Word: sarin
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...They note that even if Iraq was never acknowledged to be on a target list, Washington during the 1991 Gulf War did issue a veiled threat that it might unleash nuclear fury if Iraq used chemical weapons on U.S. troops. That might have been what kept Saddam Hussein's sarin gas sidelined. Officially, the Pentagon insists the congressionally mandated review "does not provide operational guidance on nuclear targeting or planning." Unofficially, some defense officials describe it as little more than a "self-licking ice cream cone"--a report designed to keep money flowing into military budgets for the maintenance...
...death the killer delivers is gruesome. The poison?a few spoonfuls of purple crystal granules of carbofuran, an insecticide, mixed with chicken or duck meat?acts fast, attacking the nervous system much like sarin gas. In minutes, the dogs are drooling and their muscles begin to twitch. Within an hour, they are violently convulsing. If the poison cannot be expunged, they die of shock and respiratory failure. "They are absolutely frantic," says veterinarian Lloyd Kenda. "I'd rather never see another case again...
Before Sept. 11, there was March 20, 1995. On a sunny spring morning, five members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult entered the Tokyo subway and pierced plastic packs of liquefied sarin gas with their umbrella tips, leaving 12 people dead and thousands injured. Only two months before, more than 5,000 people were killed by an earthquake that shook the western port city of Kobe. "Some strange malaise, some bitter aftertaste lingers on," writes novelist Haruki Murakami in his account of the times, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. "We crane our necks and look around...
...these threats? Almost anyone with undergraduate training in biology can raise colonies of dangerous microbes. Delivering them is much harder, as the technologically savvy extremist Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo learned in the early 1990s when it tried to spread botulism in the streets of Tokyo before finally settling on sarin gas. Moreover, germ weapons have a tendency to boomerang, as gas attacks often did during World War I when winds suddenly shifted. Highly infectious agents also are difficult to handle, a risk underscored by at least one major anthrax accident in the Soviet biowarfare program that killed scores of Russians...
...Years Ago in TIME Despite the terrible threat of chemical and biological terrorism, it has never been very effectively accomplished. One exception was a horrifying event in Tokyo, when a nerve gas called SARIN, an agent originally used by the Nazis, was placed in five subway cars during rush hour, killing 12 and making thousands...