists rummaged amidst the exposed cargo testing for dangerous emissions. A dozen pigeons and rabbits —living alarm systems in the event of escaping gas—flopped in wire cages. Overhead, helicopters monitored the tracks ahead for rockslides and other dangers. In Waxhaw, N.C., a picket met one of the trains with a sign saying NERVE GAS MAKES ME NERVOUS. The biggest event of the twin odysseys came when one of the rabbits, named Panic, gave birth to five bunnies.

The trains’ destination was the Military Ocean Terminal at Sunny Point, N.C., a sprawling, 8,500-acre depot that exists only to process ammunition. Each year 1.3 million tons of munitions pass through the base. So careful are the procedures that since 1955, when the base was completed, not a single man working there has lost his life.

Despite their fund of experience, workers handled the nerve gas with special care. A week before the gas arrived, all loading on the port’s three wharves was stopped. When the gas trains were safely at dockside, the second phase—Operation Chase, a venerable Navy acronym for Cut Holes And Sink ‘Em—was ready to start.

Missing X. Awaiting the cargo was the Le Baron Russell Briggs, a Liberty ship that obviously had known grander days. Pitted and charred, her hoist no longer works, and big red letters spelling EXPLOSIVES have been painted on her sides. In the early morning hours two gangs of longshoremen reported for duty. They had been given two days of crash orientation on the care and handling of gas. Run through a boxcar filled with tear gas, they learned how to apply atropine (the antidote to nerve gas) and how to fit gas masks. The job was not a lark for the 32 longshoremen, but neither were they particularly worried. Said W.Z. Vereen, who with his colleagues relishes the $17-per-hour double pay for the ticklish work: “This job isn’t as dangerous as the mustard gas we had in here a few years ago.”

Perhaps, but among the 418 concrete-and-steel coffins holding nerve-gas rockets is one far deadlier than the others.

AP While the others contain GB, a colorless and almost odorless gas that can kill within minutes, it holds ten pounds of VX, a far more potent agent. The container was marked with an X so it would receive special handling. But the Army had all the boxes painted silver to reduce the heating effect of the sun, inadvertently obliterating the X—and the identity of the more lethal one.

The loading took the better part of two days as the longshoremen, who boast they can load 100 tons an hour, secured one 64-ton crate every 20 minutes. This week, weather and the courts permitting, Le Baron will be towed to a point 238 miles off the Florida coast and scuttled in 16,000 feet of water.

Ruled in Favor. What will happen then is still anybody’s guess, despite thousands of words of testimony and controversy. Florida Governor Claude Kirk and the New York Environmental Defense Fund had filed suit in federal court requiring the Army to demonstrate that it had chosen the safest possible dumping locale. Under questioning.

Army experts conceded that their presumption that the disposal ship and concrete casks would not implode under sea pressure before reaching the ocean floor was based on theory only, and that they did not really know what would happen.

Unproved, too, was the assumption that the gas would hydrolize and be rendered harmless under the 31-ton-per-sq.-in. pressure at the ocean bottom. Still, for lack of a reasonable alternative, Judge June Green ruled in favor of the Army’s plan, permitting the dumping to proceed, although an appeal from her decision is still pending.

And amid the uproar, the Army quietly reminded its detractors that it had on earlier occasions in 1967 and 1968 dumped nerve gas in the ocean off the New Jersey coast, and that so far there have been no recorded complaints.

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