Then he told me how Colonel General Vladimir Pikalov, head of the Chemical Troops, was pestering the Defense Minister asking to award him with the title Marshal of the Chemical Troops. The highest officer answered them with a smile and said that he could do that, but “Where are all these chemical troops?” Indeed this prominent military formation actually consists of some numbers of independent chemical battalions and regiments.
“Chemical agents and their problems in the U.S.S.R…. this is a gigantic feeding trough for the military and civilian generals,” concluded Kostenko. Be that as it may, he continued to do his job well. Since Kostenko had a wide network of connections with his former colleagues, he easily settled organizational matters, connected with the typical ordeals that resulted from the regular research at GOSNIIOKhT. Even during the start-up time at Shikhany, he continued to travel there. This was not such a bad place. You could gather mushrooms in nearby fields, or try your luck at fishing on the Volga River.
On one of these furloughs, Gennady Ivanovich injured his hand and the cut became inflamed. He turned to a military hospital known to him from a job in the past at Shikhany, but his appeal was too late and the cure was too unprofessional. The inflammation turned to gangrene and in several days he died.
I worked for a long period of time with Kostenko’s laboratory, developing chromatographic methods of analysis of the samples from the test site. Since the preliminary testing of chemical agents was conducted in the laboratory, my methods were also used in those experiments. I was working closely with Oleg Plyushch, who was one of his deputies and his assistant.
Oleg Pavlovich (who had a M.S. in Chemical Science) was an exceptionally polite and highly cultured man. He was a strong specialist at his job, even though he had been studying issues of radioactive chemistry and the burial of radioactive waste for a long time.
Unfortunately, Oleg, like many talented people, was too principled for his own good at times. He sometimes brought down the fire of envious people on himself, people who were simply untalented and not professional scientists. Once, during a departmental party meeting, he came out against accepting Adolph Zaozerov into the party. Zaozerov was someone who was being promoted intensively by Professor Evgenia Volkova, the head of another laboratory in the department.
Evgenia, being a great lover of art, was charmed by Zaozerov, who was really a wonderful baritone, practically on a professional level. Apparently, the senior scientist’s vocal talent was unequaled, but it was absolutely useless for the leadership of scientists and for the area of work that needed to be developed.
Although Plyushch and several other people were warned in advance about the possible unfavorable consequences of such a hasty step, Zaozerov was accepted into the party and soon became a departmental head. When he finished the energetic reconstruction of his office, the new chief strangely began to force Plyushch out. At the time, I watched more with horror than anything else, how GOSNIIOKhT could drive problematic people out of their positions. There was not one conference, departmental meeting, or meeting in Shchekotikhin’s office, where Plyushch’s name was not mentioned without mocking comments.
Oleg Pavlovich was forced to leave GOSNIIOKhT, because he did not hold up well under such psychological assault. I met him again twelve years later, in 1995, at a conference on ecological problems in the Moscow City Duma. I was very happy to learn that Oleg Pavlovich had successfully defended his doctoral dissertation and had become the director of an important scientific research institute for biological problems of interest to the Ministry of Health. Right away he invited me to come to work for him, promising to give me good terms of employment. Unfortunately, at this time I understood completely that it was unsafe for my children and me to remain in Russia any longer.
Adolph Zaozerov did not put down roots as the new chief of Department “RP”. He was not able to adjust to relations with the military, and he understood very little about the direction which his department must be developed in. Having a handsome appearance and a wonderful vocal gift, he was still very far away from science. His success did not progress further than the reconstruction of his office into a luxury chamber.
In 1984, Zaozerov was replaced by Nikolai Kuznetsov, from the enterprise (NPO) “Basalt” – the leading contractor for scientific manufacturing. Basalt was the main designer in the U.S.S.R. of ammunition that contained chemical agents.
Kuznetsov was invited to work by the former director of GOSNIIOKhT, Patrushev and his deputy Guskov, who intended to give the department a more goal-oriented character. Also, it was nice to have someone who could promote the research of the institute directly to NPO “Basalt”, and have it realized.
The new director, Petrunin, quickly promoted him to his deputy. In 1991 he was sent by GOSNIIOKhT to the Volsk affiliate, to try to work on an old idea that Guskov’s collective had failed to accomplish in 1978. It became Kuznetsov’s contribution to successfully complete the testing of a binary weapon there. He understood that the previous failure with testing the binary variant on the idea of the reaction according to
O-i-C4H9
D
CH3-P=O + HS-CH2-CH2-N(C2H5)2 ’
\
CN
O-i-C4H9
/
CH3-P=O
/
S-CH2-CH2-N(C2H5)2
was due to the fact that they used an aviation bomb which was dropped from a low altitude. There was not enough time for the components of the binary weapon to mix thoroughly.
All that remained was to design a shell, or better yet a rocket, that intensified the mixing process. This is much easier to describe than to accomplish. But, thanks to their connections with military contractors, the Kuibyshevski Special Design Bureau had already completed all of this work by the end of 1990, and positive results followed.
Engineering a binary rocket is a delicate task. The burster charge used to break the barrier separating the two precursor chemicals has to be sufficient to initiate rapid mixing yet not destroy the precursor chemicals or disturb the ballistic trajectory of the rocket. Kuznetsov’s engineers worked to design this mini-reactor in flight, and it underwent preliminary testing at Basalt’s facilities in Samara (formerly known as Kuibyshev). A decision was taken to hold the tests at Nukus instead of Shikhany because prevailing opinion held that the US intelligence community did not know about the Nukus test site. The success of field tests of the Substance 33 binary rocket led the Soviet Army to adopt the first binary device as a chemical weapon in 1990.
The Soviet Army’s approval of the Substance 33 binary weapon triggered efforts to produce these weapons for the Soviet arsenal. Scaled-up studies and pilot plant production took place at Novocheboksary and probably also at Shikhany. In military circles, being able to produce a few grams of an agent was not significant. Waging war required tons of chemical agent, so figuring out how to produce large quantities of a specified agent was a crucial accomplishment. In the case of Substance 33, proving the ability to mass produce this new binary would qualify this agent’s developers to apply for the USSR’s highest awards.