David F Mayer said:

>It did not contain "traces of Sarin". It released traces of Sarin
>when perforated by an explosive charge. That is NOT the
>intended mode of use, which is to be fired out of a cannon.
>Had that been done, or had the terrorists simply drained the
>chemicals from the shell and mixed them, the result would
>have been the release of kilograms of Sarin, enough to kill
>thousands in a crowded space.

Most of what David said was correct. The artillery shell was a binary chemical weapon. The two less toxic chemical ingredients necessary to make Sarin nerve gas were separated by a partition in the artillery shell. The accelleration experienced by the shell when it was launched from a cannon would have broken the partition, allowing the components to mix due to the shell's spinning. The Iraqis who used the shell as an IED, either did not realize that it was a Sarin shell or did not understand how it operated. By simply "blowing it up" with an external explosive charge, all they did was spray about the unmixed, relatively harmless Sarin components.

Because the Sarin was not mixed, we know that the shell was not simply an old dud that the Iraqis found laying around somewhere from an earlier war. For some weird reason, it was standard practice for the Iraqi military not to put special markings on chemical weapons. For an even more goofy reason, it was also standard practice to store chemical weapons with conventional weapons. I presume it was up to the people who actually stored the weapons to know which were conventional explosives and which were Sarin.

There was almost a gallon of Sarin in the artillery shell. I'm sceptical that a gallon of Sarin could kill thousands of people in a real military situation. Yeah, sure, you could kill a thousand people with it if you had the victims lined up and spritzed each person in the face with a perfume bottle. However I'm sceptical that having the shell explode over a city would have resulted in a thousand deaths.

I wish the U.S. would tell us more about the state of this Sarin shell. Was it extremely rusty? Did it have any kind of markings on it, e.g. a manufacture date? Was it of Iraqi manufacture or was it an ex-Soviet shell? The U.S. authorities are being very quiet concerning these sorts of details. I wonder why?

Gary