On Sat, 12 Jul 2003 14:53:55 -0500, (p_j) wrote:

Gunner wrote:

I see you are still stupid. Weapons of mass destruction are classified as:
Those weapons which when used as designed cause mass casualties in an
indiscriminate manner.

Great, now you are agreeing with me. Chem and bio weapons are crappy at
causing mass casualties. So by your definition, they are not WMD.

How so? With proper usage, they are VERY effective in causing mass
casualties. Witness WW1 and Sadams usage on the Kurds.

No, the fact is that they don't work very well at all. I guess if you
want to pervert language to mean dozens of people are a mass, you might
get away with it. By the way, the US helped Saddam gas the Iranians. You
really ought to include that. The Pentagon also disputed whether it was
Iraq who did the Kurds, although it was right after a delivery of "dual
use" crop sprayers that were wangled through.


Cites?
Here, try mine:

http://www.phrusa.org/research/chemi...miraqgas2.html

Or this one
http://projects.sipri.se/cbw/researc...heet-1984.html
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

SIPRI FACT SHEET
Chemical Weapons I
May 1984
Authors: Julian Perry Robinson and Jozef Goldblat

NB: This material may be quoted freely, with attribution to SIPRI.
CHEMICAL WARFARE IN THE IRAQ-IRAN WAR

into snipped


Mustard gas was first used as a chemical-warfare agent during World
War I, when it was responsible for about 70 per cent of the
million-plus gas casualties. Its most prominent use after that war was
by Italy in Ethiopia during 1936. During World War II it was produced
by Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the
Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, the USA and the USSR. It was the CW
agent that was stockpiled in by far the largest quantity--on the order
of hundreds of thousands of tons overall--but was used only by Japan
in China. It is probably still the most heavily stockpiled CW agent
today. Its last established use appears to have been by Egypt
intervening in the (North) Yemeni civil war of the mid-1960s.

Effectiveness of mustard gas

Mustard gas can be spread from munitions deliverable by virtually any
type of weapon, including the mortars, artillery and aircraft with
which Iraqi forces are reported to have used it. Among the many
air-deliverable mustard munitions which Britain produced during World
War II, one report judged the most cost-effective to be no more than a
5-gallon oil drum filled with mustard and fitted with a simple burster
charge. The munition from which the UN team retrieved its sample in
Iran appears to have been a light-case 250-lb white-phosphorus bomb,
such as might otherwise be used for smoke-screening or incendiary
purposes. Published eye-witness accounts suggest that Iraqi practice
was for eight such bombs to be carried per ground-attack jet aircraft,
dropped from a height of 200-300 metres. There may well be an
international trade in such munitions. It would be relatively easy,
though hazardous, to exchange the phosphorus payload for mustard gas.

Manufacture

Mustard gas may be made in different ways according to whether
ethylene, vinyl chloride or thiodiglycol is chosen as the starting
material. Published UN findings suggest that the Iraqi mustard had
been made from the last of these precursors. Thiodiglycol is a quite
widely used industrial commodity, finding application as an
antioxidant, as a vulcanizing agent, as an intermediate for other
commodities, and as a solvent for dyes used in the textile industry.
Its conversion to mustard gas is very simple indeed, the only
technological problem being that of preventing its manufacturers from
becoming its first casualties. That, however, is not a small problem.
When Britain first manufactured mustard gas, there were, over a
six-month period during 1918, 1.27 cases of mustard illness per person
employed.

The quantity of thiodiglycol needed to produce enough mustard gas to
fill eight of the bombs sampled by the UN team would be about 350 kg.
A hundred tons could yield sufricient mustard to arm maybe 300
aircraft sorties or to keep a medium-artillery battalion firing
nothing but mustard shell for a fortnight.

Tabun

The second poison gas identified by the UN team was the nerve-gas
tabun. This was found in a sample which the team was assured by
Iranian authorities had been drawn by an Iranian soldier from a dud
bomb. The bomb was said to have had the same appearance as the one
from which the UN team had drawn mustard gas.

