The Nation - News from May 31, 1985

The Bigeye bomb, centerpiece of President Reagan’s $174-million plan to modernize the U.S. chemical-weapons arsenal, remains technically flawed despite seven years of testing, according to the General Accounting Office. In preliminary findings presented to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Dante B. Fascell (D-Fla.), the GAO reported that in eight of its last nine tests by the Army, the bomb had not produced a sufficiently lethal chemical reaction at high temperatures. The bomb is called a binary weapon because its lethal punch comes from mixing two nontoxic chemicals that produce nerve gas after Bigeye is dropped.