Posted on 05/17/2004 9:51:38 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Edited on 05/17/2004 9:55:03 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. officials said Monday they are concerned that other sarin-filled munitions may still exist in Iraq - and may not be well-marked - after evidence indicated a roadside shell that exploded contained the nerve agent.
No one was injured in the initial detonation Saturday, although U.S. soldiers who later transported the round did experience symptoms consistent with low-level nerve agent exposure, said a U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity.
In this case, it appears two components in the shell, which are designed to combine and create deadly sarin, did not mix upon detonation, the official said.
It was unclear whether those responsible for the attack knew it was a conventional or chemical round, the official said. The 155-mm shell did not have markings to indicate it contained a chemical agent, the official added.
U.S. officials believe, based on evidence, that the shell was an experimental munition produced before the 1991 Gulf War, called a "binary type," the official said.
Former President Saddam Hussein's government had declared binary sarin testing and production after the 1995 defection of Iraqi weapons chief Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Saddam's son-in-law.
But Saddam's government never declared that any sarin or sarin-filled shells still remained.
For that reason, the U.S. government considers the discovery of the sarin shell as significant, the U.S. official said.
"What is of concern is that that there may be more of them out there," the official also said.
Since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, a U.S. group of weapons inspectors, called the Iraq Survey Group, has been searching for weapons of mass destruction, finding only signs of programs - but no evidence - of actual weapons.
The existence of a sarin-filled munition thus could become the first indication that Saddam's regime had not destroyed all banned weapons.
The binary-type shell found Saturday holds chemicals in separate sections for security and storage reasons. The chemicals are then mixed after firing to produce sarin.
At a Baghdad press conference Monday, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, said he believed that insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as a bomb did not know that it contained the nerve agent. The dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device is very limited, he said.
Nerve gases inhibit key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. In large enough doses, sarin causes convulsions, paralysis, loss of consciousness and potentially fatal respiratory failure. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly.
An Iraqi 155-mm chemical shell can contain 2 to 5 liters of volume, which could hold a deadly concentration of sarin, if properly mixed and dispersed.
The concentration of sarin involved in Saturday's explosion wasn't clear.
Hoo-boy, that's a gotcha!
I wonder if the stockpile the terrorists got this shell from didn't contain two separate stockpiles, one conventional, and the other WMD nerve agents (that are being held in abeyance for a future mass WMD attack on American forces) and these particular terrorists were too stupid to appreciate the difference. Since the WMD in that roadside IED had to have originated from a stockpile within (say) a 5-10 mile radius of where the IED was found, it narrows the search for the remaining stockpile. Bad move, Abdul! Some terrorist is going to get his butt kicked by his commanders over that snafu.
--Boot Hill
Nope. They got the round at a garage sale or flea market. Everyone knows there are no WMD's in Iraq.
Now I'm waiting for someone to mention the Hollyweird Soundstage Conspiracy Theory. Maybe it's time to turn on CNNCBSNBCABC.
Or they bought it at "Abul's House of Humor and Great Practical Jokes"!
--Boot Hill
That might be, but I'm doubtful. I would expect that even with conventional warhead markings, a WMD binary nerve agent shell should have a distinctive shape and other observable features, due to the difference in function, contents and method of loading the chemicals.
--Boot Hill
This is for real:
_________________________________________________________________________________
Today: May 17, 2004 at 14:06:36 PDT
Here are some details about the nerve agent, sarin:
WHAT IT IS: Originally developed in Germany in 1938 as a pesticide, sarin is a clear, colorless and tasteless liquid that can evaporate into an odorless vapor. It is also known as GB.
HOW PEOPLE ARE EXPOSED: Once sarin is released into the air, people can be exposed through skin or eye contact, or breathing air that contains the chemical. It can also be used to poison water or food.
WHAT IT DOES: In large enough doses, sarin causes convulsions, paralysis, loss of consciousness and potentially fatal respiratory failure. In smaller doses, people usually recover completely. Symptoms include runny nose and watery eyes, eye pain and blurred vision, drooling, rapid breathing and drowsiness.
ANTIDOTE: The antidote for a lethal amount is a shot that includes the drug atropine, which must be injected into the thigh within minutes.
PRIOR KNOWN USE: The Aum Shinrikyo cult used sarin in attacks on in the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that killed 12 people and sickened thousands.
PRIOR LINK TO IRAQ: Iraq first told U.N. inspectors it had made 812 tons of sarin, then said it had made 790 tons. Iraq also produced binary weapons: bombs carrying two separate chemicals that when combined in an explosion, produce sarin.
Iraq acknowledged making thousands of rockets, artillery shells and bombs containing sarin. It used the chemical during its war with Iran in the 1980s and some believe it was used against Kurdish Iraqi civilians.
---
On the Net:
www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/sarin/basics/pdf/sarin-facts.pdf
--
Thanks for the "Bolding"!
Such brilliant strategic thinking.
I don't image any one is going to give this incident much credit unless a few hundred of our people die first...and even then they will find a way to blame it on the President.
______________________________________________________________________________
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -
U.S. soldiers found a roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent in Baghdad, the military said Monday. The device, which partially detonated, was apparently a leftover from Saddam Hussein's arsenals. It was unclear whether more such weapons were in the hands of insurgents.
