So depending on which side of the war debate you listen to, that IED they found over there this week that may or may not have contained sarin may or may not be the proof they were looking for that either justified the invasion, or demonstrated the total folly of sending blood and treasure over there. Personally, I'm underwhelmed; we knew that Saddam had sarin (duh, he'd used it) and so it's probably not surprising there's some lying around right now. I want to know where the thousands and thousands of gallons went, but that's just me, and I probably shouldn't be asking pesky questions like this.

I think the Poor Man gets it more or less right on the significance of this find, and for whatever it might be worth it doesn't change my opinion on the whole thing one bit.

I would, however, like the say that Boortz's claim that a gallon of sarin could kill 60,000 people is bullshit. Anyone who offers up numbers like that -- X amount of Y could kill Z people -- doesn't know what they're talking about. The issue here, as with all toxicology, is dose and exposure route. A gallon of highly diluted sarin might be safe to drink (if it were diluted enough); I don't want to get into a discussion of LD50 and LCt50, because it's complicated and I'd have to make a table, and I don't want to make a table because the stylesheet doesn't handle them as well as it should. (Translation: I"m a lazy son of a bitch.) But there is one point I want to make, and this actually goes for just about every weapon of mass destruction save for honest-to-god nuclear weapons.

You've probably heard the canard that a pound of plutonium, properly dispersed, would kill everyone on earth six times over (or whatever). That's true, but the dispersal technology is important. NOVA's program on radiation dispersal devices talked about the effects of powdered cesium flying all over town, without mentioning that most cesium powder granules are about the same size as beach sand. Try this experiment sometime: Go to the beach, take a handful of sand, and throw it up into the air. Now try to breathe some of it in. Hard, isn't it? RDD fearmongers like to overstate the ease at which this stuff can get airborne; there is a very fine line between being light enough to float freely and heavy enough to fall, and it's really doubtful that someone could make this work without a lot of careful effort (which would probably kill them in the process -- think about the last time you dusted your home, how much you were sneezing). The same problems apply to biological weapons, which is why the dangerous technology isn't in synthesis or growth of pathogens but rather in the "weaponization" of these bugs; personally, I'd rather infect some poor sap and have him cough his lungs out on an airplane (which is probably what will happen, since it's easier).

Chemical weapons are in the same kind of boat. A gallon of concentrated sarin, properly distributed, might kill 60,000 people. But six liters of sarin released on a subway in Tokyo, as Andrew points out, only killed 12 (and although press reports say 5,000 were injured, the number of patients with actual symptoms attributable to the agent rather than psychogenic sources was about 980). People seem to forget that wasn't the first time Aum Shinrikyo tried to use chemical weapons, either -- they spent some time spraying the stuff from building rooftops and killed one person (if memory serves). The moral of the story may be that although these things can be damn scary, they're also correspondingly difficult to use, and they can get damn pricey. (There's a study an American colleague of mine once made an oblique reference to -- I got the impression that it wasn't widely distributed and may even have been classified -- that looked at the relative costs of blowing stuff up and killing people; it compared conventional explosives with the holy CBRN trinity, and it turns out you get the most bang for your buck, quite literally, with high explosives, the other three being sufficiently difficult to implement that the frugal terrorist would be better off spending their money buying TNT instead of plutonium.)

And on a tangental topic, here's a question for the paranoid out there: How long would it take for a single Curie of depleted uranium, sitting on your chest, to kill you?

Epilogue: So, how'd that WMD hunt work out? That good, huh? Cool.

The answer to my tangental question, incidentally, is "more or less instantly." A single Curie of depleted uranium weighs in the vicinity of a couple of tons.