Donning gas masks and protective suits, U.S. soldiers from the
101st Airborne Division carefully searched metal drums that may
contain chemical weapons, in an Iraqi city south of Baghdad,
Monday.
Coalition forces have repeatedly found gas masks and protective
gear in Iraqi warehouses, but have never found chemical agents.
If tests prove the materials the soldiers have found to be
chemical agents, it would be the first conclusive finding since the
start of the war in Iraq.
The use of these weapons during warfare is not new. In ancient
times, military forces often contaminated wells with human and
animal corpses.
The Black Death spread throughout Europe in the fourteenth
century when an army catapulted an infected corpse into a besieged
city near the current-day Ukraine ““ survivors fled to Italy
and spread the disease.
More recently, World War I marked the first use of chemical and
biological weapons on a large scale.
Today, some defense officials believe that the possibility of an
attack is “negligible” as forces enter the heart of
Baghdad, but they still say soldiers must be absolutely prepared
for any attack ““ and have trained all service members
accordingly.
“It goes without saying that even the possibility of
having to defend against a chemical or biological attack is serious
business,” said Department of Defense Official Lieutenant
Commander Donald Sewell.
Before the Gulf War, Iraq used mustard gas during the Iran-Iraq
War in 1982 and also used nerve gas against the Kurds in 1988,
killing 5,000 civilians.
Iraq had the botulism toxin during the first Gulf War and
subsequently destroyed it, according to Hussein Kamal, Saddam
Hussein’s late son-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995.
Though Iraq claims all its chemical and biological weapons have
been destroyed, the United States still accuses it of harboring
these weapons.
Before deployment to Iraq, troops get a slew of antibiotics and
vaccines that protect them against an attack. They also receive
equipment to protect them if they are exposed to an agent.
In Iraq’s hot desert climate, soldiers during the first
Gulf War often had to choose between risking dehydration by wearing
bulky gear or risking exposure to a possibly dangerous agent.
But along with weapons technology, protection suits have evolved
from the heavy, rubber suits that soldiers wore during first Gulf
War.
The new water-repellent suits, which weigh between five to seven
pounds, are about one pound lighter than previous protective
suits.
Gas masks have also improved to allow for a better fit, a wider
range of vision and an easier way to change filtration
canisters.
But protective equipment alone isn’t enough to ensure a
soldier’s safety. Troops must have proper detectors to warn
them about harmful agents in the environment.
“In a large release, you probably wouldn’t know you
had it until symptoms arise,” said UCLA microbiology
Professor Ralph Robinson, who teaches a class on bioterrorism.
“(You) would all die at one time so other people
wouldn’t be careful to get anti-toxins.”
Detectors can also be prone to giving off false alarms.
During the first Gulf War, the detectors for chemical weapons in
the air were so ineffective that they sent off repeated false
alarms, according to Robinson.
Eventually, when soldiers heard an alarm go off, they did not
even bother to put on their protective gear, he added.
Though chemical detectors have been used since the first Gulf
War, they are still not ideal.
False positives often come up when detectors come into contact
with pesticides ““ which can be chemically very similar to
fatal nerve agents. In addition, there is no single detector that
can detect both chemical and biological agents.
The U.S. Army has a small hand-held chemical detector called the
Automatic Chemical Agent Detector and Alarm, which can identify the
traditional chemical warfare agents, according to Sewell.
There is still no way to get an immediate detection for a
biological agent in the air, but the Army constantly takes samples
of the air and attempts to identify pathogens using the same
technology as DNA fingerprinting.
But the most dangerous weapons Iraq would use are ricin and
botulism, according to Robinson.
“There are no detection methods for these and you will die
immediately,” he added.