Iranian authorities told the UN team that about 400 people had been
affected by chemical weapons during the attack from which the tabun
sample was said to have originated. The attack purportedly happened on
17 March, while the UN team was in Tehran, and was said to have been
delivered by four Iraqi aircraft. Forty of the casualties were in a
field hospital which the UN team was taken to visit the following day.
The signs and symptoms in the six cases which the UN team had time to
examine were quite different from those associated with the
mustard-gas sample. The UN team concluded from them that the patients
had been exposed to an anticholinesterase agent.

What is tabun?

Tabun, or ethyl NN-dimethylphosphoramidocyanidate, otherwise known as
GA, is such an agent. It is a liquid that evaporates only half as fast
as mustard gas, but so powerful a poison is it that even short
exposure to small concentrations of its vapour can result in almost
immediate symptoms, felt first in the eyes (as a persistent
contraction of the pupil) and chest (as a tightness or asthma-like
constriction). If a lethal dosage has been taken up, either from
inhalation of the vapour or by absorption of the liquid through the
skin, a characteristic sequence of toxic manifestations ensues, some
of great violence, including running nose, sweating, involuntary
urination and defaecation, vomiting, twitching, convulsions, paralysis
and unconsciousness. Prior to the observations made by the UN team at
the field hospital, such signs had apparently not been seen in
hospitalized chemical-warfare casualties, although one or two of the
earlier Iranian communiques (as from the northern front in October
1983) had referred briefly to "nervous system" effects. And since
mid-March, Iranian publications have been stating that nerve gas had
been used on at least 10 occasions during 1980-83.

Effectiveness of tabun

Because tabun acts much more rapidly than mustard, it could be thought
capable of stopping massed infantry assaults on the move, at least
when dropped in large air-burst bombs. In static situations, it would
probably not, in warm weather, be significantly more effective than
mustard gas as a weapon of attrition. The chief significance of the
tabun reports is twofold. First, if the reports are true, they may
well be describing the first ever use of nerve gas in comhat
operations, thus providing lessons which military authorities around
the world may be eager to absorb. Second, if resort to tabun has been
motivated by the military consideration just outlined, there may well
be powerful incentives operating upon the Gulf War belligerents to
introduce those even deadlier nerve gases that offer still more
potential for rapid mass-destruction: agents such as the sarin, VX
and, reportedly, soman stockpiled by the USA, France and the USSR.
Against unprotected people an aircraft armed with sarin could be as
destructive as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Manufacture

Tabun, like sarin, was a secret discovery of Germany's at the time of
World War II. Germany manufactured about 12,000 tons of it during
1943-44, and also, in 1944, manufactured sarin on a small pilot plant
scale. Soman was not manufactured by Germany. For filling into
munitions--artillery shell and bombs--the German tabun was left
diluted with up to 20 per cent of the solvent that had been used
during its synthesis, namely monochlorobenzene. The sample analysed by
the UN team contained a comparable proportion of monochlorobenzene,
suggesting it had been made oy the original German method.

That method used the simplest of a number of possible routes to tabun.
It started from phosphoryl chloride in a two-stage chemical process,
both stages of which were conducted within the same reactor. Advanced
containment measures were used to protect plant workers from the
tabun, but even they were insufficient to prevent at least ten deaths
and innumerable lesser exposures.

The quantity of ph o sphoryl chloride needed to produce enough tabun
to fill, undiluted, eight of the bombs examined by the UN team would
be about 500 kg. Also needed would be about 120 kg of sodium cyanide,
150 kg of ethyl alcohol and 65 kg of dimethylamine (synthesizable from
ammonia and methyl alcohol). A hundred tons of phosphoryl chloride
could yield sufficient tabun to arm maybe 200 sorties by MiG, Mirage
or Sukhoi aircraft.

