Posted on 05/28/2006 6:59:14 AM PDT by avacado
My subject title doesn't make sense, does it? How coud the U.N. be disarming Iraq from WMD while allowing them WMD at the same time. Is there a 4th dimension of space that I am not aware of?
Chemicals allowed for export to Iraq by other countries:
- Sodium Cyanide
- Hydrogen Cyanide
- Phosgene
Well golly, gee-whiz... those chemicals are WMD with a world history of being used as chemical weapons. The U.N. is a complete joke! They are looking for chemical weapons while allowing Saddam to purchase chemical weapons! Yeah, that's the ticket! Makes good sense to me!
U.N. (Oil-for-Food programme) Goods Review List: http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/documents/S-2002-515.pdf
Good post, avacado; thanks for the thread and thank you for assisting freeper's trying to translate those documents.
Thanks for the ping, Dave, and for remembering my interest in this matter.
The UN hasn't dealt honestly with the Iraq/WMD situation for their own agenda-driven reasons and since the UN is so dirty, I tend to trust freeper translations more than any others.
Thanks Peach! It's a tough crowd in here today! ;-)
One of the most important debate of the Iraq war was the WMD issue and every point that show that Saddam has WMD, or has the capability of manufacturing must be made public because the liberal liars and their media want us to believe that this man never had or never had the intention to acquire WMD from 1991 to 2003.
Look, I know how bad both phosgene and Saddam are. I have no dispute with that. Here is the reality: you can make phosgene by overheating PVC plastics. It's easy. PVC is everywhere.
The only way to preclude phosgene being used as a chemical weapon is to monitor manufacturing and storage of the bulk materials and delivery systems. Preventing imports accomplishes very little.
In term of producing Phosgene from heating plastic, I think if this is the case we will have thousands of dead people everyday. The company I work for supply control elements to chemical firms that manufacture Phosgene and this was of the toughest applications we deal with because our control element must be designed to have zero leakage to the atmosphere because Phosgene is simply extremely deadly once it is inhaled.
I was in the business of making vinyl gloves for seven years. Producing phosgene when we locked up the line was a concern.
"Chlorine gas is never produced when PVC burns, and while the possibility of producing phosgene from burning PVC has been suggested, following reports of minimal quantities produced in laboratory experiments, it has never been detected in large scale fire tests and it is not considered a significant product of PVC combustion."
http://www.svpindustries.com/pdf/pvc-and-fire.pdf
Allow me to ruin your day, even more: I worked seven years as a project engineer in the PVC industry. We had to take special provisions to preclude exposure to phosgene (not to mention VCM). With the tons of PVC available in packaging alone, the Iraqis could have obtained enough to create weapons. The chlorinated hydrocarbons in PVC and pesticides in any country with industry and agricultural as significant as Iraq is sufficient to produce enough phosgene to do serious damage.
Don't come on here with all that attitude. You're a newbie. You're still under review.
Be polite. Don't presume to tell others what to do. We'll just laugh at you.
Develop a sense of humor.
Develop a sense of humility. If you were unclear in a post and people call you on it, this is where you can use both the sense of humor and the sense of humility.
You'll get along a lot better here if you'll just follow those simple guidelines.
I have news for you. It was you who could not understand the context of my original post and it was you who made false assumptions about my original post. I simply tried to correct you. And I have further news for you, I am not trying to earn any secret decoder ring from you. If you need to ban me, then do it. You should be apologizing to me for being flat out rude and for ruining a thread to which you obviously had no interest.
Have a nice day and don't fall too hard getting off that high horse of yours.
Allow me to ruin your day, even more:
Allow me to further ruin your day, as you say. Show me a paper that documents these significant quantities of phosgene which can be generated from burning PVC that would be in such quantities as to be considered large scale enough for a full blown chemical weapons program. Lets see some numbers. You have real data, and not anecdotes to back up your claim, right?
Have a lovely day.
And lighten up a little.
Yeah, you're right. I've got no interest whatsoever with anything to do with Iraq.
Better check your facts, ma'am before you go shooting off. ;-)
First, I return like in kind and you have been rude from the start and completly ruined a thread you had no interest in. Second, I was warmly welcomed to FR sometime ago so spare me your high horse routine, once again.
Most PVC in industrialized countries is landfilled or recycled, not burned, primarily because of dioxin but also because it evolves hydrogen cyanide. Nor do the people who do burn tons of PVC optimize their process to produce phosgene (it is primarily derived from the VCM residue in the PVC). One would think they do the opposite, where it's permitted to burn it at all. Burn it at low temperature (a process quantitative decomposition) in an oxygen deficient atmosphere and you can then fraction off the phosgene by gravity (it's two and a half times the density of air, so it sinks).
Note: the process yields quite a bit more hydrogen cyanide than it does phosgene. So there's another hole in avocado's tacit assertion that import controls would preclude production of chemical munitions.
Worse for your fear mongering is that phosgene is a lousy chemical munition. It falls to the ground and then disperses. That worked trench warfare, but would be far less effective under other circumstances.
A typical combustion of PVC yields about 1ppm phosgene which quickly dilutes to far less than that under normal circumstances, hence jveritas' comment that people burning trash don't die isn't terribly meaningful. You don't need a lot to produce a fatal dose, typically 0.1ppm (about 150ug/m3). Given the adversely-optimized yield mentioned above, if you burn a ton of chlorinated plastics, you get about 1gm phosgene, enough to render about 6,000 cubic meters with a fatal dose.
How hard is it to get a ton of chlorinated plastic?
The point is this: if you really want phosgene, combustion of any chlorinated hydrocarbon will do; freon from refrigerators will suffice. It's an important constituent for processing pesticides, herbicides, and plastics which are all part of an industrial economy. It's easy to produce and makes a lousy gas for chemical munitions, but hey, if it fits your fear mongering, go for it.
Actually the point is that the yields that you posted are very low and why give Saddam straight phosgene -- a known chemcial used as a chemical weapon? At least make him work for it.
But thanks for the post and the information. It was interesting information.
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