I've always scratched my head about their recipe below for reduced sodium dill pickles. The 6 cups of sugar has to be a misprint, right? That's a heck of a lot of sugar, and almost double the amount of their reduced sodium "sweet" pickle recipe. But it seems to be replicated everywhere.
I'm hesitant to assume it's a typo because the process that puts a recipe in the official list of food preservation techniques is pretty rigorous.
I haven't tried this recipe but I wonder if the sugar is used as the preservative instead of salt- it functions in a similar way, inhibiting bacterial growth after a certain point because osmosis competes for the water that bacteria need to grow.
But then why is does their reduced sodium "sweet" pickle recipe have about half that sugar as their "dill" recipe? Anyway, I've got a recipe that I use that has no salt or sugar in it, but I treat them as refrigerator pickles as I don't want to trust that they'd stay preserved correctly with only the vinegar.
https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_06/reduced_sodium_dill.html