Tests on an artillery shell that blew up in Iraq on Saturday confirm that it did contain an estimated three or four liters of the deadly nerve agent sarin, Defense Department officials told Fox News Tuesday.
The artillery shell was being used as an improvised roadside bomb, the U.S. military said Monday. The 155-mm shell exploded before it could be rendered inoperable, and two U.S. soldiers were treated for minor exposure to the nerve agent.
Three liters is about three-quarters of a gallon; four liters is a little more than a gallon.
"A little drop on your skin will kill you [in the binary form," said Ret. Air Force Col. Randall Larsen, founder of Homeland Security Associates. "So for those in immediate proximity, three liters is a lot," but he added that from a military standpoint, a barrage of shells with that much sarin in them would more likely be used as a weapon than one single shell.
The soldiers displayed "classic" symptoms of sarin exposure, most notably dilated pupils and nausea, officials said. The symptoms ran their course fairly quickly, however, and as of Tuesday the two had returned to duty.
The munition found was a binary chemical shell, meaning it featured two chambers, each containing separate chemical compounds. Upon impact with the ground after the shell is fired, the barrier between the chambers is broken, the chemicals mix and sarin is created and dispersed.
Intelligence officials stressed that the compounds did not mix effectively on Saturday. Due to the detonation, burn-off and resulting spillage, it was not clear exactly how much harmful material was inside the shell.
A 155-mm shell can hold two to five liters of sarin; three to four liters is likely the right number, intelligence officials said.
Another shell filled with mustard gas, possibly also part of an improvised explosive device (IED) was discovered on May 2, Defense Dept. officials said.
The second shell was found by passing soldiers in a median on a thoroughfare west of Baghdad. It probably was simply left there by someone, officials said, and it was unclear whether it was meant to be used as a bomb.
More...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120268,00.html
Tests Confirm Sarin in Iraqi Artillery Shell
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southerngale
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Tests Confirm Sarin in Iraqi Artillery Shell
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wx247
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Thanks for the update on that Kelly. They haven't talked about it when I was watching.
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The posts in this forum are NOT official forecast and should not be used as such. They are just the opinion of the poster and may or may not be backed by sound meteorological data. They are NOT endorsed by any professional institution or storm2k.org. For official information, please refer to the NHC and NWS products.
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Here's another story - from CBS of all places!!!
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/ ... 0449.shtml
Iraq Sarin Find Worries U.S.
17-May-04
Iraq Bomb Attack
(Photo: CBS/AP)
The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt
• Interactive:
Sarin Gas - Find out more about the dangers of this nerve agent and what Iraq was supposed to have had.
Other biological and chemical weapons
(AP) U.S. soldiers found a roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent in Baghdad, the military said Monday. The device, which partially detonated, was apparently a leftover from Saddam Hussein's arsenals. It was unclear whether more such weapons were in the hands of insurgents.
Soldiers who removed the bomb experienced symptoms consistent with low-level nerve agent exposure, U.S. officials said. No one was wounded in the partial blast Saturday, and the dispersal of sarin from the bomb was very limited, the military said.
If confirmed in subsequent testing, the discovery would be the first evidence of a banned weapon in Iraq since the war began. The Bush administration based its case for the war on the existence of such weapons.
Earlier this month, some trace residue of mustard agent, an older type of chemical weapon, was detected in an artillery shell found in a Baghdad street, a U.S. official said Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity. The shell was believed to be from one of Saddam's old stockpiles and was not regarded as evidence of recent weapons of mass destruction production in Iraq.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned that the sarin results were from a field test, which can be imperfect and more analysis needed to be done.
We have to be careful, he told an audience in Washington Monday afternoon. Rumsfeld said it many take some time to determine precisely what the chemical was, what its presence means in terms of risks to U.S. forces and other implications.
U.S. troops have announced the discovery of other chemical weapons before, only to see them disproved by later tests. Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said "the jury is still out" on whether chemical or other weapons of mass destruction remained in Iraq.
