Dissecting the dusty agent used in UK attack
It is a foregone conclusion in Western capitals that the Russians were behind the use of an “exotic” nerve agent that critically injured Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the town of Salisbury, not far from Stonehenge, in England, earlier this month. Tissue and other samples of the agent, collected at different sites, were analyzed by chemical weapons experts at Porton Down, a science park close to Salisbury that houses the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, similar to the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center at Ft. Detrick, Maryland.
What makes a nerve gas, which is an organophosphate, exotic? As the British authorities have so far disclosed, the formulation of the nerve agent was quite unusual compared to well-known nerve agents such as Sarin, Tabun and VX. Furthermore, “exotic” also refers to the qualities of the material itself: in simplest terms, this was a specially militarized version of nerve gas.
Nerve gases have been known since the 1930s, when they were first developed in Nazi Germany. For various reasons – including Winston Churchill’s threat to bomb German cities with anthrax-filled bombs – the Germans did not use their nerve gas, although they had already prepared artillery shells and bombs for battlefield use. The Germans also experimented with nerve gas on concentration camp inmates, and tested the agent at places like the complex at Gross-Rosen, located 40 miles southwest of Wroclaw in present-day western Poland. There, some 40,000 inmates would perish from disease, hunger, injury, shooting and poisoning, many of them women and children. Gross-Rosen was a huge Nazi armaments manufacturing facility.
A militarized nerve agent is designed to be easily deployed and used, to be persistent on the battlefield or targeted area, and to kill efficiently and quickly. The US developed binary weapons to deliver nerve gas, thereby minimizing the risks of handling the material. A binary weapon has a membrane that divides the two major chemicals that combine to form the nerve agent. But Iraq and Syria both used “live” fully-mixed nerve agent that was loaded into warheads or bombs.
But Iraq also appears to have developed a “dusty” version of nerve gas that is a better weapon. It seems now – judging from what has so far been released by the UK authorities – that the Skripals were poisoned by a dusty agent, with suspicion falling on Segrei Skripal’s car, a red BMW. Nerve agent has been found on the door handle of the car and there is a strong suspicion that a dusty agent form of the nerve agent flooded the cockpit of the vehicle from the BMW’s ventilation system. Among other things, the overall operation to poison Sergei Skripal was professional and well-planned.
http://www.atimes.com/dissecting-dusty-agent-used-uk-attack/
Interesting if you don't have to enter the car -- just pour the agent into the ventilation intake duct.
= new reply since forum marked as read
