Can one of our military FReepers please explain:
1) Tear gas, how it works, and
2) Why RDX would be in these Chinese cannisters?
Is tear gas anything like Mustard Gas? Mace? Pepper spray?
Cheers
*DieHard*
Tear gas severely irritates the mucous membranes - thus tearing up of the eyes and severe coughing.
RDX is Research and Development Explosive. This was developed prior to WW II as a general use explosive for explosive projectiles, bombs and so on. Only a small amount would need to be used as a bursting charge. Production errors could cause a canister to have too much explosive and cause undesired casualties.
On the other hand, it is not beyond the realm of belief that the canisters were made to dispense gas and cause casualties - a deliberate design characteristic. But you would not want to deliver such canister to a foreign customer asking for plain vanilla tear gas grenades. It makes for real bad press.
In view of all the quality control problems showing up in Chinese products, I would guess a manufacturing error occurred.
I will guess that we are discussing ‘CS’ not teargas.
CS is a tear agent.
In this case an explosive was used to disperse the CS in power form.
CS gas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CS_gas
[
As 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile is a solid at room temperature, not a gas, a variety of techniques have been used to make this solid usable as an aerosol:
1.Melted and sprayed in the molten form.
2.Dissolved in organic solvent.
3.CS2 dry powder (CS2 is a siliconized, micro-pulverized form of CS).
4.CS from thermal grenades by generation of hot gases.[1]
In the Waco Siege, CS was dissolved in the organic solvent dichloromethane (also known as methylene chloride). When the volatile dichlormethane evaporated, the CS crystallized with the dichloromethane molecules as an aerosol.[1]