Posted on 05/21/2004 6:55:23 AM PDT by 11th Earl of Mar
'Sarin Bomb!' v The Dud Heard Round the World
by Scott Ritter from the May 21, 2004 edition
Iraq sarin shell is not part of a secret cache
By Scott Ritter
DELMAR, N.Y. v In the mid-1980s I served as the intelligence officer for a Marine artillery battalion. Stationed in Twentynine Palms, Calif., I would often find myself deployed in the field, on exercises where thousands of live artillery rounds were fired downrange.
In keeping with the Marine artillery motto of "shoot, move, communicate," we were always moving from one firing location to another to simulate modern war.
This mobility had us often passing through live-fire impact areas.
One thing you quickly learned was not to touch anything lying on the ground, because modern artillery shells had a high "dud" rate, meaning they didn't always function the way they were intended.
Tens of thousands of these "duds" were scattered across the desert terrain, not unlike those found in Iraq.
What makes this relevant now is the ongoing speculation about the source of the sarin chemical artillery shell that the US military found rigged as an improvised explosive device (IED) last week in Baghdad. If the 155-mm shell was a "dud" fired long ago - which is highly likely - then it would not be evidence of the secret stockpile of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that the Bush administration used as justification to invade Iraq.
As a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, I know that the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the US-led unit now responsible for investigating WMD in Iraq, could quite easily determine whether this shell had been fired long ago or not.
Given the trouble the administration has had in documenting its past allegations about WMD, releasing the news of last week's sarin shell without the key information about the state of the shell itself seems disingenuous.
As a former UN inspector, I'm also familiar with the level of disarmament achieved concerning Iraq's banned WMD. And during my time in Iraq, 95 percent of the WMD produced by Iraq were verifiably accounted for.
But I've always contended that Iraq is a WMD archaeological site, and that if one digs long enough, vestiges of these past WMD programs will be uncovered. Determining whether the discovery of the sarin artillery shell represents such an archaeological discovery, or is part of Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpile of WMD, rests with a full forensic exam of the shell.
The key to whether the sarin artillery round came from an arms cache or was a derelict dud rests in the physical characteristics of the shell.
The artillery shells in question were fitted with two aluminum cannisters separated by a rupture disk. The two precursor chemicals for the kind of sarin associated with this shell were stored separately in these containers.
The thrust of the shell being fired was designed to cause the liquid in the forward cannister to press back and break the rupture disk, whereupon the rotation of the shell as it headed downrange would mix the two precursors together, creating sarin.
Upon impact with the ground - or in the air, if a timed fuse was used - a burster charge would break the shell, releasing the sarin gas.
Many things go wrong when firing an artillery round: the propellent charge can be faulty, resulting in a round that doesn't reach its target; the fuse can malfunction, preventing the burster charge from going off, leaving the round intact; the rupture disk can fail to burst, keeping precursor chemicals from combining.
The fuse could break off on impact, leaving the fuse cavity empty. To the untrained eye, the artillery shell, if found in this state, would look weathered, but unfired.
What gives away whether the shell had been fired is the base-bleed charge, which unlike the rest of the shell, will show evidence of being fired (or not).
Iraq declared that it had produced 170 of these base-bleed sarin artillery shells as part of a research and development program that never led to production.
Ten of these shells were tested using inert fill - oil and colored water. Ten others were tested in simulated firing using the sarin precursors.
And 150 of these shells, filled with sarin precursors, were live-fired at an artillery range south of Baghdad. A 10 percent dud rate among artillery shells isn't unheard of - and even greater percentages can occur.
So there's a good possibility that at least 15 of these sarin artillery shells failed and lie forgotten in the Iraq desert, waiting to be picked up by any unsuspecting insurgent looking for raw material from which to construct an IED.
Given what's known about sarin shells, the US could be expected to offer a careful recital of the data with news of the shell. But facts that should have accompanied the story - the type of shell, its condition, whether it had been fired previously, and the age and viability of the sarin and precursor chemicals - were absent.
And that's opened the door to irresponsible speculation that the shell was part of a live WMD stockpile. The data - available to the ISG - would put this development in proper perspective - allowing responsible discussion of the event and its possible ramifications.
