Reporting on Chemical Testing of the Bigeye Binary Chemical Bomb

Gao ID: NSIAD-85-3 October 30, 1984

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on whether the Department of Defense (DOD) intentionally withheld information from Congress about the Bigeye binary chemical bomb program.

GAO found that: (1) because a steering committee with responsibility for the Bigeye program did not recognize the seriousness of a test failure, there was a delay in providing information to Congress about the failure; (2) after being informed of the test failure, the Office of the Secretary of Defense timely provided the information to Congress; and (3) because of the problem that caused the test failure, DOD withdrew production funds for Bigeye from its 1984 budget request and delayed Bigeye production for 1 year. In addition, GAO found that Congress was not informed of another test failure because the problem that caused the failure was easily corrected and did not recur.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Henry W. Connor Team: General Accounting Office: National Security and International Affairs Division Phone: (202) 275-4141


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