I would love to hear why I am not correct (I really would), however please see point A. I have no doubt they paid someone for 30 year old chemical weapons. The usefulness or potency of said chemical weapons I would question given that it an unnamed source from an agency known for misrepresenting the truth without actual proof.
Iâm glad you noticed I did not say you were -wrong-. You were not!
The shelf-life of the materials is how long you can expect a material to last. Itâs more like an expiration date on milk. If it started at a much higher purity than needed, and was kept in near-ideal circumstance, than after 30 years it could very well be at a significant and still quite weapons grade material.
Itâs to do with thermodynamics, closed systems, and change happening because there is an energetic reason for material A to degrade into by products B⌠and also what the increasing concentration of by product B does to the rate of decay of material A. At some point stasis can be reached. Not unlike WWII bombs which still occasionally go off in Europe, or like 40 year old landmines.
Stasis, until you cut it open and dump it in a bathtub that is. Thanks for asking! And yes, we totally paid for 30 year old weapons. Probably ones we helped make, since how else are we to stay on top of what the bad guys are doing unless itâs us showing them.
I guess this could get into the question of whether or not the expansion of military resources actually leads to more military actions, because we have to justify the expense to the American public - which comes first, the nuclear chicken or the war time egg?
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When your only tool is a $600+ billion/year hammer everything starts to look like a nail.
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So will Sarin ever totally go bad when sitting in a shell, or will there always be some level of potency?
It will not go bad if you use Sarin Wrapâ˘
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Forever is a long time. But sealed, I imagine the stuff is deadly enough for hundreds of years. I guess I will do some actual research on Sarin (being a politically active toxicologist in this NSA universe, i tend to avoid such search strings, but now I suppose I have an excuse).
::typing noises:: Google-clanking ::back of envelope mathing::
Turns out Sarin is totally not very stable, can be stabilized, and would not last 30 years more than likely, si I too was not entirely correct. HOWEVER
There is this, too (wikipedia)
One example of a binary chemical weapon is the United States Army M687. In the M687, methylphosphonyl difluoride (military name: DF, a Schedule 1 chemical) and a mixture of 2 agents held in chambers within the weapon, separated by a partition. When the weapon is fired, acceleration causes the partition to break, and the precursors are mixed by the rotation of the weapon in flight, producing sarin nerve gas.
I wonder where we did the research on stuff like this⌠in the 80s?
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So we go back to, whatever was actually in shells, while not fun, was largely not Sarin. And the fact any Sarin was left probably surprised even to the CIA considering they were dumping it into cast iron bathtub.
if you want to argue that it was not sarin, you may do so.
I believe it was probably a binary weapon, like the one described, where two stable precursors plus A SLIGHT BUMP makes Sarin instantly. I guess that isnât Sarin, technically. But it IS Sarin INSTANTLY.
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According to the article:
An internal record from 2006 referred to âagent purity of up to 25 percent for recovered unitary sarin weapons.â
Cheryl Rofer, a retired chemist for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said such purity levels were plausible, because Iraqâs sarin batches varied in quality and the contents of warheads may have achieved an equilibrium as the contents degraded.
Thatâs sounds more like your original analysis. In any case, I would say these were not the chemical weapons we were led to believe they had.
And if you wonder whether this should be a liberal or conservative talking point, too late⌠Rush Limbaugh is already using it a vindication for Bush and the Iraq war.
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They surely are not
He addresses the people on the ship and his fellow Americans before saying âMajor combat operations in Iraq have ended and the battle of Iraq the United States and its allies have prevailed and now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.â which certainly sounds like itâs referring to the Iraq war to me.
You are right that they tried their best to make it seem as if it wasnât about the war, but even the Wikipedia page on the matter shows how their story kept changing. The White House made and hung the sign. Since they lied from the start about hanging it themselves why would I believe their line that its creation was upon request from the navy? Have you ever seen such a huge banner draped across a navy ship for such a reason before? Believe whatever you want, but Iâll retain a healthy skepticism when it comes to trusting the words of systematic liars and war criminals.
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And when itâs secret to begin with, I imagine that just makes it more likely people are going to forget about it. That sandwich gets stuck someplace strange and out-of-sight, no oneâs going to run into on accident, and it was an ill-conceived sandwich made with bread that you shouldnât have been using in the first place, so youâd really just as soon forget you ever put it togetherâŚ
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Whoa, whoa. As others have pointed out, thatâs far from the truth. In fact, everything I was reading before the war was skeptical or outright debunked US claims. There was all this evidence that indicates Iraq no longer had a WMD program, but the USâs response was, âTrust us, we have a super secret intelligence source.â That source turned out to be âCurveball,â the zero-credibility informant described as âcrazyâ and âa congenital liarâ by his handlers. Who turned out to be, surprise, surprise, lying.
It did indeed, and that was the problem. It created a new battlefield that didnât exist before the US invasion. A battlefield that also was a great recruiting and training opportunity for them and is directly responsible for the rise of IS and the global explosion of popularity of Al Qaeda and its offshoots. This was also predictable - and predicted, ahead of the invasion.
What do you mean âwasâ? Theyâre still there and they havenât exactly changed. They went from controlling 90% of the country to just controlling the majority of the country. Theyâve actually reinforced their position in many places because they provide a functional government - a terrible one, granted, but their court system in particular is preferred by many over the chaos of no courts or the courts of the horribly corrupt US-backed government. The Afghan invasion was another ill-conceived and terribly executed idea.
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Indeed, we do.
The US is indeed that basically well-meaning but crazy neighbor who is armed to the teeth because âthe zombies might come any dayâ.
If that neighbor turns out to be right, of course we will figure out that he was Right All Along and come to his house.
Only, I still donât believe in zombies, and I would kindly ask my neighbor not to patrol the streets with his gun while the kids are playing outside. Thank you.
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