The former top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, said it was possible the shell was an old relic overlooked when Saddam said he had destroyed such weapons in the mid-1990s.
Kay, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, said he doubted the shell or the nerve agent came from a hidden stockpile, although he didn't rule out that possibility.
Former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, speaking to the AP in Sweden, agreed the shell was likely a stray weapon scavenged from a dump and did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles.
Numerous arsenals and weapons depots were looted in the turmoil following the collapse of the regime last April. Some depots are still only lightly guarded. Many of the materials used for roadside bombs were believed to have been looted.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said he believed that insurgents who planted the explosive did not know it contained the nerve agent. The 155-mm shell did not have markings to indicate it contained a chemical agent, a U.S. official said.
He said a U.S. military convoy discovered the round, which had been rigged as an explosive device. A detonation took place before soldiers could make the bomb inoperable, producing "a very small dispersal of agent."
U.S. officials believe, based on evidence, that the shell was an experimental munition produced before the 1991 Gulf War, called a binary type — a bomb carrying two separate chemicals that when combined in an explosion, produce sarin.
Dispersal would be far more effective if a shell containing nerve agent were fired from an artillery piece, Kimmitt said.
Even so, it appears that two components in the shell that exploded Saturday did not properly mix upon detonation, the U.S. official said.
Blix, whose inspection team didn't make any significant weapons finds during months of searching Iraq before the war, said he and his team found 16 warheads that were tagged as used for containing sarin but were empty.
Saddam's government had disclosed binary sarin testing and production after the 1995 defection of Iraqi weapons chief Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Saddam's son-in-law. But Saddam's government never declared that any sarin or sarin-filled shells still remained.
Iraq used the chemical during its war with Iran in the 1980s and is believed to have used it against Kurdish Iraqi civilians. According to U.N. weapons inspectors, sarin-type agents constituted a significant part of Iraq's chemical weapons arsenal — about 20 percent of all chemical weapons agents that Saddam's government declared it had produced.
Nerve gases inhibit key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. In large enough doses, sarin causes convulsions, paralysis, loss of consciousness and potentially fatal respiratory failure. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly.
In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult unleashed sarin gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening thousands. In February of this year, Japanese courts convicted the cult's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentenced him to be executed.
Developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi scientists, a single drop of sarin can cause quick, agonizing choking death. There are no known instances of the Nazis actually using the gas, but that didn't stop other nations from stocking it.
While the finding an artillery shell designed to disperse the nerve gas sarin is notable, it would take an arsenal of such weapons to pose a meaningful military threat, arms policy experts said.
You would fire hundreds of these shells on the battlefield to have any significant effect, said Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior researcher at the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington.
In that way "you try to saturate an area" containing enemy troops, said Michael Powers, a senior fellow at the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Washington.
U.S. military officials in Baghdad said the Iraq Survey Group, a U.S.-led organization whose task was to search for weapons of mass destruction after the ouster of Saddam, confirmed the presence of sarin.
The team has run into a number of dead ends. In January, for example, field tests on discovered mortar shells near Qurnah in southern Iraq indicated a blister agent was in the shells. But follow-up tests indicated that the munitions did not contain the agents, though U.S. officials said Saddam had such agents in the early to mid-1990s.
Officials say there are chemicals associated with certain munitions, such as phosphorous, that can produce false positives. Some field tests are designed to favor a positive reading, erring on the side of caution to protect soldiers.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/ ... 0449.shtml
Iraq Sarin Find Worries U.S.
17-May-04
Iraq Bomb Attack
(Photo: CBS/AP)
The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt
• Interactive:
Sarin Gas - Find out more about the dangers of this nerve agent and what Iraq was supposed to have had.
Other biological and chemical weapons
(AP) U.S. soldiers found a roadside bomb containing sarin nerve agent in Baghdad, the military said Monday. The device, which partially detonated, was apparently a leftover from Saddam Hussein's arsenals. It was unclear whether more such weapons were in the hands of insurgents.
