Posted on 06/22/2006 7:53:56 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
The infamous Sarin gas possesses a variety of names...Sarin like most other nerve agents,is colorless,odorless,tasteless and diffuses very rapidly into the human skin due to its high volatility....Sarin is known to vapourise 36 times more rapidly than Tabun, is 26 times more deadly than cyanide, 21 times more lethal than potassium cyanide and all it takes is 0.01 mg for every 1kg of body mass for it to be fatal for a human....Remember that Sarin is a gas and it is also colorless and odorless, making it even more difficult to be sensed by human beings;And even if the person somehow "manages" to detect the presence of the gas it is quite likely that he/she has been contaminated as well.
(Excerpt) Read more at library.thinkquest.org ...
I only put a portion here. I encourage FREEPers to read more.
very serious stuff
on a lighter note, my dog has gas that bad
Do the Dems understand that sarin = WMD?
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/7541/nerve.htm
Actually, IIRC, sarin in its pure state is an oily liquid, similar to the feel (if you lived long enough to perceive the feel)of baby oil. The trick to delivering sarin is to atomize this liquid into sufficiently fine drops over a sufficient volume that it all volatilizes into the vapor state.
The military has a surrogate compound, DMMP (dimethyl methyl phosphonate) that is harmless but has similar physical charateristics to sarin (MW, volatility, BP, etc) that they use for testing mock ups and countermeasures.
Iraq adopted the "binary" method of weaponization, in which the components of sarin gas are stored separately until use, when they are mixed. Binary agents have a shelf life of several decades, not two years, which is why the militaries of the world produce binary chemical weapons.
When mixed, the binaries form a compound of DF 2 and the alcohols cyclohexanol and isoproponal. This is what will have a limited shelf-life... but as long as the temperatures in the underground bunkers don't exceed 90 degrees, that life can be ten years depending on the purity. Iraq manufactured DF 2 with a purity of 95%, and imported alcohols of 100% purity, so the detonation of its munitions could be expected to yield relatively pure sarin.
Make no mistake about it... the weaponized binary agents in these shells were highly lethal when produced, and maintain a very high degree of lethality today.
I like yours better...
Apparently not.
Crude delivery method saved a lot of people in Tokyo... had it been a better delivery method there would be more dead people there.
When you get FEMA to buy the town 23,000 gas masks, 100 plus sirens, air purification systems, window kits, and shelters. You obviously think old Sarin gas is dangerous.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/03/16/Worldandnation/Not_Iraq__but_Annisto.shtml
The WMD we are looking for, are in Syria.
The problem is that generally chemical weapons are overrated.
The statistics you see for them regarding the incredibly small amounts of _____ required to kill one person are based on absolute perfect delivery of that drop; but all too often you'll see people simply divide some quantity of somthing by the minimum dose to kill and proclaim that that quantity of _____ can kill some bajillions of people - that's only if each drop was perfectly delivered under perfect, controlled, conditions.
In realtity chemicals get highly dispersed, degraded by sunlight, you get an overdose right near the attack and not enough at a distance, etc.
Chemical weapons were used in simply massive quantities in World War I and actually there weren't that many troops actually killed by them, relative to plain old high explosive - main effect was fear and the slowdown in operations caused by the masks, etc.
When Saddam gassed the Kurds it was a fairly massive, long-term attack in a pretty controlled setting; he probably could have killed them faster with shelling or just rounding them up and shooting them.
I welcome terrorists fooling around with chemical weapons (and the even more overrated "dirty bombs" as well) as any time and money spent on them isn't spent on high explosive attacks which would likely kill far more people.
If Aum Shinryko had put the time, effort, vast amounts of money, and highly trained people they used in the Sarin subway attacks into a simple high explosive attack like the London subway and bus bombings, they probably would have killed 10x or 100x more people than they did.
The main thing about chemicals, and the reason they're banned in warfare, is people are simply creeped out by them.
For whatever reason people are more freaked out by being paralyzed and dying from a drop of nerve gas than being painfully blown to pieces by high explosives and shrapnel.
Syria has had its own fairly massive chemical weapons production program, and big stockpiles of same, for decades now. Anything from Iraq is a likely not very relevant (or distinguishable) addition.
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