Rarely does news from the Department of Defense (DoD) cause me to pause, and contemplate the level of insanity needed to come up with one of the myriad schemes that rival something out of Austin Powers.
If their plan is to make us all think to ourselves, “Are you <expletive deleted> kidding me?” If that was in fact their goal, all I have to say is Mission Accomplished.
1.4 million pounds of “Divine Strake”
Thursday, August 17, 2006 the Louisville Courier Journal reported the DoD is considering a Southern Indiana quarry for a test titled “Divine Strake”, involving more that 700 tons of high explosive.
With little fanfare, U.S. military officials and the operators of a limestone quarry near Mitchell detonated 3,000-pound batches of explosives in the summer of 2004 and in March 2005.
The blasts were part of an experiment by the federal National Threat Reduction Agency to fine-tune ways to root out enemies and powerful weapons nestled in limestone tunnels.
Although the tests largely escaped public attention, the same Hoosier quarry was identified this month in a published report as a possible location for a far larger experimental blast involving hundreds of tons of explosives.
(Hat tip to Oye Sancho at Daily Kos for his diary on this.)
How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb (Steve’s Song)
Local environmental activist group Valley Watch reports that the size of the test explosion suggests it is a surrogate for a nuclear bunker buster, ie Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.
It is the limestone that is attracting the DOD. In fact, they have already set off two, 3,000 pound explosives there as part of the Divine
Strake experiment. Those tests were conducted in 2004 and 2005 without any
sort of local notice or input.
Apparently, DOD was hoping to keep this a secret as well since several recent reports indicate that there are no state
or local officials who have been informed as to the blast’s possibility.
DOD theorizes that the limestone embedded in the earth in Lawrence County is similar to what would be experienced if a nuclear “bunker busting” bomb was
dropped on the underground nuclear facilities in Iran.
Such a nuclear weapon cannot be tested under the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that
America proposed and signed nearly fifty years ago. So DOD is seeking to use the next best thing, Divine Strake. 1.4 million pounds of mostly ammonium nitrate, the same as used by bomber, Terry McVeigh to blow up the federal
building in Oklahoma City a decade ago is a mere substitute for the nukes that Rumsfeld and Bush are raring to use on Iran.
Perhaps the most ironic aspect about the impending use of this weapon of mass
destruction on the soil of the Hoosier state is that it was Indiana’s own Steve Buyer (R-IN4) who floated a trial ballon for the Bush adminstration when they hoped to get public approval for the used of tactical nuclear weapons in the caves at Tora Bora, Afghanistan in late 2001.
“Don’t send special forces in there to sweep. We’d be very naive to believe that biotoxins and chemical agents were not in these caves. Put a tactical nuclear device (emphasis mine) in and close these caves for a thousand years,” said Buyer in an interview with Indianapolis television station WRTV.
Yes Virginia, Phosgene is a Weapon of Mass Destruction
Valley Watch has posted the environmental impact statement filed for a similiar test in Nevada. Amongst the witches brew of toxic chemicals that are
produced when you detonate 700 tons of high explosives was a suprise. 1,535 pounds of Phosgene (Carbon Dichloride), while the process by which really big bomb creates more than 15,000 pounds of Chlorine compounds is a mystery to me there’s a simple, and incovenient truth here.
Phosgene is a chemical weapon, a relic of the “War to End All Wars”, the first world war; fought to “make the world safe for democracy.”
The toxic action of phosgene is typical of a certain group of lung damaging agents. Phosgene is the most dangerous member of this group and the only one considered likely to be used in the future. Phosgene was used for the first time in 1915, and it accounted for 80% of all chemical fatalities during World War I.
Phosgene is a colorless gas under ordinary conditions of temperature and pressure. Its boiling point is 8.2°C, making it an extremely volatile and
non-persistent agent. Its vapor density is 3.4 times that of air. It may therefore remain for long periods of time in trenches and other low lying
areas. In low concentrations it has a smell resembling new mown hay.
The outstanding feature of phosgene poisoning is massive pulmonary edema. With exposure to very high concentrations death may occur within several hours; in most fatal cases pulmonary edema reaches a maximum in 12 hours followed by death in 24-48 hours. If the casualty survives, resolution commences within 48 hours and, in the absence of complicating infection, there may be little or no residual damage.
