Sarin production took off at a frenzied pace. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, the two plants cranked out thousands of tons of sarin nerve agent each year. The facility at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, code-named Building 1501, was a windowless five-story blockhouse designed to withstand a 6.0 earthquake and 100-mph winds. It was the largest poured concrete structure in the United States, and for years, no one in America without a need to know had any idea what went on inside. The Chemical Corps also fast-tracked its chemical warfare munitions program, developing state-of-the-art weapons with which to deliver deadly nerve agents in battle. At the Rocky Flats munitions loading plant, sarin was fitted into artillery shells, aerial bombs, rockets, and warheads for missiles, with the preferred method of delivery being the M34 cluster bomb, a 1,000-pound metal cylinder with 75 sarin-filled mini-bombs sealed inside.
Shortly after the Korean War ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953, the Chemical Corps began releasing public service announcements to educate Americans about chemical warfare. In November 1953, when Collier’s magazine published “G-Gas: A New Weapon of Chilling Terror. We Have It—So Does Russia,” the public learned for the first time that World War III with the Soviets would most likely involve nerve agents. Journalist Cornelius Ryan presented the information about sarin in the starkest of terms. “Right now, you and your family—all of us—are unprotected against the threat of a terror weapon which could prove more deadly than an atomic bomb.” The army described sarin as “an odorless, colorless, tasteless nerve gas designed to destroy people with paralyzing suddenness” and warned Americans of a possible “Pearl Harbor–type attack.” Ryan described for readers a scenario wherein a Russian strategic bomber, the Tu-4, carrying seven tons of sarin bombs, would drop its load on an American city, killing every unprotected human in a 100-square-mile radius within four minutes of the attack. The chief of the Chemical Corps, Major General E. F. Bullene, promised the nation that the only defense was offense. “At this time the only safe course is to be prepared to defend ourselves and ready to use gas in overpowering quantities.” Brinkmanship—the practice of pushing dangerous events to the edge, or brink, of disaster—was the new Cold War mentality.
In 1957, after years of producing sarin and filling munitions around the clock, the Chemical Corps finally fulfilled the Defense Department’s stockpile requirement. Later that same year, Edgewood chemists found an even more lethal killer, “a toxic insecticide that penetrated the skin like snake venom,” explains Jonathan Tucker. This nerve agent was code-named VX (the V stood for venomous)—a battlefield killer that was three times more toxic than sarin when inhaled and one thousand times more lethal when it came in contact with the skin. Ten milligrams of VX could kill a man in fifteen minutes. VX would be much more effective on the battlefield than sarin ever would be; sarin dissipated within fifteen or so minutes, but when VX was sprayed, it stayed on the ground for up to twenty-one days. Now, in 1957, the Chemical Corps began producing VX by the thousands of tons. Operation Paperclip scientist Fritz Hoffmann moved over from synthesizing tabun at Edgewood to working on VX munitions. But Fritz Hoffmann’s more haunting legacy lies in the work he performed for the CIA’s Special Operations Division and the Chemical Corps’ antiplant division. Antiplant agents include chemical or biological pathogens, as well as insects, that are then used as part of a program to harm crops, foliage, or other plant life.
After the death of Frank Olson, the SO Division continued its LSD mind control schemes. But Sidney Gottlieb, the man who had suggested poisoning Frank Olson at the CIA safe house in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, was assigned to also work on the CIA’s assassination-by-poison program. Fritz Hoffmann was one of the chemists at the locus of this program. “He was our searcher,” Edgewood laboratory director Dr. Seymour Silver told journalist Linda Hunt. “He was the guy who brought to our attention any discoveries that happened around the world and then said, ‘Here’s a new chemical, you better test it.’ ”
Hoffmann’s daughter, Gabriella, remembers her unusually tall, soft-spoken father regularly traveling the globe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, always with a military escort, gathering obscure poisons from exotic toads, fish, and plants. “He would send me postcards from places like Japan, Australia and Hawaii,” she recalls. “He always flew military and he was always escorted by military staff. They would pick him up at our house and bring him back home on a Sunday night.” A teenager at the time, Gabriella Hoffmann remembers the unconventional items her father brought home. “He’d unpack his luggage before he would go back to Edgewood on Monday and in his suitcase he’d have all these little jars. They were filled with sea urchins and things. It all seemed very exotic to me.”