GB Or Not GB?

Georgia Governor Lester Maddox wanted to ride atop the train to prove its cargo safe. The mayor of Macon, Ga., Ronnie Thompson, has vowed to use force, if necessary, to keep it from passing through his city. A Pentagon spokesman insists that the chances of "catastrophe" are virtually zero, yet the Army is quietly stockpiling quantities of a lifesaving antidote along the proposed route. The British Foreign Office (representing the government of the Bahamas) has questioned the wisdom of the plan.

What has given everyone the jitters is a colorless, almost odorless nerve gas coded GB, able to kill or incapacitate human beings within seconds. It blocks the enzyme the body uses to destroy one of its own chemical nerve-signal transmitters that becomes poisonous after serving its function. This affects control of the nervous system and ultimately causes the body to poison itself. This week, if all goes according to plan, the Army will begin shipping 12,540 rockets armed with GB from depots in Anniston, Ala., and Blue Grass, Ky., to Sunny Point arsenal in North Carolina. There the rockets, crated in concrete-and-steel boxes, will be loaded on a hulk, towed to sea some 230 miles off the Florida coast and scuttled in 16,000 ft. of water.

Do Not Drop. The disposal plan has stirred the same furor that forced the Army to cancel similar shipments twice in the past year. The specter of the gas escaping to pollute the ocean has been raised by both England and the Bahamas, and indeed, environmentalists are worried. There is no positive proof that the dumping will or will not cause permanent damage. Dr. Howard L. Sanders, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, called the plan "sheer, unbelievable inefficiency and stupidity." Florida Governor Claude Kirk went one step further, promising to "pursue every avenue available to me to see to it that this dangerous substance is not deposited just beyond our shores."

Also of concern is the transportation of deadly gas over creaky southern rail lines that, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, account for a disproportionate number of the nation's train wrecks and derailments. More than 400,000 people live along the 661 miles of track the Anniston train will cover, and, reportedly, the thin concrete walls encasing the rockets are fragile if dropped on one of their corners.

So far, the Army has been somewhat slow in responding to its critics. Last Monday, Brigadier General W.W. Stone Jr., Director of Chemical and Nuclear Operations, told a nervous Senate subcommittee that the Army would never again carry defective or old nerve weaponry around the country by train, a virtual admission that the plan was not a sound one. Called on to support the Army plan, the White House environmental expert, Russell Train, cited the need to dispose of the rockets (earlier Senate witnesses had testified that the propellant was becoming unstable and that there was evidence of small leaks), but he admitted the plan was at best "the least undesirable one."

Throughout, the Army clanked along with its preparations, and the gas, with or without Maddox, should be in Sunny Point by this Friday. As an editorialist in the Washington Daily News pointed out: "There is something perverse about the grand old American habit of using oceans and rivers as convenient dump holes for all manner of poisonous crud. There must be a better way."

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