I was reading Wikipedia and found a listing for chlorine trifluoride, an oxidizer so potent it will cause nearly anything (including asbestos :eek:) to ignite on contact. It’s used to clean vapor deposition chambers used in semiconductor manufacturing, so it can be purchased from companies that sell industrial gases.
My question is, what controls are in place to prevent terrorists from buying a couple of tanks of this stuff? For that matter, what stops them from buying more common gases such as plain chlorine, which is a chemical weapon in its own right?
For a lot of the gases you have to show a license before you can buy large quantities. I know that when the science department at my school orders gases, there is a metric buttload of paperwork that has to be done. As for the lesser poisonous gases like chlorine…I think you still have to show ID at the least to purchase them, and they don’t make very good weapons anyway. Everybody discovered that in World War One. Too hard to transport and control. Nerve gas is much more effective than chlorine at terrorizing.
And not much more effective at actually hurting/killing people. Famously, a Japanese cult tried in back in the nineties, and fewer deaths resulted than would have been expected from pipe bombs.
Ultra-reactive gasses like that would be more of a danger to the terrorist than to any potential victims. It’s mostly safe to store if you have a tank and fittings with the right kind of material, and you really know what you’re doing. But if you’re not careful, it’ll burn through any vessel you put it in. A hairline crack or small leak in the fittings you attached to the tank, and suddenly you have a metal-fluorine fire.
See “Sand Won’t Save You This Time”, from chemist-blogger Derek Lowe. You might also want to check out his whole section on “things I won’t work with”, which relates the horrifying sort of compounds that scare even the most hardened chemist…
There are stories about nearly every terrorist group having their own people killed by their own bombs blowing up by accident when being assembled or transported. (Terrorists aren’t generally know for careful & cautious actions.) Think how many more could be hurt if it was the much more unstable poisonous gases they were working with.
Oh Og, I went to those links just out of morbid curiosity, and maybe it’s just me, but I found myself laughing so hard I thought I was getting abdominal cramps. This guy’s a seriously funny writer.