Word: sarin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...traces of chemical weapons when they blew up ammunition at the Kamisiyah weapons depot in southern Iraq on March 4, 1991. It was one day after Iraq's surrender, ending the Gulf War, and the unit was destroying Bunker 73, which contained rockets brimming with the virulent gas sarin. Three weeks ago, a presidential commission tripled--to 1,100--its estimate of the number of G.I.s exposed to the poison during that incident. Then last Wednesday the Pentagon said it was alerting 5,000 American troops who may have been exposed on March 10, 1991, when members of the 37th...
...risky because the weapons--rockets, artillery shells, bombs and land mines--are deteriorating. There have been some 2,100 reported incidents of leakage inside the igloos. Last summer at the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama, 60 workers were evacuated and one was hospitalized after the nerve gas sarin leaked from an M-55 rocket...
BETWEEN 1961 AND 1966, COLORADO'S ROCKY MOUNTAIN Arsenal cranked out 300,000 M-55 rockets, which are now stockpiled at five of the nation's chemical-weapons storage sites. Too late, the Army discovered that the design of the weapon has a potentially fatal flaw: sarin, the deadly poison that was packed into the nose cone, tends to corrode the aluminum casing. And sarin leaking into the rear chamber accelerates the decay of the stabilizing agent that prevents the rocket fuel from "auto-igniting.'' Because there is no way to safely dismantle the rocket, the deadly nerve agent...
Military experts at first estimated that the M-55s were safe until 1986, but a '93 Army report suggests the danger zone could be reached in 1997. Several years ago, the Army simulated a single auto-ignition using real rockets filled with fake sarin. The weapons close to the smoldering rocket exploded, blowing the heavy door off the igloo and allowing rockets to fly out, spewing fake sarin into the air. Inside the igloo, rockets kept detonating with dull thuds. A typical igloo contains 4,000 M-55s, each with a seven-mile range and 20 tons of sarin...
...Travolta film) and a recent series of scary, attention-getting commercials by attention-needing presidential candidate Richard Lugar. Of course, the appeal of nuclear weapons to terrorists is obvious: if destabilizing society or drawing attention to one's cause is the goal, a mushroom cloud outranks truck bombs and sarin attacks...