Soldiers who removed the bomb experienced symptoms consistent with low-level nerve agent exposure, U.S. officials said. No one was wounded in the partial blast Saturday, and the dispersal of sarin from the bomb was very limited, the military said.
If confirmed in subsequent testing, the discovery would be the first evidence of a banned weapon in Iraq since the war began. The Bush administration based its case for the war on the existence of such weapons.
Earlier this month, some trace residue of mustard agent, an older type of chemical weapon, was detected in an artillery shell found in a Baghdad street, a U.S. official said Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity. The shell was believed to be from one of Saddam's old stockpiles and was not regarded as evidence of recent weapons of mass destruction production in Iraq.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned that the sarin results were from a field test, which can be imperfect and more analysis needed to be done.
"We have to be careful," he told an audience in Washington Monday afternoon. Rumsfeld said it many take some time to determine precisely what the chemical was, what its presence means in terms of risks to U.S. forces and other implications.
U.S. troops have announced the discovery of other chemical weapons before, only to see them disproved by later tests. Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said "the jury is still out" on whether chemical or other weapons of mass destruction remained in Iraq.
The former top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, said it was possible the shell was an old relic overlooked when Saddam said he had destroyed such weapons in the mid-1990s.
Kay, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, said he doubted the shell or the nerve agent came from a hidden stockpile, although he didn't rule out that possibility.
Former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, speaking to the AP in Sweden, agreed the shell was likely a stray weapon scavenged from a dump and did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles.
Numerous arsenals and weapons depots were looted in the turmoil following the collapse of the regime last April. Some depots are still only lightly guarded. Many of the materials used for roadside bombs were believed to have been looted.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said he believed that insurgents who planted the explosive did not know it contained the nerve agent. The 155-mm shell did not have markings to indicate it contained a chemical agent, a U.S. official said.
He said a U.S. military convoy discovered the round, which had been rigged as an explosive device. A detonation took place before soldiers could make the bomb inoperable, producing "a very small dispersal of agent."
U.S. officials believe, based on evidence, that the shell was an experimental munition produced before the 1991 Gulf War, called a binary type - a bomb carrying two separate chemicals that when combined in an explosion, produce sarin.
Dispersal would be far more effective if a shell containing nerve agent were fired from an artillery piece, Kimmitt said.
Even so, it appears that two components in the shell that exploded Saturday did not properly mix upon detonation, the U.S. official said.
Blix, whose inspection team didn't make any significant weapons finds during months of searching Iraq before the war, said he and his team found 16 warheads that were tagged as used for containing sarin but were empty.
Saddam's government had disclosed binary sarin testing and production after the 1995 defection of Iraqi weapons chief Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Saddam's son-in-law. But Saddam's government never declared that any sarin or sarin-filled shells still remained.
Iraq used the chemical during its war with Iran in the 1980s and is believed to have used it against Kurdish Iraqi civilians. According to U.N. weapons inspectors, sarin-type agents constituted a significant part of Iraq's chemical weapons arsenal - about 20 percent of all chemical weapons agents that Saddam's government declared it had produced.
Nerve gases inhibit key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. In large enough doses, sarin causes convulsions, paralysis, loss of consciousness and potentially fatal respiratory failure. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly.
In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult unleashed sarin gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening thousands. In February of this year, Japanese courts convicted the cult's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentenced him to be executed.
Developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi scientists, a single drop of sarin can cause quick, agonizing choking death. There are no known instances of the Nazis actually using the gas, but that didn't stop other nations from stocking it.
While the finding an artillery shell designed to disperse the nerve gas sarin is notable, it would take an arsenal of such weapons to pose a meaningful military threat, arms policy experts said.
"You would fire hundreds of these shells on the battlefield to have any significant effect," said Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior researcher at the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington.
In that way "you try to saturate an area" containing enemy troops, said Michael Powers, a senior fellow at the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Washington.
U.S. military officials in Baghdad said the Iraq Survey Group, a U.S.-led organization whose task was to search for weapons of mass destruction after the ouster of Saddam, confirmed the presence of sarin.
The team has run into a number of dead ends. In January, for example, field tests on discovered mortar shells near Qurnah in southern Iraq indicated a blister agent was in the shells. But follow-up tests indicated that the munitions did not contain the agents, though U.S. officials said Saddam had such agents in the early to mid-1990s.
Officials say there are chemicals associated with certain munitions, such as phosphorous, that can produce false positives. Some field tests are designed to favor a positive reading, erring on the side of caution to protect soldiers.
---
Associated Press reporters Katherine Pfleger Shrader in Washington, Matt Moore in Stockholm, Sweden, Malcolm Ritter in New York and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this story.
--
Updates above!
Afternoon update ping!
See #31.
Probably picked up at a garage sale or flea market...we all know Saddam destroyed all his weapons.
Former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, speaking to the AP in Sweden, agreed the shell was likely a stray weapon scavenged from a dump and did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles.
Hogwash, I have it on good authority that the binary GB 155mm arty shell was purchased at Ahmads 7-11 in beautiful downtown Baghdad.
Yeah, it is safe to say that Blix and Kay have a bit of prestige at stake here and are not about to give an unbiased and reasoned appraisal of this find.
Boot
God, I hope not!
Greta talking about this with Tim Trevan, i just turned on Fox.
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