ORIGIN OF THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS

The UN report provides only negative evidence of the origin of the
mustard gas sample. The absence in the sample analysed in Sweden and
Switzerland of polysulphides and of more than a trace of sulphur
indicates that it is not of past US-government manufacture, for all US
mustard was made by the Levinstein process from ethylene and mixed
sulphur chlorides. That process is also said to have been the one used
by the USSR. From similar reasoning, British-made mustard, too, can
probably be ruled out, even though substantial stocks were once held
at British depots in the Middle East. For more positive evidence other
sources of information must be used. Over the years since the
mid-1960s quite a lot of information has been published purporting to
describe Iraqi chemical weapons, but much of it is contradictory and
all of it is of a reliability which SIPRI is in no position to judge.
A major caveat must be entered: chemical warfare is such an emotive
subject that it lends itself very readily to campaigns of
disinformation and black propaganda, campaigns which the politics both
of the Gulf War and of the current chemical-weapons negotiations have
unquestionably stimulated to no small degree.

We may look first at the nature of the chemical-weapons technology
which Iraq has been reported to have acquired.

In addition to bulk-filled free-fall aircraft bombs, at least two
other categories of chemical munition have reportedly been employed:
artillery shell and air-to-ground rockets. Iranians sent for hospital
treatment in London who were suffering from what must almost certainly
have been mustard-gas burns have attributed their injuries to all
three categories of munition. There is no evidence that mustard-filled
air-to-ground rockets have ever been stockpiled by Western countries.
The rockets whose use was described by one of the Iranians apparently
had submunition warheads, a relatively sophisticated design.

Other agents reported to have been used

Tear gas: In August 1982, US officials were quoted in the press as
being "confident" that the Iraqis did not possess any "deadly chemical
weapons", only tear gas.

Choking gas: Chlorine,the archetypal war gas, is included in at least
one of the lists of Iraqi chemical-warfare agents published this year
by Iranian authorities.

Arsenicals: Iran informed the UN Secretary-General last year that
"compounds containing arsenic" had been used in Iraqi chemical
weapons. Speaking to reporters, one of the Swedish specialists
treating Iranian gas casualties said he thought it probable that the
latter had been exposed to a mixture of mustard gas and lewisite. Such
mixtures were standard munition-fills in the arsenals of Japan, the
USSR and probably other states too during World War II.

Nitrogen mustard: Official Iranian sources have several times stated
that an agent of this type had been identified by Iranian military
experts in samples from Iraqi chemical munitions. "Knowledgeable" but
unidentified US officials have also been reported as speaking of Iraqi
nitrogen mustard.

Germ-warfare agents: Israeli intelligence sources have been cited for
reports that anthrax had been found in hospitalized Iranians. Iranian
sources have referred to Iraqi use of "microbic" and "bacteriological"
weapons.

Mycotoxins: A Belgian forensic toxicologist has claimed that his
laboratory has found mycotoxins (T2, HT2, nivalenol and verrucarol) in
addition to mustard gas in samples of blood, urine and faeces taken
from Iranian gas victims hospitalized in Vienna, but this claim
currently remains unverified and open to question. There are reports
of similar findings from patients hospitalized in Belgium, France, FR
Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, but these too still remain open to
doubt, especially since, in the Swedish case, the Swedish authorities
concerned have expressly repudiated the report. The UN team inspected
cadavers returned to Tehran from Swedish and Austrian hospitals, but
its report makes no mention of any post-mortem tissue samples having
been taken for analysis. Mycotoxins were sought but not found in the
chemical samples analyzed by the UN team. The search method used had a
detection limit of 0.00005 per cent: i.e., capable of finding
mycotoxins at loadings greater than a third of a gram per 250-lb bomb.

Novel unidentified agent: There has been speculation in the press
about Iraqi use of a toxic agent unknown in the West. This was excited
by reports early in March from the Gzaiel sector, just to the north of
Basra, of groups of Iranian corpses having been seen that were said to
bear no external trace of injury--looking as though they had fallen
asleep in their foxholes.

Indigenous or external sources of supply?

With the exceptions, maybe, of the last two of these different
categories of putative Iraqi agent, sources of supply might as well be
indigenous as external to Iraq, given the technology implied.
Involvement of the last three categories would, in some circles,
implicate the USSR as supplier, for the reason that the USSR is said,
on evidence that has yet to be solidly substantiated but which has
nonetheless attracted some firm believers, to have weaponized all
three of them in recent years. For its part, the USSR has expressly
denied supplying Iraq with toxic weapons. Reports of Soviet supply
attributed to US and other intelligence sources have nonetheless
recurred. The earliest predate reports of Iraqi use of chemical
weapons in the Gulf War.

