Are all bio and chemical agents lethal?
It says it's an empty container, then there's speculation that all sorts of stuff could be used - pepper spray, smoke, crowd control agents, biological agents, chemical agents, obscurants, marking agents, dyes and inks, chaffs and flakes.
It's a catch-all statement - that's how patents are written.
Making a chemical warfare boogeyman out of this will be as successful as the attempt about 9 months ago by the European press to say the US's use of White Phosphorus projectiles and grenades amounted to chemical warfare.
Good to see we're getting some sort of "bang for the buck" out of our
government.
They hardly do anything else well.
Since we have such a tough time proscecuting Terrorists and Dictators for their actual deeds, this way we can get them for patent infringement.
That's the title. You posted it.
It's just an update of the old "rifle grenade" concept we had as far back as WWII.
Back then, you put a blank round in the chamber and mounted the "rifle grenade" on the end of the muzzle. The blank round made the rifle grenade go bang, thus launching the "grenade" farther than you could throw it. The problem with the system was that sometimes in the heat of battle guys would use live ammo instead of the blank round, usually resulting in a dead or seriously wounded GI.
This is just a rifle grenade that is designed to use live bullets instead of blanks. It looks like its main use is for delivering less-lethal munitions, which would include, by definition, chemical and biological agents. Remember, not all chemical and biological agents are necessarily for use against humans.