[The_Reader_David]

That's the question if a government which cares about the safety of its troops wants to use nerve agents. The Iraqi 'pesticide dumps' contained drums of stuff which caused symptoms of nerve gas exposure in those who investigated them, field tested positive for the presence of nerve agents, but then were pronounced to be pesticides. According to the original report (see the link in my original post), all the facilities where these were found also had lots of gas masks.

Plainly it was some sort of fairly nasty organophosphates in the drums, already potent enough to have dilaterious effects on folks poking around in the room where it was stored. Two possiblities suggest themselves: the Baathists decided to settle for using a pesticide which was of similar toxicity to Sarin (say within an order of magnitude) as a nerve agent, or they had a process whereby the pesticide and some very common chemical were the components of a binary agent.

[SandRat]

Heck they taught us in Chem School how to use, then common, 50% Solution Malathion into an agent, if used in aerosol form for inhalation in an unprepared target it could be guaranteed an LD rate of 35 out of 100. What's the surprise in this story other than it being overly PC and dealing with stupid $%%#@ cibilians/poli-tics-anz.