Official Iranian commentaries, too, have pointed to the USSR as a
supplier of the Iraqi weapons. These sources have also accused Brazil,
France and, most conspicuously, Britain of supplying the weapons. No
basis for any of these Iranian accusations has been disclosed. France,
alongside Czechoslovakia and both Germanies, is reportedly also
rumoured, among "foreign military and diplomatic sources" in Baghdad,
to have supplied Iraq with chemical precursors needed for an
indigenous production effort. Unofficial published sources have cited
Egypt as a possible supplier of actual chemical weapons. In the
mid-1960s, when Iraq was alleged to be using chemical weapons against
insurgent Kurdish forces, Swiss and German sources of supply were
reported in the Western press.

Production capability in Iraq

Increasingly persuasive evidence is now emerging in published sources
that, whether Iraq has or has not been receiving chemical weapons from
abroad, it has been acquiring a development and production capability
for them of its own. An official Iranian commentry dates the beginning
of this effort back to 1976, claiming that information to that effect
had been provided to Iran by West German intelligence officials.
Unidentified US intelligence sources have been quoted as saying that
Iraq began making mustard gas in the early 1970s. Such sources have
been quoted as believing that Iraq is now attempting to produce sarin
nerve gas. Associated with this belief is the assessment, it was
reported in the US press at the end of March, that, while Iraq has
already been using nerve gas in the Gulf war, this has been on an
experimental scale using stocks accumulated during the development
programme; supplies of nerve gas from large-scale production
facilities were expected--the reporting continued--to be available
within a matter of months, even weeks. Further, the press has reported
US government sources as having identified three, possibly five,
chemical-agent production sites in Iraq. The locations that have been
specified in the press are Samawa, Ramadi, Samarra and Akashat. The
last of these has, however, been toured by foreign correspondents,
including a British journalist who has reported finding only
contra-indicative evidence of a nerve gas plant being there.

Technological capacity

Other than the need for elaborate safety measures, there seems to be
nothing about the technology of producing mustard gas or tabun--or
lewisite or nitrogen mustard--that would obviously be beyond the
capacities of the Iraqi chemical industry: an industry which has been
growing rapidly in size and sophistication since the early 1970s.
However, if nerve gases of a type whose production would necessitate
the technically demanding and comparatively specialized processes of
phosphorus-fluorination and/or phosphorus-alkylation--i.e. nerve gases
such as sarin, soman and VX--foreign technology might very well have
to be imported. There is strong public evidence (but by no means
conclusive yet) that Iraq has been endeavouring to acquire these or
related technologies from private corporations in the USA, Britain, FR
Germany and Italy since 1975; and that it has been dissembling these
endeavours under the guise of acquiring production capacity for
organophosphorus pesticides.

The search for materials

Any need to import special chemical-process plant and associated
know-how could be lessened by importing, instead, some of the chemical
intermediates needed to produce chemical-warfare agents, rather than
attempting to manufacture those intermediates from indigenous raw
materials (of which the Iraqi mining, petroleum and related industries
appear to provide the full range needed for mustard and nerve gases,
with the possible expection for some of the latter of fluoride
minerals). Certain intermediates can be identified which could reduce
the requirements for chemical plant to processing equipments of
standard off-the-shelf or easily improvised types. Iraq has not
concealed the fact that it is in the market for chemicals which do
indeed fall within this category. This has been most conspicuous in
Iraq's search in America for supplies of methylphosphonous dichloride
and dimethyl methyl-phosphonate. These two chemicals do, however, have
certain civil applications. But at least in the former case they are
not ones which, in the normal course of events, Iraq might obviously
be expected to exploit.