Further, Phosgene is a prohibited Schedule 3 chemical weapon under the Annex on Chemicals attached to the Chemical Weapons Convention. It was in this context, that the British government expressed concern that Iraqi facilities linked to the production of phosgene had been rebuilt in the period following the end of UNSCOM inspections in the September 2002 dossier entitled, IRAQ’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION:THE ASSESSMENT OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT.
Phosgene when weaponized is a WMD. The scale of Divine Strake can only be realistically deployed through the use of nuclear weapons, and it produces nearly 1,500 pounds phosgene, a banned chemical weapon. And the DoD is planning testing in a populated area of Southern Indiana.
I direct you to the definition of a WMD per the DoD’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.
from One America Blog where it’s currently being trollrated by people who clearly don’t get that 700 tons of high explosves is a weapon of mass destruction. Any help in uprating this there would be appreciated. I want to see if we can get word of this to John Edwards, the secrecy involved as well as the suggestion that this test might violate the Test Ban Treaty demands big action from big name politicians.
so the phosgene will be produced in the explosion as a byproduct?
In short, no.
The Valley Watch document is a copy of part of the environmental impact statement available on the DoE website.
It’s the DOE/EA – 1550 under the number column, and when I clicked it told me the file was corrupted.
Thanks for finding it; I just downloaded a readable copy. See comments following.
The chlorine comes from naturally occurring minerals in the environment, such as calcium chloride and sodium chloride. Next time you’re in a limestone cave touch your finger to a drop of water coming from a stalactite and touch it to your tongue. You’ll definitely taste the chloride salts.
the origin of the Chlorine for the Phosgene left me clueless, but this makes tons of sense, unlike this insane test.
That would seem to be about the only way to get chlorine into the explosion products, but making 7 tons of chlorinated compounds by exploding 700 tons of chlorine-free material, with the chlorine all extracted from traces of salt in the rock beneath the explosion? This doesn’t make physical sense.
There is corroboration of this: I downloaded the “Revised Environmental Assessment: Large-Scale, Open-Air Explosive Detonation, DIVINE STRAKE, at the Nevada Test Site”. Its word-search function is in working order and finds entries in tables. There is no mention of “phosgene” or “chlorine”.
Chlorine is the 19th most abundant element in the Earth (Anders & Ebihara, 1982)
Also, don’t forget the relative molecular weights of the components of the toxic chlorine compounds. You don’t need 7 tons of chlorine, just a fraction of that would be the weight of the chlorine. Still, I’m not claiming the estimate is accurate, but just that it doesn’t seem out of line to me. It stands to reason that at least some chlorine compounds will be created, so I don’t trust any one who “fails to mention” that there will be at least some.
That would be the environmental assessment people who stopped the test?
BTW, if a blast in limestone could produce anything remotely like a 1% yield of organochlorine compounds we’d have heard about it: miners would wear military-grade gas masks, and so on.
hmmm, it wasn’t clear to me from the article who stopped the original test in Nevada.
And no, I don’t trust ‘environmental assessments’ as a general rule unless I know exactly who is producing them. Oftentimes the ‘environmental assessment’ is bought and paid for by the same people who want to do the dirty deeds in the first place.
Having said that, I am certainly not a chemist, just an erstwhile geophysicist. Chemistry is not my bailiwick, but geologists have to know a good bit of it. I’m neither supporting or denying any of the claims. I just thought we might be dismissing the possibilities for phosgene creation for the wrong reasons.
Yes, I don’t understand the chemistry, but there’s a whole list. Click on the Valley Watch link. There’s phosgene, and a whole mess of other chemicals including carbon tetracholoride, a known carcinogen previously used as a degreasing agent in auto repair shops.
I know that there’s resistance to viewing this as a weapon of mass destruction because it isn’t a nuke, but I think that by any reasonable definition including the DoD definiton which includes high explosive desiged to create massive destruction, and purposely excludes means of transport. Thus while a Katyusha rocket isn’t a weapon of mass destruction, a Katyusha rocket with a chemical warhead is. It’s a gray area, but any way you cut this, this whole affair begs for comparision to Dr. Strangelove.
And, remember the whole point is to simulate a tactical nuclear strike on a reinforced underground target. This is preparation for a tactical nuclear strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Check out this Decmember 2000 Foreign Policy in Focus article.
