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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (66507)	1/17/2003 8:58:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Nadine Carroll; Re having troops load chemical warheads with mustard gas (LOL). The trend in weapons is to make them easier to use, not more difficult. If the US could figure out how to make stable munitions 50 years ago, the Iraqis can do it now. From an engineering perspective, a shell is a great place to store mustard gas. It has the advantages over a barrel that (1) relatively small amounts are kept in one place, and (2) relatively thick steel surrounds it. Here's a link showing that the "payload" in these shells is not loaded at the front, but is instead installed in a nice, safe factory far from the front lines: ... 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. ... projects.sipri.se Also see: Mustard Blister Agent In 1981, Iraq started producing the blister agent mustard (HD). Iraq's earlier declarations of 3,080 tons produced have been reduced in the 1995 disclosure to 2,850 tons. The quality of the mustard agent was good (not less than 80 per cent pure) and was such that the agent could be stored for long periods, either in bulk or in weaponized form. Even years after its production, the mustard agent analysed by the Commission was found to be in good and usable condition. fas.org By the way, the US took some accidental casualties to mustard gas in WW2, but it was our own (secret) gas that caused the casualties. The reason this is of interest is due to the amount of mustard gas involved and the number of casualties: One of the ships, it seems, had held 100 tons of mustard gas. Later, the Army claimed it'd been there as a deterrent -- a deterrent which had inexplicably been made top secret. We were lucky that most of the mustard gas burned off in the fires. The small part of it that'd been absorbed into floating oil was what did all the damage. And so this Bay of Bari incident produced the only mustard gas casualties in WW-II -- Americans killed by American gas. When military surgeons autopsied 53 of the dead, they began to see just how mustard gas acts on the body. The chemical agent has the imposing name, methyl-bis(beta-chloroethyl)amine hydrochloride. It was called nitrogen mustard for short. The autopsies showed that one of its actions was to attack white cells and lymph tissue. uh.edu To put the Iraqi possession of 12 empty mustard gas shells in perspective, we should note that WW1 use of gas was as follows: Germany: 68,000 tons France: 36,000 tons Britain: 25,000 tons ------- Total: 129,000 tons These agents caused a total of 90,000 deaths and 1,300,000 casualties. ... The casualties from Iraq's chemical weapons were estimated to be around 10,000. ... In 1981, Iraq started producing the blister agent mustard (HD) and is believed to have 2,850 tons stockpiled. Production of the nerve gases tabun (GA) and sarin (GB) started in 1984 and is believed to have yielded 210 tons of poor-quality tabun and 790 tons of sarin. From June 1992 to June 1994, 30 tons of tabun, 70 tons of sarin and 600 tons of mustard agent were destroyed by the United Nations. ispec.specwarnet.net The WW1 production of gases produced casualties at the rate of around 1,300,000/129,000 tons = 10 casualties/ton. With 10,000 Iranian casualties, this implies total Iraqi production of around 1,000 tons. Thus the above figures are about what one would expect -- Iraq's use of chemical weapons was relatively light, compared to France, Britain and Germany's. The fact that Iraq obtained fewer casualties/ton than was obtained in WW1 is undoubtedly due to modern warfare being more widely spaced than that of WW1. That is, the soldiers are more widely separated nowadays, so one shell kills fewer of them. -- Carl P.S. to frankw1900; Note that the decrease in the number of casualties/ton for mustard gas between WW1 and the Iran/Iraq war is for exactly the same reason that the casualties/weapon for machine guns dropped between Omdurman and WW2. That is, the increased lethality of weapons forced armies to spread out, thereby decreasing the lethality again. God forbid we ever have a war where nukes are used with the profligacy that we now use machine guns.