I’ve been seeing a lot of articles since the tragic attack in Syria about how Assad lied about having chemical weapons , and the inspectors didn’t know they were there until it was too late.
I know that other chemical warfare agents like chlorine and phosgene are used to produce plastics. Nobody would think anything of a chemical plant or oil refinery having either of these on hand.
Could Assad have either “hidden it in plain sight” or acquired sarin from someone who had a non-violent use for it?
I’m not a chemist but I did have training in the subject by the Army. Nerve agents like Sarin and pesticides are pretty similar. Many pesticides act on bugs in a similar manner that nerve agents work on humans. If a country is advanced enough to produce pesticides it can make nerve agents.
I’m not a chemist either, but apparently sarin is easy enough to produce that it can be whipped up by a small nutty cult.
I am a chemist and I worked for several years coming up with solutions for detoxifying nerve gases for the US DoD. Loach is correct in that some pesticides (insecticides in particular) are closely related to nerve agents such that long term exposure by farmers or occasional direct contact has injured people in the past. And ~5 years ago, a school bus in Iowa was accidentally crop sprayed by an airplane + drift by one of these insecticides and 30-some kids were taken to the hospital for oxygen plus monitoring. That being said 99% of insecticides are not related to nerve agents.
Sarin, Vx, and their ilk are thousands of times more lethal and have 0 industrial purpose. There is a key chemical structure+bonding difference which makes the nerve agent a suicide substrate, which means that it gets onto its targeted enzyme and sticks in there almost permanently. Insecticides, phosgene, and those chemicals with more industrial application chemical structures which are still able to do other chemistry.
Chlorine and mustard gases are more equivalent to nasty burns due to chemical reactions than nerve agents and should be separated in any discussion.
Nerve agents aren’t hard to make- but they are hard to make with high purity and activity as well as being able to be stored long though especially at large enough volumes to cover a significant area all without killing yourself or others nearby. There are multiple steps to get to the named chemical, like sarin, that are also highly toxic and lethal. You can almost look at the Breaking Bad documentary as a lesson in that Dr. Heisenberg is most concerned with a phosphorous reaction (gas mask and smoke before the amine synthesis later in production), but that element/chemical/moiety is the core of most nerve agents.
Nutty, perhaps, but hardly small. Aum Shinrikyo had a following of 40,000 plus people at the time of the 1995 Tokyo attack and was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It employed dozens and possibly hundreds of chemists, microbiologists and other researchers. It even had a research lab in the Australian outback where it tested sarin (and probably VX which they certainly synthesized) on sheep. It was about as close to being SPECTRE as any real-life organization ever has been.
The other difficultly of course is to develop a sophisticated delivery system that with effectively spread the agent on the target. The G series agents like sarin and tabun are considered non-persistent nerve agents because they are a gas at normal temperatures. It poses the problem of how to deliver the gas so it can be effective before disapating. VX is a persistent agent because it is a liquid at normal temperatures. The delivery system has to aerosolize the liquid so it can be spread.
We were always told the Soviet doctrine treated chemical weapons like just another type of artillery and not as a WMD. The predicted attack through Germany would be led by attacks with non-persistent agents through the axis of advance with VX being in areas they were not planning to hit to bog down any troops there. Places such as airfields would get hit with a combination of blood agents and VX. The Cold War was a special time.
As a chemist you can verify this. I remember reading in a manual a long time ago that even after the chemical weapons break down chemically and no longer work in the manner intended the area would still be contaminated with a nasty cocktail of carcinogenic chemicals. It sounded right but I don’t know what would be left behind.
Here http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/chembio-warfare is a chemistry blog that has some older articles which are a primer on chemical agents and includes some recent articles on recent events.
He does a nice job of outlining the practical realities at a high level for us non-chemists without giving any useful clues to the bad guys trying to actually make the stuff.
Yep. We fully intended to fight WWIII in CW suits.