Given that the US is in the midst of a contentious presidential campaign, it's essential that accurate data about Iraq be available to the electorate.
The handling of the sarin shell incident is the greatest justification yet for shutting down the ISG, and the immediate return to Iraq of UN weapons inspectors - if for no other reason than to restore a vestige of credibility to a disarmament effort that long ago lost its moral compass.
• Scott Ritter was a UN weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-1998) and is author of 'Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America.'
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C'mon people!
Attacking the person and not the argument is childish - something I'd expect from DU.
While the child-molestation jabs are at times amusing, I'd say his piece was overall pretty accurate. A single shell is in no way indication of an active WMD program.
Unfortunately for those who thought we'd find a massive WMD program to back up Bush's main justification for the invasion, Ritter seems to have been VERY right indeed with his WMD claims - both before and after the war.
The best he can say is yes, its possible the device was from a stockpile and its also possible it was from a dud found in the desert. Then compare and contrast.
He clearly dismisses out of hand any indication that he weighs all possibilities equally.
As for attacking the man, when someone writes something like this its a waste of time to take it apart and making fun of him is certainly the best reaction.
Fantastic, loved your post
SPIN ONE FOR THE FLIPPER!!!
Many things go wrong when firing an artillery round: the propellent charge can be faulty, resulting in a round that doesn't reach its target; the fuse can malfunction, preventing the burster charge from going off, leaving the round intact; the rupture disk can fail to burst, keeping precursor chemicals from combining.
Since we know Saddam's sarin had only a few week shelf life once combined (I think that was the time I read - certainly well short of years), the sarin cannot have mixed in flight on this supposed dud. Thus, the rupture disk must have failed to burst. And, since the components of the sarin were still in the round, the bursting charge must have failed to go off.
So what we have here, to belive this lying traitor, is a round that was fired, and which had two independent systems fail. It's just not going to happen.
A little bit of elementary mathematics, even assuming his rediculous 10% overall failure rate, with 3 distinct failure modes (no mix, no fuse, insufficient propellant). If we assume for simplicity that the odds of each of these 3 failure modes is equal (not very likely, but all we have to go on for this simple exercise), then there's a 3.3% chance of any one type of failure per shell fired. For two independent failures, that 3.3% squared, or 0.1% chance for a dud to occur in this way.
Since his failure numbers are obviously inflated (there's no way there's a 10% overall failure rate), the odds of a dud existing are even lower than this.
You mean Inspector Cluesoe?
I did 6 years in the National Guard with a 155mm Artillery battery and can't recall one dud.
We never fired chemical rounds, but HE, flares, and atomic simulators never failed. We used a variety of fuses, impact, timed and radar, and never had one failure.
I recall one time a projectile was launched with the wrong propellant charge, it still went off when it hit the ground about 100 yds in front of the Forward Observers. No one was hurt but a wardrobe change was necessary.
Just exactly what enemy was Saddam shooting at, there along the Syrian border? Or did the users cart a dud from the Iranian border all of the way across Iraq to the Syrian border to set a trap?
Ritter's WMD claim? Besides what he wrote below, David Kay indicated that Saddam now had an indigenous program...were he didn't have to have "stockpiles" of weapons. Because of the years of inspections, Saddam had set up the infrastructure to whip up WMDs on demand. This was even further confirmed ealier by Ritter himself, who said that Saddam could reconstitute his various WMD programs within weeks to months. I think Ritter actually put it best in 1998:
From The New Republic, Dec. 21, 1998:
"As a member of UNSCOM since 1991, and its chief inspector responsible for investigating Iraq's concealment mechanism from July 1995 until my resignation on August 26, 1998, I know that this is hardly the first time Saddam has pulled such tricks. In fact, they are at the heart of his strategy for preserving his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and, eventually, getting rid of U.N. economic sanctions (which he has largely succeeded in eluding anyway).
Through skillful manipulation of the situation on the ground in Iraq, international public opinion, and rifts among the members of the Security Council, Saddam actually aims to cap his comeback by getting UNSCOM to issue a clean bill of health. It is an audacious plan, but it may succeed, thanks in no small part to the mistakes of U.S. policymakers themselves.