Soldiers who removed the bomb experienced symptoms consistent with low-level nerve agent exposure, U.S. officials said. No one was wounded in the partial blast Saturday, and the dispersal of sarin from the bomb was very limited, the military said.
If confirmed in subsequent testing, the discovery would be the first evidence of a banned weapon in Iraq since the war began. The Bush administration based its case for the war on the existence of such weapons.
Earlier this month, some trace residue of mustard agent, an older type of chemical weapon, was detected in an artillery shell found in a Baghdad street, a U.S. official said Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity. The shell was believed to be from one of Saddam's old stockpiles and was not regarded as evidence of recent weapons of mass destruction production in Iraq.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned that the sarin results were from a field test, which can be imperfect and more analysis needed to be done.
We have to be careful, he told an audience in Washington Monday afternoon. Rumsfeld said it many take some time to determine precisely what the chemical was, what its presence means in terms of risks to U.S. forces and other implications.
U.S. troops have announced the discovery of other chemical weapons before, only to see them disproved by later tests. Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said "the jury is still out" on whether chemical or other weapons of mass destruction remained in Iraq.
The former top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay, said it was possible the shell was an old relic overlooked when Saddam said he had destroyed such weapons in the mid-1990s.
Kay, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, said he doubted the shell or the nerve agent came from a hidden stockpile, although he didn't rule out that possibility.
Former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, speaking to the AP in Sweden, agreed the shell was likely a stray weapon scavenged from a dump and did not signify that Iraq had large stockpiles.
Numerous arsenals and weapons depots were looted in the turmoil following the collapse of the regime last April. Some depots are still only lightly guarded. Many of the materials used for roadside bombs were believed to have been looted.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said he believed that insurgents who planted the explosive did not know it contained the nerve agent. The 155-mm shell did not have markings to indicate it contained a chemical agent, a U.S. official said.
He said a U.S. military convoy discovered the round, which had been rigged as an explosive device. A detonation took place before soldiers could make the bomb inoperable, producing "a very small dispersal of agent."
U.S. officials believe, based on evidence, that the shell was an experimental munition produced before the 1991 Gulf War, called a binary type — a bomb carrying two separate chemicals that when combined in an explosion, produce sarin.
Dispersal would be far more effective if a shell containing nerve agent were fired from an artillery piece, Kimmitt said.
Even so, it appears that two components in the shell that exploded Saturday did not properly mix upon detonation, the U.S. official said.
Blix, whose inspection team didn't make any significant weapons finds during months of searching Iraq before the war, said he and his team found 16 warheads that were tagged as used for containing sarin but were empty.
Saddam's government had disclosed binary sarin testing and production after the 1995 defection of Iraqi weapons chief Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Saddam's son-in-law. But Saddam's government never declared that any sarin or sarin-filled shells still remained.
Iraq used the chemical during its war with Iran in the 1980s and is believed to have used it against Kurdish Iraqi civilians. According to U.N. weapons inspectors, sarin-type agents constituted a significant part of Iraq's chemical weapons arsenal — about 20 percent of all chemical weapons agents that Saddam's government declared it had produced.
Nerve gases inhibit key enzymes in the nervous system, blocking their transmission. In large enough doses, sarin causes convulsions, paralysis, loss of consciousness and potentially fatal respiratory failure. Small exposures can be treated with antidotes, if administered quickly.
In 1995, Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult unleashed sarin gas in Tokyo's subways, killing 12 people and sickening thousands. In February of this year, Japanese courts convicted the cult's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and sentenced him to be executed.
Developed in the mid-1930s by Nazi scientists, a single drop of sarin can cause quick, agonizing choking death. There are no known instances of the Nazis actually using the gas, but that didn't stop other nations from stocking it.
While the finding an artillery shell designed to disperse the nerve gas sarin is notable, it would take an arsenal of such weapons to pose a meaningful military threat, arms policy experts said.
You would fire hundreds of these shells on the battlefield to have any significant effect, said Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior researcher at the Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington.