Kids that think the world is a mess today have no idea how much safer they are now than we all were then.
OTOH, there’s no assurance humanity won’t paint ourselves right back into the same special corner.
A particularly nasty combination because the blood agent broke down the filters we used. The filters were good till after it should have been safe to unmask from just a blood agent strike. Throwing a persistent agent on top of it means breaking down filters while the other threat is not going away. The mix is a pretty nasty one-two punch.
It went on for a while after that, when “Wartrace” replaced the concept of “Capstone Mission” my Guard unit’s trace was to support Korea. Our major command post exercises were against a North Korean opponent using their doctrine. As late as 2000, in one big exercise I recall, gauging the NK course of action based on where they employed chemical weapons and by what type of agent they used was still a thing. I didn’t really see the drop off in focus till post 9-11 and especially after OIF-1 when the major chemical threat became the occasional small scale use of chlorine by insurgents.
I’m long out of the DoD biz, but I have to wonder how much of the de-emphasis on defensive CW since the Cold War is pure wishful thinking on our part? For sure OIF, etc., have had us only dealing with minor uses by minor players.
But I wonder how much the Russians nee Soviets and NKs and …'s have really abandoned their 1980s and 1990s thinking? And their 1980s & 1990s offensive chemical assets.
There are several battlespaces I’d rather not go into underprepared; CW is probably number one on my personal list.
I have heard that one can call nerve gas pesticide for people or conversely, pesticide is nerve gas for bugs.
One reason people believed Iraq had a nerve gas facility is that the country had purchased equipment to outfit a pesticide plant(s). The US was suspicious that some of the equipment was diverted/repurposed.
I have never heard of a legitimate use for nerve gas, but I am no expert.
I would think that Sarin makes a poor alternative to Permethrin?
Nerve gases are cholinesterase inhibitors just like many common insecticides like Malathion and Sevin. As a matter of fact, they were derived from pre-war insecticide research by I.G. Farben in Germany.
The main difference is the strength, I suspect.
About 20 minutes reading at the blog I cited in #8 will bring all this together. Broadly speaking, yes, the first nerve agents were outgrowths of insecticide research. All are broadly chemically similar with some designed-in differences. There is a lot of overlap in production techniques and production tooling.
Aum Shinrikyo attracted some of the best of the best – graduates of the Universities of Tokyo and Kyoto, the two top rated schools there. IIRC, the second or third in command was a chemist.
For all of the money they spent developing and testing sarin and other agents, they had to wing it for the delivery of the gas on the subway attack. Key members carried the sarin in sealed plastic bags in newspapers. They then punctured the plastic bags and got off their respective subway cars.
The cult had used a more effective delivery system for the Matsumoto attack, with a modified truck. An illustration of the truck – modified to remove some key features can be found in this online article..
There is no doubt that had they set out to build a better delivery system for the subways, they could have killed hundreds or thousands of people.
They targeted Kasumigaseki Station for peak morning rush hour. I had a number of customers located near there and fortunately none of their employees were involved.
Red Storm rising had more or less a chapter on that very thing, with the East Germans discussing it, and mentioning that nukes by comparison were cleaner.
Clancy probably read the same manual. I can’t remember what it was called but I remember it was the only NATO-wide manual we had. Unclassified of course.
Interesting. That paper, specifically Appendix F, seems to raise doubts that Banjawarn Station in Western Australia was ever used to produce or test chemical weapons. Not that it makes much difference to the main point, I guess – Aum Shinrikyo clearly had tens of millions of dollars to throw at the problem of making biological and chemical weapons, as evidenced by the facilities they built in Japan.
True, but they also had to deal with a deranged leader who kept changing things on a whim (note that I’m drawing comparison to a particular WWII leader who will remain unnamed as to avoid invoking Godwin’s law).
Had they decided they wanted to kill thousands or tens of thousands of people, and used said resources, it wouldn’t have been outside of their capabilities.