[trainfromkansas]

Playing devil's advocate: why assume Iraq would (attempt to) store VX in the same way? It actually has a thin ring of plausibility around it in the same the way you sometimes hear stories that Kim Jong Il would watch American movies and demand "I want us to build that".

[mandevil]

Good question. One point is that the chemistry is well known by the right kinds of chemists in every country and... doesn't look like that (just as a for instance, a gel that aerosolizes in the ways you'd want for a chemical weapon would be roughly Nobel Prize quality work). Another is that actually quite a bit was known about the Iraqi chemical weapons programs, and published in the UNSCOM Reports, and the level of research to achieve something like that would show up in other places, other sites, other locations, and other people.

Recall that Iraq was well known to have used significant quantities of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War (against Iranian and Iraqi civilians): it was only after UN Security Council Resolutions 686 and 687- ending the Gulf War with the liberation of Kuwait- that Iraqi lost the ability to have Weapons of Mass Destruction. And so UNSCOM tracked down a lot of leads and visited a bunch of places inside Iraq for several years, looking for evidence of these, and the idea that Iraq hid the massive programs necessary to develop state-of-the-art technologies like that, and produce them in significant quantities, while remaining totally covert seems unlikely.

Back in 2002 I was an intern at a non-proliferation group in Washington DC, and spent some time talking to a (now sadly deceased) MITRE expert on chemical weapons about all of this, but I didn't take more than 1 year of college chemistry so I'm not an expert on the chemistry myself.

[Lammy]

> Recall that Iraq was well known to have used significant quantities of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War (against Iranian and Iraqi civilians)

“After the defeat the Iranians said the attack killed more than four thousand civilians — welcome to the VX gas attack” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nem_uP-bpFs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_massacre

[Analemma_]

Because Iraq used real chemical weapons in the war with Iran. It would be sort of ridiculous to pivot to fake ones after that.

[mandevil]

Interestingly, it might be true that Saddam Hussein did pivot to fake ones. After the complete destruction of his conventional military in 1991, it seems he decided that the only way to keep Iran or some other unfriendly neighbor from invading him (1) was to convince everyone that he had chemical weapons. This might have applied even to his own generals. I have heard that when US forces were interrogating Iraqi generals after the fall of Baghdad International Airport, they would ask them where were the chemical weapons and General A said that he didn't have any of them, but he was told that General B had them, and General B was sure that General C had them because he knew that he didn't, and General C thought that General A had them. At least, this was a story I heard verbally from someone involved, I've never tracked down the documentation to see if that was real (I was an intern working on non-proliferation before the invasion of Iraq, so I so I knew some people in that world, but pursued a different path and don't know how true this story is).

1: In roughly the same way that he had invaded Iran in 1980 when that country was in disarray after the fall of the Shah. Note that he doesn't seem to have noticed that his invasion was a huge disaster for Iraq, killing huge numbers of people, destroying massive quantities of stuff, going deeply into debt- so much debt that he decided to try and seize Kuwait, bringing the wrath of the United Nations down upon him- and gaining him exactly nothing. The idea that other leaders might be smart enough NOT to do that never seems to have crossed his mind.

[psd1]

Re your last point, there have been many deaths in war caused by overestimating the enemy's intelligence. Or misunderstanding their perspectives and red lines.