On Fri, 21 May 2004, Damon Agretto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> mentioned http://www.stripesonline.com/article.asp?section=104&article=22295
The leakage may be from smoke rounds ... >From what I have heard, chemical warheads leak. The Germans, US, and Soviets all found this out. Presumably, the rounds do not leak immediately or hugely, so the problem did not halt initial production. But leakage was, I am told, one of the reasons that the US and USSR developed binary munitions. Another solution was to load the warheads shortly before use rather than load them at the factory. When you do this, the poison spends most of its time in larger tanks that are less likely to leak. It is handled by people with more expertise. If I remember rightly, United Nations inspectors said that the Iraqi military first made old fashioned munitions. As expected they leaked. Then it created systems to load warheads shortly before use. In the fall of 2002, United Nations inspectors in Iraq found some empty missile warheads that appeared to be designed for such loading. Also, I am told that in the mid 1990s, after first saying it did not do any such work, the Iraqi government said that it had developed some binary shells. The UN inspectors said that the number of shells manufactures was more than `some'; that the numbers were in production run quantities. I can well believe that some liquid filled warheads leak and that those filled with nerve gas are especially dangerous since so little poison injures or kills someone. I can also believe that the Iraqi military worked to protect its own people by developing late loading systems and by developing binary weapons. The United Nations inspectors have also said that sometimes the Iraqi military buried banned weapons in sand. This destroyed fighter jets but did not necessarily damage artillery rounds. (As far as I know, all this has been common knowledge for six or eight years; I cannot remember where I learned it. Doubtless, if you have a faster and more reliable Internet connection that I, you will want to check.) I do not know what the Iraqi military or other portion of the Iraqi government did with its chemical weapons. All we know is that the United States, under the Bush Administration, did NOT, as I wrote to the Brin List on 30 May 2003, send ... 20000 or more troops to look at the various sites and to search for more sites. The troops would not have been able to do much except clear harmless sites and guard suspect sites -- but that would have been enough. And that could have been done over a few days in the middle of April [2003]. Remember, the goal would not have been to find a `smoking gun' but to have cleared some sites and to have provided guards for those sites that appeared dangerous to ordinary soldiers. On 31 May 2003, the BBC said http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/americas/2951440.stm The Pentagon has a list of around 900 sites which may provide clues to Saddam Hussein's alleged chemical and biological arsenal. So far, around 200 locations have been searched, said Pentagon officials on Friday. which means the US military said that 700 sites were unvisited. As I wrote on Saturday, 31 May 2003 ... some 466000 coalition troops were involved [in that part of the war]. I am talking about shifting the task of fewer than 5% of the total troop number for a short time. Moreover, if the army had needed another 20000 troops, Bush could have delayed the start a little longer to wait for them and their equipment to arrive. .... Most likely most of those 700 locations will be empty or clueless. ... But suppose one of those sites contained enough weaponized anthrax to fill a Johnson Baby powder container like those that that many grown up travelers carry? What if someone who is unfriendly to the US and has the right contacts gets hold of it before a US Army team comes by? For all we know, some of those unvisited, but suspected sites contained chemical weapons. Since they were not visited by the US, someone could have taken them without the US learning. -- Robert J. Chassell Rattlesnake Enterprises As I slowly update it, [EMAIL PROTECTED] I rewrite a "What's New" segment for http://www.rattlesnake.com
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