In that way "you try to saturate an area" containing enemy troops, said Michael Powers, a senior fellow at the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Washington.
U.S. military officials in Baghdad said the Iraq Survey Group, a U.S.-led organization whose task was to search for weapons of mass destruction after the ouster of Saddam, confirmed the presence of sarin.
The team has run into a number of dead ends. In January, for example, field tests on discovered mortar shells near Qurnah in southern Iraq indicated a blister agent was in the shells. But follow-up tests indicated that the munitions did not contain the agents, though U.S. officials said Saddam had such agents in the early to mid-1990s.
Officials say there are chemicals associated with certain munitions, such as phosphorous, that can produce false positives. Some field tests are designed to favor a positive reading, erring on the side of caution to protect soldiers.
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Stephanie
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This one was written by the AP, but listed on the ABC news website;
Sarin-Filled Munitions in Iraq Worry U.S.
U.S. Concerned That More Unmarked Munitions in Iraq May Contain Nerve Agent
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON May 18, 2004 — The discovery of an artillery shell apparently filled with a deadly nerve agent has raised fears among U.S. officials that insurgents may have more and will learn how to use them to greater effect.
But officials stopped short of claiming the munition was definite evidence of a large weapons stockpile in prewar Iraq or evidence of recent production by Saddam's regime the Bush administration's chief stated reason for invasion.
Some U.S. officials and weapons experts suggested the artillery shell may be an experimental design that predates the 1991 Gulf War.
A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the origin and age of the artillery shell are under investigation, but said shells of this type have a long shelf life, so it could have been constructed some time ago.
Iraq first field-tested such a shell containing sarin in 1988, the defense official said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned that the results were from a field test, which can be imperfect, and more analysis is needed. "We have to be careful," he told an audience in Washington on Monday.
It may take some time to determine precisely what the chemical was, what risks it may pose to U.S. forces and other implications, Rumsfeld said.
Also on Monday, two U.S. officials acknowledged finding an old artillery shell that apparently had been filled with mustard agent, a chemical weapon that was also part of Saddam's arsenal. They said initial tests suggested at least some residue of mustard remained in the shell, found in Baghdad earlier this month.
David Kay, the former top U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq, said it's possible the sarin shell was an old one, overlooked when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein said he had destroyed such weapons in the mid-1990s.
Kay, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, said he doubted the shell or the nerve agent came from a surviving hidden stockpile, but didn't rule out that possibility.
"It is hard to know if this is one that just was overlooked and there were always some that were overlooked, we knew that or if this was one that came from a hidden stockpile," Kay said. "I rather doubt that because it appears the insurgents didn't even know they had a chemical round."
The 155-millimeter artillery shell, which was converted into a roadside bomb, bore no special markings indicating it contained a chemical agent, so officials speculate that the bombers may have believed they were using a conventional artillery round.
Often chemical and biological weapons are marked to differentiate them from conventional artillery rounds, so people know how to handle them. Officials have said Saddam may have disguised his alleged weapons as conventional rounds to fool weapons inspectors.
No one was injured in the initial detonation Saturday. However, two U.S. soldiers who later removed the round experienced symptoms consistent with low-level nerve agent exposure, officials said.
The shell was a "binary" type, which has two separate chambers containing relatively safe chemicals, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. When the round is fired from an artillery gun, its rotation in flight mixes the chemicals to create sarin that disperses when the shell reaches its target.
Since it was not fired from a gun but set up as a bomb, the explosion dispersed the precursor chemicals, apparently mixing them in only small amounts, officials said.
On the battlefield, such shells would be fired in the hundreds to affect a large body of troops, said Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Saddam's government disclosed binary sarin testing and production after Iraqi weapons chief Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Saddam's son-in-law, defected in 1995. Saddam's government never declared that any sarin or sarin-filled shells remained.
Because of that, the U.S. government views the discovery of the sarin shell as significant and is trying to determine if more exist, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.
Since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. weapons hunters have been searching for weapons of mass destruction. So far, they've found only signs of a weapons program but no evidence of actual weapons.
