Posted on 09/19/2007 12:06:09 PM PDT by mojito
An explosion at a Syrian military complex in July which killed 15 soldiers was a bid to arm a chemical warhead and was not caused by a heatwave as Damascus said, according to Jane's Defence Weekly.
Syria had said temperatures up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) caused an ammunition dump to explode, killing the soldiers and wounding another 50.
But Jane's Defence, quoting Syrian defence sources, said the blast occurred as Syrian weapons experts, with Iranian backing, were attempting to activate a 500-km-range (300-mile-range) "Scud C" missile with a mustard gas warhead.
"The explosion occurred when fuel caught alight in the missile production laboratory," the magazine said, quoting the sources.
"The blast dispersed chemical agents (including VX and Sarin nerve agents and mustard blister agent) across the storage facility and outside. Other Iranian engineers were seriously injured with chemical burns to exposed body parts."
The sources said dozens of Iranian missile engineers were killed along with the 15 Syrians.
The magazine also pointed out that the explosion occurred at about 4:30 a.m., two hours before sunrise, when temperatures have barely begun to rise, let alone reach 50 C.
Syrian officials were not immediately available to comment on the Jane's story.
The article, to be published in the Sept. 29 edition, said the Syrian-Iranian cooperation at the classified military production facility in Aleppo, northern Syria, was the result of a two-year-old weapons agreement between the two nations.
Under the deal, the magazine said, Iran agreed to supply Syria with weapons and ammunition, train Syrian personnel, and help transfer technology for weapons of mass destruction, including chemical-warfare systems.
It said the agreement, signed in November 2005, had led to the establishment of five pilot facilities in Syria aimed at producing chemical weapon precursors.
As a result of the explosion on July 26, Jane's said an Iranian-Syrian programme to arm short-range ballistic missiles with chemical warheads had been aborted.
It's Syria.
L
Since the Syrian experts were killed, we can assume that future warhead arming will be by guys that come to play off the bench.
They are down to second string and the coin toss beginning the game hasn’t happened yet.
Somebody be sure to send this story to Ms. Pelosi - so she can send belated condolences, no doubt.
Does this mean what I think it means...
And thus, Syria had a motive to order Nuclear Take-Out through their favorite Chinese restaurant, Norkies.
Israel must be on red alert.
Syria and Iran are playing high stakes poker, almost all the chips are on the table.
Someone is going home broke pretty soon.
The accident may have put some of the Iranian chem specialists out of business. That could force the Iranians to heavily invest in nuclear WMD. It appears that the Chem warheads are just a little too dangerous to work with. Also interesting that we really have 2 proxies in the mix here. China’s proxy North Korea ships nukes to Iran’s proxy Syria. My guess is the Israelis had a nuke sub parked off the norkie coast just in case the mission failed. The Israelis did go all in, especially considering that if the mission failed the Syrians probably would have launched since they would have expected a followup attack. Use it or lose it. We now have the Mahdi Wannabe making a song and dance trip to New York trying to save the Iranians. This all points to the probability that the Iranian Nukes are not operational yet, which means we still have the chance to stop them. What I have found interesting is no one really knows what the North Koreans shipped. All we have been told is nuke material or nuke equipment. If that is all the Israelis knew, they had to have assumed the worse.
Scud-C’s can’t reach Israel from Aleppo (in Northern Syria where the missile mishap occured). Scud-C’s are just 300 mile range weapons.
The more reasonable answer is that it was 800 mile range No Dong missiles that cooked off, one way or another (Israel has stealth UCAV’s, for instance).
It’s the shipment(s) of No Dong’s into Syria, badged as Iranian Shaheeb-3’s, that has ramped up tensions in the region.
So be it...
Well shoot Luke, there's your problem...
Regards,
GtG
PS Maybe we can count on a little less cooperation between the Persians and the Arabs, yes?
I wanted to give you time and then return. Sorry if I put you off by my hint.
Reuters has done it’s best to make this look as if Iran is the bad guy here. Why? Does the word Iraq ring any bells?
Where are the WMDs from Iraq that everyone thought they had prior to the war?
Did these supplies truly come from Iran? My guess is that some of the devices or chemicals came from Iran, and we’re finally seeing them surface after five years.
Iran may be helping, but I’m not convinced at all that it supplied the goods.
Folks I’d like you to consider whether Reuters’ reporting is accurate here. We may be seeing some of Saddam’s WMDs surface here. Reuters has a vested interest in misdirecting people. Heaven forbid it be found out that Syria did in fact get Iraq’s WMDs. Heaven forbid it be revealed that the original (blown all out of shape and rediculed endlessly) reason for entering Iraq was valid.
Dog wrote:
But Jane’s Defence, quoting Syrian defence sources, said the blast occurred as Syrian weapons
experts, with Iranian backing, were attempting to activate a 500-km-range (300-mile-range)
“Scud C” missile with a mustard gas warhead.
Does this mean what I think it means...
*****************
No.
The missile described was out of range of any target, it wasn’t being fuelled for offensive launch.
Was it being fuelled at all? The fuels have a shelf life, they don’t sit in the missiles for days or weeks until launch.
If it was being fuelled at all, it would have been for a test launch. That doesn’t square with the presence of multiple chemical and nerve agents.
You find multiple chemical and nerve agents in a research facility, or in an agent stockpile bunker, if they’re binaries, otherwise standard practice requires a just in time production and delivery system, or in a stockpile of completed waheads, or in a Scud storage bunker, with the filled warheads already mounted to the missile.
There’s no place for rocket fuel in any of those places.
There’s no place for rocket fuel more than 300 miles away from a valid military target, except in a test launch situation, and those usually don’t launch from cities, even with dummy warheads.
If we rule out rocket fuel, then things make a lot more sense. The fuel in that case would be dispersion charges for the chemical agent.
Normal ordnance handling procedure installs the least stable components last. If the Syrians decided the payload chemicals were the most dangerous, they could have been assembling finished warheads, but they’d have to store completed warheads close by to get a mix of payload gases.
If they decided the dispersal charges were the most dangerous, they’d be installed last, again, finishing completed warheads.
No matter how you slice this, somebody screwed up basic procedure.
In a lab, assembling the first ever chemical warhead, with multiple agents present, or in a production facility, with multiple complete warheads present, or in a Scud storage facility.
Something is wrong, there is critical information missing or wrong, but nowhere in the chain of logicdo I see evidence to believe that an offensive launch was imminent.
I would, however, assume that Syria has completed Scud missiles with chemical or nerve gas warheads. Since all of the scenarios outlined above don’t fit the story data given, all must be “wrong”, and none then look likely. But more of them involve completed warheads than don’t so planning for the worst assumes the capability.
Keep in mind, no “outrage” from anyone outside Syria, over their screwup and deaths due to negligent WMD handling.
That leads me to believe we know a lot more than what Janes published.
This “datapoint” could even be part of other occurrence threads.
North Korea has come right out and said they have been supplying Syria with scud missiles.
Yeah, but it seems like they are supplying Nuc stuff!
Doesn’t that just tear your heart out?
NAAAAAAAAAaaaa!
I appreciate the comments, but wonder why you would say that Russia moved to Syria things you say didn’t exist, and that Syria didn’t need.
The Israelis seem to have reached that conclusion already.
I am not so sure we know yet what actually caused the explosion or if there were any IDF lasers around at the time.
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