Export controls

On 30 March, the US government announced the imposition of 'foreign
policy controls' on the export to the Gulf-War belligerents of five
chemicals that could be used in the production of mustard and nerve
gases. US officials told the press that this had been done in response
to an unexpected volume of recent orders from Iraq for those
chemicals. They also said that Japan, FR Germany and other unspecified
European countries had been exporting the chemicals to Iraq. The
British government took action similar to that of Washington on 12
April, adding three more chemicals to the control list (see table).
Since then, other European governments have also announced embargoes
of varying scope, and on 15 May the Foreign Ministers of the European
Community agreed in principle on a common and complementary policy.
There are Western press reports of suspicions in Western diplomatic
circles in the Middle East that the USSR is shipping intermediates to
Iraq through Jordan.

Postscript

The origin of the chemical weapons used in the Gulf War is a matter
which warrants more attention than space in this Fact Sheet
permits--it has an immediate bearing on the negotiations in Geneva for
a Chemical Weapons Convention: a treaty which, among other things,
must be designed so as to place effective constraints on the
proliferation of the weapons.



Table of export-controlled chemicals
Chemical Chemical-warfare utility
Thiodiglycol a,b Convertible into mustard gas simply by contact with
hydrogen chloride.
Chloroethanol b Essential to one of the ways for making thiodiglycol
(see above).
Phosphoryl chloride a,b Essential to tabun production. Can also be
converted, with some difficulty, into methylphosphonyl dichloride (see
below).
Dimethylamine b Like phosphoryl chloride (see above), essential to
tabun production, but much easier to make.
Methylphosphonyl difluoride a,b Convertible into sarin-family nerve
gases simply by contact with any of' many alcohols.
Methylphosphonyl dichloride b Convertible into sarin-family nerve
gases by carefully controlled reaction with an alcohol and a fluoride
such as potassium fluoride (see below). Convertible into methyl
phosphonyl difluoride (see above) by heating with a fluoride such as
potassium fluoride.
Dimethyl methylphosphonate a,b One of many methylphosphonyl compounds
from which methylphosphonyl dichloride (see above) can be made quite
easily.
Potassium fluoride a,b One of many fluorine compounds that could be
used in the production of sarin-family nerve gases. Insignificant in
the absence of a supply of methylphosphonyl or ethylphosphonyl
compounds.


Conspicuously absent from the list
Sodium fluoride A fluorinating agent more common than potassium
fluoride.
Methylphosphonous dichloride Essential precursor in most of the
better routes of VX-family nerve gases. Easily convertible into
methylphosphonyl dichloride (see above.)
O-alkyl methylphosphonothioates Precursors for VX-family nerve gases,
also convertible into satin-family nerve gases.
Other methylphosphonyl compounds See dimethyl methylphosphonate
above.
P-ethyl homologues of all the methylphosphorus compounds above
Precursors for ethylphosphonate-family nerve gases.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Or perhaps this one?

http://www.ku.edu/~kansite/ww_one/medical/gas.htm
Extract from:
The Medical Department of the United States in the World War, Volume
XIV, Medical Aspects of Gas Warfare

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following useful reference document is an extract from The Medical
Department of the United States in the World War, Volume XIV, Medical
Aspects of Gas Warfare. It gives an authoritative account of the
classification of the various poison gases used during the war and
describes how they exerted their effects and were delivered in action.
Dr Geoffrey Miller
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CLASSIFICATION AND METHODS OF USE OF WAR GASES

CLASSIFICATION BY PHYSIOLOGICAL ACTION

The gases used against American troops by the Central Powers may be
classified according to their physiological action, as lacrymators
(eye irritants and "tear gases"), sternutators (nasal irritants,
"sneeze gases," "vomiting gases"), lung irritants (suffocants,
respiratory irritants), and vesicants (skin irritants, escharotics).

Volumous report snipped





By the way, America was founded on liberal principles.

It sure was. And of course, you are fully aware, Mr Extreme Right
Winger..snicker..that the meaning of liberal and conservative have
been reversed since the founding of America, are you not?

Or do you need the data to filter though the little pea sized
leftwing tissue mass that one could, with a bit of charity, call your
brain?

I wonder Sir, could you tell me please, what its like going though
life, as you evidently do, as a neo-fascist? Doesnt that conflict with
your identity as a Socialist?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Gunner

"What do you call someone in possesion of all the facts? Paranoid.-William Burroughs