Meteorological and Intelligence Evidence of Long-Distance Transit of Chemical Weapons Fallout from Bombing Early in the 1991 Persian Gulf War

Background: Coalition bombings on the night of 18–19 January 1991, early in the Gulf War, targeted the Iraqi chemical weapons infrastructure. On 19 January 1991, nerve agent alarms sounded within Coalition positions hundreds of kilometers to the south, and the trace presence of sarin vapor was identified by multiple technologies. Considering only surface dispersion of plumes from explosions, officials concluded that the absence of casualties around bombed sites precluded long-distance transit of debris to US troop positions to explain the alarms and detections. Consequently, they were discounted as false positives, and low-level nerve agent exposure early in the air war was disregarded in epidemiologic investigations of chronic illnesses. Intelligence Data: Newly assembled evidence indicates that plumes from those nighttime bombings of Iraqi chemical facilities would have traversed the stable nocturnal boundary layer and penetrated the residual layer where they would be susceptible to rapid transit by supergeostrophic winds. This explanation is supported by plume height predictions, availReceived: October 3, 2012 Accepted: October 3, 2012 Published online: December 14, 2012 James J. Tuite 440 Johnson Farm Road Gretna, VA 24557 (USA) E-Mail jjt43 @ georgetown.edu © 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel 0251–5350/13/0403–0160$38.00/0 www.karger.com/ned Th is is an Open Access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License (www.karger.com/OA-license), applicable to the online version of the article only. Distribution for non-commercial purposes only. Meteorological Evidence of Chemical Weapons Fallout Neuroepidemiology 2013;40:160–177 161 After the initial bombing, thousands of automated devices (predominantly the US M8A1 nerve agent alarm) widely deployed throughout US and Coalition troop concentrations to detect cholinesterase-inhibiting chemical nerve agents (‘nerve agent alarms’) began sounding [4] , continuing over at least the following 2 days, in areas occupied by these forces located hundreds of kilometers southeast of the bombed sites ( fig. 1 ). Expert teams from France and the Czech Republic, using sophisticated equipment, confirmed the presence of ambient sarin nerve agent and blister agent during this period ( fig. 1 ; table 1 ), and US technical intelligence specialists officially assessed the Czech confirmations of sarin, which continued from 19 to 24 January, as ‘valid’ and ‘credible’ even though they could not determine the source [5, 6] . In the ensuing years, US government investigations of a potential link between these events relied on contemporary atmospheric transport and dispersion (ATD) modeling methods [6–8] , which estimated the extent of plumes expanding through the lower atmosphere near the surface directly from an emission source. When severe chemical casualties in populated areas near the bombed sites, predicted by ATD models of explosions at a chemical weapons storage facility, were not found, and surface winds were reported to be emanating from the wrong direction, US government analysts and the Task Force on Persian Gulf War Health Effects of the US Defense Science Board [9, 10] concluded that nerve agent emissions from the bombings could not have been appreciable and fallout from the bombings could not have reached US and Coalition troop positions. Thus, the close temporal association of the bombing with frequent widespread chemical nerve agent alarms confirmed by expert detections was left unexplained [6, 11, 12] . Consequently, epidemiologic investigations of chronic illnesses among Gulf War veterans disregarded possible Fig. 1. Map of the central area of the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, showing the two chemical weapons research, production and storage sites – the Muthanna State Establishment and Fallujah I, II and III – bombed on the night of 18–19 January 1991; the locations of company-level US military units on 19 January 1991 when thousands of M8A1 chemical alarms sounded, and the approximate sites where low-level sarin and/or mustard agents were detected by chemical weapon experts with sophisticated detection equipment, listed in table 1. Muthanna is 470 km from Rafha and 610 km from Hafir Al Batin. Symbols for military units located in the Persian Gulf represent US Navy vessels. Lakes Tharthar, Habbaniyah and Razazah are visible in several satellite images in figures 4–6. Deployed personnel numbered some 739,000 of the 2,066,000 active duty US military personnel, which included personnel on regular active duty, activated Reserve and National Guard, and recalled retired personnel.