Originally Posted by Contendahh:
Originally Posted by Stanky:
The jihadist group bringing terror to Iraq overran a Saddam Hussein chemical weapons complex on Thursday, gaining access to disused stores of hundreds of tonnes of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin.
Isis invaded the al-Muthanna mega-facility 60 miles north of Baghdad in a rapid takeover that the US government said was a matter of concern.
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Old stuff--it was known years ago that there were stocks of degraded chemical weapons on hand in Iraq:
http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovi...06-701-munitions.pdf
And had you wished to put a bit of balance and completeness into your ost, you could have noted this statement at the end by a U.S. expert familiar with the site:
"One US official told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that Isis fighters could be contaminated by the chemicals at the site.
'The only people who would likely be harmed by these chemical materials would be the people who tried to use or move them,' the military officer said."
So the hunt for those game-changing, deadly mass quantities of WMDs goes on!.
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The UN report doesn't 'splain where Iraq's newer binary weapons went. It appears the US was stuck with handling the leaky and still lethal older weapons while the newer stock went to Syria.
While the shelf life of nerve agents such as the sarin, one of the chemical weapons found in Iraq and recently used in Syria, is short, an undated CIA report estimated that the Iraqis had improved their sarin stocks by increasing the purity of the chemical components and building binary weapons. In binary weapons, the components of the nerve agent are not combined until the weapon is ready to be used. This could make the shelf life of the weapon “irrelevant” and allow it to be stored for years before use. This means that if Iraqi stockpiles were transferred to Syria prior to 2003 they could still be lethal.
http://www.examiner.com/articl...addam-s-missing-wmds
Only one binary weapon was found, but only because terrorists tried to make use of it as an improvised weapon and with no rotation, there was little mixing of chemicals.