Overview

On July 8, 1969 twenty-three soldiers and one civilian working on the American army base on Okinawa became sick after one of the bombs filled wqith Sarin began to leak after a sand-blast treatment (Tucker, 2006). On July 18, The Wall Street Journal printed a story reveling the leak and the secret stockpile of Chemical Weapons present on Okinawa which was unknown to Japanese authorities.

Beginning in 1961, the Kennedy Administration secretly authorized transferring of chemical weapons to a base in Okinawa without informing any Japanese authorities. The stored Nerve Agents and Mustard Gas in munitions at the base.

References

Tucker, Johnathon B. War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda. Pantheon Books, 2006.