causes immediate pain when contaminating skin and blister are formed quickly. However in field tests carried out by a young lieutenant, later director of Edgewood, it was shown that Lewisite rapidly hydrolyses into non toxic products. Within 15 minutes of contamination active Lewisite cannot be detected. This was why the US carried nitrogen mustard in WW2. In 1946 the Lewisite was transported by ship to open water where the ship was scuttled. Some nations, for instance Italy,


preferred to use a mixture of Lewisite and sulphur mustard because both compounds are active and the freezing point of the mixture is way below the 14o


C of pure mustard, which could be


seen as a disadvantage in winter. Nitrogen mustard is approximately equally toxic with sulphur mustard it has an 18o


C lower freezing point and


lower volatility at room temperature a making it more persistent. Nitrogen mustard was the cause of a tragic incident in 1943 when a US cargo ship in the harbour of Bari, Italy was bombed by German planes. Some of the mustard agent was released and the sailors, many of them contaminated, had to swim to safety. The medical investigations that followed the incident resulted in a chemotherapy for certain forms of cancer that still is in use today. The story of the hazardous form of


mustard as dusty agent pops up from time to time. What the Italians try to achieve in Libya in 1938 was to make mustard more persistent in a hot desert


by absorbing it into dust. According to the investigators it worked and Mussolini sold the idea to Hitler. Germany bought a few tons of the dust and did some field tests but saw no advantage in the dusty agent. Later some analyst expected the dust to be of such a small particle size that it would penetrate a mask filter. Extremely small particles might penetrate today’s aerosol filters to some degree but the amount of agent they can carry is so small that it is not a serious hazard. Dusty mustard would penetrate present day protective clothing to a larger degree, but again the fraction of the penetrated aerosol that is deposited onto the bare skin under the clothing is very small


Change… yes we can! CW in modern form were developed by German scientists and later by British, French and US scientists as well as some from the former Soviet Union. Several of them were awarded Nobel prizes, fortunately not for their CW achievements. After 100 years we have come so far that the use of CW agents is internationally regarded as a war crime. Businessmen who have delivered precursors to CW user states have been prosecuted and convicted. In trials of Iraqi officials the use of CW agents was often included as a crime. But more importantly over the past 25 years most states, now numbering 192, have become members of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).


Sometimes to make a point pundits


will show a 1kg container of a household product saying that if this were a nerve agent it could kill 1 million people. In principal it is possible. If the lethal dosage (LD50) of an agent is 1mg and if you line up the victims and give them all a measured 1mg dose you will kill half a million and make the other half sick. Such statements come from persons who suffer from the sperm syndrome (Every man produces enough sperm cells in his lifetime to impregnate every woman in the world, however there is an enormous distribution problem). WW1 statistics, computer simulations of CW attacks, the Tokyo incident etc, all show that it is necessary to release on average 1 million toxic doses to achieve one battlefield casualty. What the world needs to do is to


destroy the remaining CW agents in the coming years, while politicians and the media recover from the sperm syndrome and stop telling terrorists that CW are wonder weapons, which they are not! Everybody will then come to realise that CW are not worth the effort. Until that point is reached it is wise to maintain detection and protection in the form of masks and clothing. These countermeasures make CW less efficient by a factor of at least 100 thereby increasing the theoretical amount of the nerve agent to 100kg per casualty. Could we change to such a degree


that in 20 years we write ‘In Memoriam’ for CW?


King of the battlefield or the most humane? ©Creative Commons


www.cbrneworld.com CBRNe Convergence, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Indiana, USA, 6 - 8 Nov 2017 www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2017


June 2017 CBRNe WORLD


17


CBRNeWORLD


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68