If it succeeds, the consequences could be dire. The Baghdad regime-- strengthened by having retained the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction and psychologically fortified by having outlasted the world's sole remaining superpower--will rapidly restore its internal and regional constituencies and reemerge as a force to be reckoned with.
Since his defeat in the Gulf war, Saddam has built up eight years' worth of resentment and frustration that can only be released through renewed efforts at territorial expansion through armed aggression and blackmail, both economic and military. Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed.
UNSCOM lacks a full declaration from Iraq concerning its prohibited capabilities, making any absolute pronouncement about the extent of Iraq's retained proscribed arsenal inherently tentative. But, based on highly credible intelligence, UNSCOM suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents.
Iraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production.
Meanwhile, Iraq has kept its entire nuclear weapons infrastructure intact through dual-use companies that allow the nuclear-design teams to conduct vital research and practical work on related technologies and materials. Iraq still has components (high explosive lenses, initiators, and neutron generators) for up to four nuclear devices minus the fissile core (highly enriched uranium or plutonium), as well as the means to produce these.
Iraq has retained an operational long-range ballistic missile force that includes approximately four mobile launchers and a dozen missiles. And, under the guise of a permitted short-range missile program, Iraq has developed the technology and production means necessary for the rapid reconstitution of long-range ballistic missile production.
Iraq supports its retained prohibited capabilities with an extensive covert procurement network operated by Iraqi intelligence. While images of starving Iraqi children are beamed around the world by American television, Iraqi front companies have spent millions of dollars on forbidden material related to all weapons categories--in direct violation of existing sanctions and often under the cover of the humanitarian "oil for food" program.
Finally, Iraqi security forces have kept critical documentation, including the vital "cookbooks" that contain the step-by-step process to make chemical agent, outline the procedures for producing weapons-grade biological agent, detail the final design of the Iraqi nuclear weapon, and provide the mechanical integration procedures for long-range ballistic missiles."
>>Anyone else wondering WTF Scott Ritter is doing writing in Pravda?
["In 1990, Scott Ritter divorced his wife to marry 19 year old Marina Khatiashvili, a Russian Model recruited and used by the KGB to sexually compromise US Intelligence Sources in the 1980's during the Nuclear Disarmament Period."]
http://www.ropma.net/ritter.htm
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1127446/posts
Sadaam never declared having this type of shell and UN inspectors had previously indicated that Sadaams chemical shells required mixing the two components prior to firing the shell. This shell was more likely to have been acquired after 1996 and could not have been previously fired. Scott Ritter knows this and is purposely providing deceptive information - AKA - lying!
Good Lord! What the hell was this man doing as part of our inspections team?!
PS.. Notice how Ritter in this 1998 article has already labled the Oil for Food Program a fraud.
Failure of the rupture disk is not a reasonable factor. Between the g-force from the firing and the g-force of the impact, the rupture disk will rupture. The difference in g-force for safe handling and the g-force of typical use is so great that the design parameters do not have to be that tight. A failure of the rupture disk will occur about as often as a water balloon not breaking on impact with cement when thrown off the top of a three story building.
Excuse my ignorance of things military, but if this shell had previously been fired, even if it was a dud, wouldn't it have been destroyed or seriously deformed upon impact? In the Kennedy assassination, we had the "pristine bullet" controversy; now we have a "pristine dual-chamber shell" controversy.
What kind of nonsense is this? It's like finding an automobile and saying there's no evidence of an automobile-manufacturing program. The idea that this binary artillery shell is a unique custom-made item is pretty ludicrous.
By the way, what is the minimum threshold of deadly doses of Sarin before a weapon can be considered an WMD ? --5 thousand? -5 million? 5 billion? ---what's the number?
---just curious.
>>Good Lord! What the hell was this man doing as part of our inspections team?!
Working for Comrade Klinton?
It is so sad to see a former Marine turn into a seditious piece of offal, such as Ritter. Writing for Pravda is just the latest in his spiral downward. Like his compatriot Benedict Arnold, I suppose he will live abroad for the rest of his life.
The metal casing of an artillery shell is actually quite hard metal. It takes the explosive force of the detonation to rip it to shreds, the shreds (known as shrapnel) become mini-projectiles and inflict much of the damage caused by the shell. A shell landing in the ground without the explosive charge detonating, would not sustain any damage other than a few scratches.
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