Seems another would -be, wannabe warrior, flashing his badges of security all around (doubtless to gain some kind of credibility, despite minding a coding and intercept facility in Brindisi, Italy over 1969-71), thinks I was wrong in my suggestion of using Sarin on the ISIS vermin. According to 'Mr. Air Force Man', the use of all poison gas has been banned since the end of World War I because of the diffusive and dispersant effects. Thus, a large amount of collateral damage can be inflicted if release is proximate to population centers, villages etc..
This is absolutely true, and I never overlooked it. So if Mr AF man would have spent less time pounding his chest in false bravado and more time reading the blog post (Aug. 10, 'The Solution to the ISIS Terrorists: Nerve Gas') to which he refers in his FB rant, he'd have read the parenthetical at the end of the 6th paragraph:
This assumes, obviously, the ISIS fighters can be isolated sufficiently that innocents won't also be gassed. Thus, dump the sarin when ISIS alone is in the vicinity of a dam they gain control of - or when they're racing across the desert in their land rovers, jeeps, trucks etc.
I thought to any person of 5th grade reading ability that point wouldn't have been missed, but evidently I was wrong. Way wrong! Maybe, despite the fact the Web manners police insist no use of caps, I ought to have written the whole damned thing in caps, then Mr.AF Man wouldn't have missed it like he did.
When I said "isolated sufficiently" I meant in situations - such as racing across hundreds of miles of Iraqi desert (I guess he knows Iraq is mostly desert) and hence far from any population areas. The dam reference implied the ISIS rats had taken it over completely and killed all those around.
In such instances Sarin would be the perfect agent to use in the right concentration (100 mg can kill a man confined to a one cubic meter closet in 1 minute). Also, unlike mustard gas or chlorine (used in WWI) it doesn't just roll over the landscape affecting all in its wake but diffuses more rapidly because of having less density. But maybe he didn't take chemistry any more than he took physics in HS.
Sarin and other similar nerve agents aren't banned because of the potential diffusive effects so much as their chemical action on the body. Once inside your body, nerve agents affect the signaling mechanism that nerve cells use to communicate with one another. Sarin is a cholinesterase inhibitor -- it gums up the cholinesterase enzyme, which your nerve cells use to clear themselves of acetylcholine.
The result is a horrific death summarized by the acronym 'SLUDGE': sweating, larcrimating, urinating, defecating and gastro-intestinal emesis. Hence, the person makes a mess of himself before the final convulsions and asphyxiation. In other words it's damned terrible in its physical effects which is why it's been banned.
But are the ISIS bugs deserving of being spared such appalling effects? Not when they enslave and rape females and torture and behead innocents. They are no better than rats and deserve what they get. Hell, if it didn't take so long, I'd ditch the Sarin and just round up all of them and dump them on Komodo island and let the giant lizards rip them to shreds piece by piece. A death by a 'thousand bites'.
The Pentagon announced this morning that "all options are on the table" and one of them should certainly be the POSSIBLE use of Sarin if the right - I say RIGHT - conditions for use present themselves. If they don't, then obviously you don't use it since we want to keep the kill count on the ISIS maggots not anyone else.
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