Syria, worse than you think
Dec. 6th, 2012 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrThe news has been mentioning that the Syrian government is getting ready to use Sarin.
What they aren't mentioning is that if it *is* used, the areas that get bombed may be lethal for years, maybe even decades.
Sarin (as it will be used) isn't so much a gas as a mist of fine droplets. Those droplets will coat *everything. And any spot that's protected from sun and enough a bit sheltered from the weather will retain the coating for years.
Anybody who comes in contact with the coating is likely to die.
So, well into the next decade people (especially children) and animals and insects will be dying from such contacts. Cleanup will be an insane undertaking. Bulldozing everything and treating the resulting debris as toxic waste is likely the only *barely* practical cleanup method. and the workers would require full hazmat gear or miltary high level MOPP gear.
So, in essence, if the bombs get used, the areas they are used in will become wastelands. Due to the effects on animals (even insects and other "creepy crawly" critters) agriculture (yes, even growing crops) won't be doable there until after decontamination.
It'd actually be easier to recover from a nuclear attack.
If the bombs get used, even ignoring any retailiation, it'll pretty much destroy Syria.
What they aren't mentioning is that if it *is* used, the areas that get bombed may be lethal for years, maybe even decades.
Sarin (as it will be used) isn't so much a gas as a mist of fine droplets. Those droplets will coat *everything. And any spot that's protected from sun and enough a bit sheltered from the weather will retain the coating for years.
Anybody who comes in contact with the coating is likely to die.
So, well into the next decade people (especially children) and animals and insects will be dying from such contacts. Cleanup will be an insane undertaking. Bulldozing everything and treating the resulting debris as toxic waste is likely the only *barely* practical cleanup method. and the workers would require full hazmat gear or miltary high level MOPP gear.
So, in essence, if the bombs get used, the areas they are used in will become wastelands. Due to the effects on animals (even insects and other "creepy crawly" critters) agriculture (yes, even growing crops) won't be doable there until after decontamination.
It'd actually be easier to recover from a nuclear attack.
If the bombs get used, even ignoring any retailiation, it'll pretty much destroy Syria.
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no subject
Date: 2012-12-07 03:20 pm (UTC)To use a quote from a Seventies TV movie "It kills the land."
no subject
Date: 2012-12-07 11:00 pm (UTC)But the long term stability isn't as bad as you describe, fortunately. It's very toxic, killing by preferential bonding to cholinesterase molecules, but the resultant phosphoester is biologically inactive; the sarin molecule is used up doing that damage. Outside of living things it can last a little longer - sarin isn't waterproof and decomposes rather rapidly in high humidity; too bad that's so rare in Syria. This was actually a problem for the potential military uses; back in the 1970s when Iraq was trying to lay in some chemical weapons, some of their sarin shells were going bad in a matter of weeks. The US (and probably the USSR) had better quality control and produced shells that were usable months later, and eventually we figured out binary precursor storage systems.
You can probably find accounts of just how long sarin took to degrade, after use and in that region, by researching the Iran-Iraq War.