Crossposted at Politicook.net
For any weapon to be effective, a means of delivery must be devised. This is particularly important for chemical weapons, because, even with protective gear, there is extreme risk to the forces using them if off normal cases occur.
The first delivery system in World War I was to open a valve on a cylinder of chlorine (chlorine is a gas at normal pressures, but a liquid in the high pressure cylinder) and let the wind carry it towards the target. That works OK for materials like cyanogen chloride, hydrogen cyanide, chlorine, and phosgene that are gases, but obviously will not work for solid and liquid materials. In addition, a shift in wind direction can be a disaster.
After mustard agents were developed, the artillery shell became the medium of choice for delivery. A typical chemical shell consists of a steel casing, sometimes very large and heavy, a burster tube filled with high explosives to burst the shell and deliver the contents, a fuze to detonate the burster. Not shown is the shell casing that holds the propellant. Some artillery systems use a baseless shell and the propellant charge is loaded manually after the shell.
Here is a diagram of a typical shell:
I apologize for the poor quality of this sketch. If any commentor has a better one, I would be glad to substitute.
Shells work well for any liquid agent, but were mostly used for mustard. They still find them in Europe from World War I, not just chemical ones, but high explosive ones as well. The main difference is that in a chemical shell there is only enough explosive to burst the shell and disperse the agent. In a high explosive one, the entire shell is occupied with explosives to destroy anything nearby.
Such shells were loaded by the hundreds of thousands by the United States after World War I, mostly with "Levinstein" mustard (an impure material, named for the developer of the manufacturing process), or, later "distilled" mustard, a much more pure product. The Levinstein mustard is causing a problem in our current destruction processes, because the material in the shells has degenerated into a semisolid, black, and extremely complex mixture that is difficult to extract and thus to destroy.
They are, or were, stored around the nation at chemical depots, such as Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado (those are still there), Bluegrass Army Depot in Kentucky (those are also still there), and several other facilities.
After World War II, there was both a rocket race and a chemical race with the Soviet Union. The United States developed the M55 rocket to deliver nerve agents GB and VX.
Here is the best diagram that I could find in the public domain. I am privy to better ones, but those are FOUO ("for official use only") and I will not post them.
I am not sure of the range of these rockets, but they were many miles. the advantage over artillery shells is that heavy artillery guns were not required to fire these, since they were self contained in shipping/firing tubes. Not that is was a picnic, but must more logistically feasible, especially on short notice in a rapidly changing theater.
But there were even other developments. Remember, one use of chemical warfare agents is to make territory inaccessible to the "enemy". What a better device for that than a Claymore mine, a device designed to throw out its payload in a predictable direction. These mines are designed to be set on the ground, and triggered either by tripwires or be remote control. Tens of thousands of these mines were loaded with nerve agents in the early 1960s and then stored. Here is a diagram of a Claymore mine:
Those were designed as high explosive containing mines, filled with metal fragments, to defend a perimeter of warfighters when there was not enough personnel to protect them during sleep, etc. The troop would set up five or six of them around a perimeter, set the trip wires, and trust them to fill invaders with hot steel fragments. Then someone got the idea to fill the fragment space with nerve agent instead.
Those are the most common delivery systems for most agents. However, the agent BZ, covered in a previous installment of this series, is a solid. It had two primary delivery systems, the cluster bomb and the smoke generator.
A BZ cluster bomb was about three feet high, composed of a bunch of soup can sized submunitions surrounding a detonation cord core. They were designed to be dropped from aircraft, ignited, and the dispersed by the detonation cord. Since BZ is a solid, it was mixed with a pyrotechnic burning mixture that created an aerosol of the material, just like a cigarette makes an aerosol of tobacco components, but faster.
The smoke generator was essentially three, five gallon paint buckets strapped together and filled with soup can sized submunitions. A pyrotechnic fuze ignited the submunitions essentially simultaneously, and vents in the paint cans allowed the BZ containing smoke to escape. I have a disagreement with a commentor, whom I respect, in that the smoke generator was designed for airdrop. In my opinion, it was much too fragile for that. However, rolling them off of the back of a truck would work fine. I firmly believe that this device was designed for domestic crowd disruption (as opposed to crowd control). Consider the era, early 1960s, and the effect of BZ (see an earlier diary here that explains it).
Well, as usual this has gotten too long. There are methods that I have not covered, but these are main ones. Our Nation has spent literally billions of dollars to develop, weaponize, and deploy these weapons, and now is spending billions more to destroy them. Incineration is the preferred method, but Bluegrass and Pueblo are using chemical neutralization. The plants are not built, and the life cycle cost estimate for Bluegrass alone will top two billions of dollars, for two per cent of the stockpile. But Bunning and McConnell love it.
I will stick around for questions, comments, and other input, as always. Warmest regards, Doc.