I read about the Japanese detergent suicides starting to happen in America (only slightly changed for locally available products). The article was not clear in how exactly you stage one of those, for obvious reasons, but the little detail they gave made it sound like it would be something very easy to weaponize. Specially since they present a high risk to emergency workers responding to the suicides.
Is this a real concern, or is it something that is not easily scalable?
ETA: If the authorities decided that this was a real threat, is there anything they could do to stop it?
Well the wiki article on suicide methods states that 2 liters of each chemical is enough to kill someone in a car or bathroom. I see no reason it couldn’t be upscaled. Seems like it’d be fairly large quantities though. I suspect most terrorist organizations have more effective recipes.
Sure the authorities could ban one of the principle ingredients from being used in household cleaning products.
I’m sure someone with more knowledge will be along in the near future.
Mixing chlorine bleach with acid-based descalers gives off chlorine gas. Mixing chlorine bleach with ammonia-based cleaning solutions gives chloramine. Both of them are toxic. Generally it is not a good idea to mix detergent products.
As I once discovered.
I am guessing that bath sulfur is some bath salt meant to emulate the experience of bathing in a natural thermal bath. Rotten egg smell and all.
It would seem so but not really. For instance, many times I am the only one in the subway station other than the security guard, who doesn’t work for the Chicago Transit Authority, but rather a seperate security company.
First you get drums of liquid that can be rigged to open on a timer
So I just have a friend distract the guard by asking for directions and then I wheel the huge drum through the handicapped entrance.
Then I just put the drum under the platform. Who looks there? Of course somewhere it’s probably on tape but who looks at that unless their is a problem. And in cold weather it’s easily solved by wearing a ski mask like lots of people do.
Then a few days later I repeat it with another drum of another substance.
I imagine once you get the drums in it’d be easy enough to set the timers and eventually the drums empty and the chemical hit each other and mix.
It’s really not hard to do. Chicago’s subway’s and Els run very close to schedule. If anyone wanted to it’d be pretty easy to bomb the lines so that no one would be around and you’d ruin the line with no loss of life.
On the face it seems like a lot of work but it isn’t really. I’m just surprised it hasn’t happened yet.
The article says that “bath sulfur”, whatever it is, is not commercially available in the U.S. So not magnesium sulfate.
The article mentions “toilet bowl cleaner” specifically, which to me says hydrogen chloride, not bleach. The wiki article on hydrogen sulfide notes that the standard way to synthesize H[sub]2[/sub]S in the lab is to react a “strong acid” (such as hydrogen chloride) with iron sulfide; perhaps “bath sulfur” is a metal sulfide of some kind. The “common insecticide” mentioned in the article as a North American substitute might be lime sulfur, though my chemistry is a little too rusty to know it would react with acid in the same way.
Finally, it seems to me that hydrogen sulfide is a particularly poor choice for a bioterror agent, mainly because the human nose is pretty damn good at detecting hydrogen sulfide. As noted by the Wiki article, there’s a factor of 2000 between “levels that you can smell” and “levels that will hurt you.” If the next bin Laden or McVeigh or Asahara managed to rig up a device in a subway station à la Markxxx that created hydrogen sulfide, people would be retching and running from the station long before the chemical reached harmful concentrations. This, of course, isn’t a concern if you’re trying to commit suicide, but you’re going to have trouble killing anyone with it who doesn’t want to be killed.
(Mods: I hope this post doesn’t cross a line; feel free to delete if you think it does.)
I imagine the difficult part will be delivery. How can you put this effectively into an aerosal? This is also a concern for those who think its trivial to weaponize smallpox.
I imagine the solution would be something of a large device and quite more liquid than you would expect to give a lethal dose to even a small space. This device would be difficult to test and even more difficult to move, especially undetected. It would also be easy to disable too. At this point its an opportunity cost for a would-be terrorist and theyre just better off with well-understood technology like bombs.
I think its a problem for emergency workers because they usually cracking open small spaces like cars or apartments, so they could be sickened easily. That may not be lethal and it may only work when they think time is of the essence and break down a window and dive in.
>If the authorities decided that this was a real threat, is there anything they could do to stop it?
I imagine a bomb robot could easily disable this weapon and chlorine detectors would give good warning.
Before Oklahoma City I knew a guy who ran with Castro. He mentioned making one of those to bring down a telephone line (he apparently didn’t have a chainsaw, it being a simple wooden pole). I asked if that would really work.
“Oh yeah!” and he gave the proportions. A few years later Tim McVeigh convinced me.
The guy I knew got shot in the ass for his troubles.
So long story short, the stuff is just too bulky compared to the alternatives. I was kind of figuring that since it seems to take a bucket (a lot) to kill a person inside a car (a very small place).
I am sure that someone with a will and some basic knowledge of chemistry could make a bomb or poison out of basically just about any product in a modern supermarket, so little point on the authorities trying to stop this.