Associated Press Writer Katherine Pfleger Shrader in Washington contributed to this report.
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040518_243.html
Sarin-Filled Munitions in Iraq Worry U.S.
U.S. Concerned That More Unmarked Munitions in Iraq May Contain Nerve Agent
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON May 18, 2004 — The discovery of an artillery shell apparently filled with a deadly nerve agent has raised fears among U.S. officials that insurgents may have more and will learn how to use them to greater effect.
But officials stopped short of claiming the munition was definite evidence of a large weapons stockpile in prewar Iraq or evidence of recent production by Saddam's regime the Bush administration's chief stated reason for invasion.
Some U.S. officials and weapons experts suggested the artillery shell may be an experimental design that predates the 1991 Gulf War.
A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the origin and age of the artillery shell are under investigation, but said shells of this type have a long shelf life, so it could have been constructed some time ago.
Iraq first field-tested such a shell containing sarin in 1988, the defense official said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned that the results were from a field test, which can be imperfect, and more analysis is needed. "We have to be careful," he told an audience in Washington on Monday.
It may take some time to determine precisely what the chemical was, what risks it may pose to U.S. forces and other implications, Rumsfeld said.
Also on Monday, two U.S. officials acknowledged finding an old artillery shell that apparently had been filled with mustard agent, a chemical weapon that was also part of Saddam's arsenal. They said initial tests suggested at least some residue of mustard remained in the shell, found in Baghdad earlier this month.
David Kay, the former top U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq, said it's possible the sarin shell was an old one, overlooked when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein said he had destroyed such weapons in the mid-1990s.
Kay, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, said he doubted the shell or the nerve agent came from a surviving hidden stockpile, but didn't rule out that possibility.
"It is hard to know if this is one that just was overlooked and there were always some that were overlooked, we knew that or if this was one that came from a hidden stockpile," Kay said. "I rather doubt that because it appears the insurgents didn't even know they had a chemical round."
The 155-millimeter artillery shell, which was converted into a roadside bomb, bore no special markings indicating it contained a chemical agent, so officials speculate that the bombers may have believed they were using a conventional artillery round.
Often chemical and biological weapons are marked to differentiate them from conventional artillery rounds, so people know how to handle them. Officials have said Saddam may have disguised his alleged weapons as conventional rounds to fool weapons inspectors.
No one was injured in the initial detonation Saturday. However, two U.S. soldiers who later removed the round experienced symptoms consistent with low-level nerve agent exposure, officials said.
The shell was a "binary" type, which has two separate chambers containing relatively safe chemicals, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. When the round is fired from an artillery gun, its rotation in flight mixes the chemicals to create sarin that disperses when the shell reaches its target.
Since it was not fired from a gun but set up as a bomb, the explosion dispersed the precursor chemicals, apparently mixing them in only small amounts, officials said.
On the battlefield, such shells would be fired in the hundreds to affect a large body of troops, said Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Monterey Institute's Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
Saddam's government disclosed binary sarin testing and production after Iraqi weapons chief Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Saddam's son-in-law, defected in 1995. Saddam's government never declared that any sarin or sarin-filled shells remained.
Because of that, the U.S. government views the discovery of the sarin shell as significant and is trying to determine if more exist, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.
Since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. weapons hunters have been searching for weapons of mass destruction. So far, they've found only signs of a weapons program but no evidence of actual weapons.
Associated Press Writer Katherine Pfleger Shrader in Washington contributed to this report.
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040518_243.html
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chadtm80
Becuase for them to admit that there was wmd in Iraq at all would have to say that maybe Our intelligence and Bush might of been right, and God knows thats not part of the agenda for the media 
They would rather continue the stories of the mistreated soldiers due to Bush's lack of leadership (give me a break)
They would rather continue the stories of the mistreated soldiers due to Bush's lack of leadership (give me a break)
furluvcats wrote:I didn't see mu ch at all on the guy in interm being killed or this gas thing on the news yesterday...whats up with that?
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