NEWS: Nerve Gas Shell DOES NOT Explode in Iraq

One shell, or a dozen, or a crate full, does not this administration's WMD case make. I could easily imagine the Iraqis misplacing some during the process of destroying what they had. Sadaam had lots of this stuff, some of it surely went missing. The core of the administration's thesis: 'remaking the middle east in our image'... remains almost laughably naive. Are they stupid, evil, or both?

It was a binary shell, has to be fired out of an artillery peice to get the 2 chemical agents to combine correctly and form sarin. Binary weapons extend the shelf life much further.

First of all, I never said the US's propensity for meddling too much in everyone's business was a justification for terrorism, I said it was the reason for it. Two entirely separate things. If we are talking in practical terms, I could care less about pretexts, justifications, and posturing - the point is to get results.

As for the rest of your arguments, they are almost pure nonsense. The fact is that the EU behaves more or less in the manner that I'm suggesting, and collectively have an economy, population, and culture that is in the same size ballpark as ours. They are neither walling themselves off in complete isolation, or running around like the global police trying to bend eveyone to their whims. It does not seem to be leading to economic collapse, uncontrollable invasions and terrorism, or the sky falling down. The fact that the world is increasingly interconnected does not imply that we have to try and force every situation to go the way our rich elite want it to by military force and bullying tactics... it does for said elite, of course, because the only way they can maintain their tenuous grasp on such a dispropotionate share of the wealth and power is to resist change. For the vast majority of our population, though changing into a more modest, civil world citizen would not resemble the apocalypse in your 'chicken little' vision.

...apparently not long enough.

Huh, it was perfectly good when this thing blew up, but it wasn't fired out of an artillery peice, so the binary agents didn't mix.

Doesn't mean the agent was expired.

Well, if he had a big-ass cannon to shoot the shells out of, probably quite a few.

Otherwise, a Ryder truck full of sarin shells probably wouldn't kill anybody, unlike the hundreds of people who are still dead/injured in OKC.

I didn't say sarin shells, but thanks for assuming.

Well, then be specific. The whole thread is about a "WMD" shell. If you mean something different, spell it out.

Do you have a rebuttal? So far the answer seems to be no.

The whole argument back then was that a certain amount of chemical weapons would do much more damage than the same amount of conventional weapons. The discussion at that point was independent of delivery system, was merely talking about the agent itself and what exactly should be considered a WMD,

Actually, you said this, which is what my initial post disagreed with:

"The conventional weapon would be much less viable for terrorists."

As has been amply demonstrated by the Aum cult gas attacks in the Tokyo subway sytem, the conventional weapon is much easier to obtain, far more reliable, and kills more people than chemical or biological weapons.

Chemical or biological weapons are far less of a threat than 9 guys with box cutters and airline tickets or a Ryder truck loaded with drums of common fertilizer and heating oil.

I would be far more woried about the 18-wheeler 80,000 lb gasoline tanker truck stolen from a drop yard in NJ a month ago.

Imagine 60,000lbs of gasoline going "boom" in downtown Manhattan.

Not pretty.

Well gaoline doesn't go boom, but anyway. Imagine 60,000 lbs of sarin being dispersed into manhattan?

I was talking about the fact that chemical weapons allo a much larger amount of destruction to be put in a much smaller package.

As for the Sarin attack in Japan, that wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, everyone in that train is lucky that the terrorists didn't know what they were doing and the Sarin liquid didn't get a chance to evaporate. If the terrorists knew what they were doing they could have killed everyone in that subway with those little bags of nerve agent.

What my comment about viability was reffering to is this. If a terrorist decided to kill as many people as timothy mcveigh did, he would need a miniscule amount of chemical weapons, which would be vastly easier to transport and hide than a giant truck bomb. That is what I was referring to about viability, not whether or not the terrorists are smart enough to use one or whether they would even choose to use one.

They would certainly do unimaginable damage if someone with knowhow decided to attack with chemical weapons. Regardless of whether the past attempts were incompetent or not.

Look, buddy, your science pretty obviously is your personal inference from what you're reading in the press. You should probably stop that. The sarin attack in Tokyo was a raging success. it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It "failed" in the way you assert because chemical weapons suck unless you explode them. They must be aerosolized and the only way to do that is with a shitload of high explosives. There really is no way to deploy it in the manner you describe unless you want to walk through the train with a plant mister and a chem suit.

As for 60,000 pounds of Sarin, sure it would be bad. Fortunately however you need an industrial plant and tens of millions of dollars to make it. The japanese jokers are part of a billion dollar doomsday cult and they couldn't make enough to fill a locker much less a top kick cube truck. Chemical weapons are dangerous, complicated to make, even more complicated to deploy, hard to transport and expensive to produce. On your viability index, they don't move the needle.

Listen, for the amount of technical prowess that they have, the aum cult are idiots and really shouldn't be used as an example unless you're talking about what a bunch of near retards can accomplish with a suitable bank account.
They attempted an anthrax attack by spreading the spores in open air from a rooftop in broad daylight (at least, this is what's reported). Anthrax spores being highly photosensitive, they didn't do jack shit.
They attempted a sarin attack by *poking holes in the containers and allowing the agent to leak onto the floor of trains and evaporate*.
The fact that they were able to fully comprehend and implement the technology neccesary to tie their shoes is astounding.

Well, in that they're more difficult to manipulate yes... but really they're more of a force multiplier in this sense. If you can already manage to accmplish the initial explosion/event, adding a chem frosting makes the cake much tastier. Tim McVeigh was able to achieve his small body count using just ammonium nitrate and deisel fuel, but imagine if he had sarin or, well, ANY OTHER chemical weapon piled on top of those drums? Gee, instead of killing a small number of people in one building he could have killed most of the people within whatever the radius of affect was.
But the really scary stuff is the biological weapons, because they can be self-propogating. A single guy with a properly designed bio-weapon (possbly something based on smallpox and botulin, which has already been done) could, alone, put a large dent in the world population.

Not pretty, but not a *huge* deal either. Unless you can vaporize it prior to ignition, 60,000 lbs of gasoline isn't going to be much more of an explosion than a significantly smaller amount of gasoline. Yeah, if done properly you could put a hurting on the island of manhatten by blowing that shit up. On the other hand, if done properly a much smaller attack using chem/bio weapons could shut the entire island down.

[Edited on May 21, 2004 by Helter]

Either that, or you could create a small device to spread the shit for you. A small CO2 canister, a simple timer, some plumbing fittings...

Does finding mass destructive weapons by chance NOW really change the obvious fact that the US/British alliance really didn't know what they were talking about when they used it as a reason to invade Iraq?

Thats way harder than you think, and probably wouldn't be terribly effective. You need to create a cloud, and a big one. Sarin is a liquid at room temperature, its volatile but heavier than air, it degrades quickly especially in cold and damp