Badges without Borders: Volume 56 (American Crossroads) by Stuart Schrader

Author:Stuart Schrader [Schrader, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520295612
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2019-10-14T22:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 12. Lake Erie Chemical Advertisement: CN versus CS. The Police Chief, June and August 1968.

The wide deployment of CS in Vietnam outside riot control nonetheless came to justify its domestic deployment in riot control. “Things like tear gas, the CS that is being used in Vietnam, have a tendency to find their way into domestic use,” one of Meselson’s colleagues observed in a hearing on chemical weapons.65 The circulation went both ways. “Recent experience with crowds, mobs, and riots in the United States has stimulated numerous studies of all aspects of their control. Developments in nonlethal weapons for this purpose have concentrated on exploiting the super tear agent CS,” the Institute for Defense Analyses reported the following year. “Many of these developments are directly applicable to low-level combat in cities abroad.”66 By 1968, advertisements in The Police Chief were touting the advantages of CS over CN, illustrating how thoroughly CS could incapacitate its targets. Advertisements also cited the authority of the Kerner Commission on CS. Well into the 1970s, the LEAA continued funding Army research on “less-lethal” weapons, with Sagalyn as a consultant.67

For its part, OPS was centrally involved in creating travel-ready chemical technologies. From 1964 to 1969, AID was the largest buyer of commercial chemical munitions, which it distributed to countries receiving police assistance.68 Dissatisfied with existing technologies, OPS issued technical specifications for a tear-gas grenade more suited to law enforcement than the existing military-grade weapons. Engineers with Maryland’s Aircraft Armaments, Inc., developed the new multi-purpose grenade, based on OPS designs. This grenade became a favored riot-control weapon both at home and abroad. It was a versatile dispenser of tear gas that could be held in the hand, tossed, or launched from a shotgun. Its fuse length was variable, which also gave its users flexibility. It had a lengthy shelf-life, was cheap (initial cost was double the Army’s standard grenades, but with the longer shelf-life, its amortized cost was lower), durable, and resistant to temperature fluctuations. Upon discharge, it did not pose a fire hazard, nor did its body produce sharp-edged fragments, like other tear-gas grenades. Multi-purpose grenades could disperse CN, CN mixed with dye, or CS.69

Top-ranking Johnson administration officials’ claim that tear gas had already been in use in peace-keeping riot control domestically justified the use of CS in South Vietnam. Its massive combat deployment in South Vietnam, as well as its use elsewhere in riot control by aid-recipient police forces, then encouraged and enabled its use as an alternative to lethal force by professionalized police domestically. Its success in counterinsurgency in South Vietnam owed to its utility, it was originally argued, in the “intermingled” situation of guerrillas and civilians in a single location. Tear gas helped separate the two. The sensible law-enforcement approach, according to OPS, was to use tear gas similarly at home. In situations of domestic unrest, even as the Kerner Commission found explanations reliant on communist and subversive agitation to be incorrect, the need to separate the hardcore rioter from the opportunist or the bystander remained central.

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