[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