And of course, the whole point of this test is to simulate a “tactical” nuclear weapon. I refuse to remove the quotes from that since there’s no such thing. Nuclear weapons are a horrific idea in any context, and any test that brings us a step closer to using them, as Divine Strake clearly is designed to do, is a disaster.
This is the same weapon they were going to test in Nevada, but even Orrin Hatch new that stirring up all that radioactive dust from previous nuclear tests was a spectacularly bad idea. Who are the Senators in Indiana? I’d hit the phones in a big way.
When it was planned for Nevada, one of the reasons was because it was going to be detonated over a buried tunnel so that reconstruction time could be tested, as well as the damage from the blast.
So my question is this: what is buried in Indiana?? What’s the underground facility that’s going to be the test subject?
This is just a normal limestone quarry as far as I know.
And Lugar and Bayh are Indiana’s Senators.
See my comments above. The salt story doesn’t make sense, and I’ve downloaded and searched the Revised Environmental Assessment. It contains no mention of “chlorine” or “phosgene”.
I don’t know what Valley Watch is linking to, but I’ll bet that there’s no evidence that it both comes from a credible source and describes the expected results of the test.
We’re strongest when we stick to the facts and don’t overstate. “Phosgene” is wrong. An immovable mass of explosives isn’t a weapon. Preparation for the use of nuclear weapons, however, is terrifying.
Actually, it’s precisely because this can’t be a test of a 700-ton weapon that we have good reason to think that it’s simulating something else. Something that produces a huge blast from a much smaller, deliverable mass — and there’s only one possibility for what sort of thing that could be.
See my above comment on the chemistry. I’m not claiming that phosgene will be a byproduct, but that it is at least plausible. Also, please note that the article quoted in the diary says “…1.4 million pounds of mostly ammonium nitrate…[emphasis mine]” It wouldn’t take much of some explosive perchlorates (rocket fuel, etc.) thrown into that mixture to provide enough byproducts to generate some phosgene. I’m not a chemistry expert or an explosives expert, but some googling around will get you info about perchlorates.
That’s a good point about perchlorates — if enough were included, this would overcome the objection that there just wouldn’t be enough chlorine.
I still wouldn’t believe the Valley Watch table (which isn’t from the environmental assessment). An explosion is like an incineration process. I’d expect to see dioxins mentioned, but not phosgene and tetrachloromethane.
As a check, I just looked up information on phosgene and incineration. There’s a lot on using incinerators to destroy phosgene, but it seems that they can only produce it if they’re burning chlorinated organic compounds. This is what I’d expect.
(I’ve got at least 5 feet of shelf space devoted to books on chemistry, so I’m not just groping around the internet for hints.)
I’ll bow to the judgment of the one who has a shelf full of chemistry books! However, being trained in the physical sciences, I would want to know more than we have in front of us before making or dismissing the claim that phosgene could be created.
I also did some rudimentary googling on phosgene, but couldn’t come to any conclusions. I still believe that it might be possible, particularly during the immediate cooling of the explosion. Having first heated up a ball of chemicals and its immediate surroundings to very high temperatures and high energies, the recombinations during the explosion and subsequent cooling might be conducive to creating almost anything, given the right ingredients.
Like I said, I don’t know that much about it, but it sure is interesting to argue about it!
Not to make light of the whole danged mess that brought this conversation/argument into being in the first place…
Great! — I should puff myself up as some sort of authority more often!
700 tons of high explosive set up for a test blast isn’t a weapon of mass destruction, because it can’t be used as a weapon.
No one can argue that this test is designed to simulate a nuclear explosion, and that conducting this test brings us one very large step closer to actual using nuclear weapons.
Indeed. Whatever the label, this is a sign of dangerous developments.
Let me get this straight.
DoD and DoE, tell people they decided not they will not be testing at the Nevada Test Site and that Divine Strake blast will be delayed indefinitely. It seems they were hoping people would forget.
And now they are going to detonate this thing in a more populated location? WTF? is this our punishment for stoping them? This is fucking mad.
And that surprises you? I wish it did me, but it doesn’t. I never believed it would be postponed for long – in fact I wrote that here at the time.
The delay nah, I figure they would do it again. What surprises me, they are willing to do it in a more populated surrounding. Usually, the Bush Junta could play ignorance and that is why people by their shit. Now, they are doing because they can regardless if their own base were to object.
I wish they would see the message they are sending to them, “It doesn’t matter what you say because in the end, you will still be suckered into voting for us.”
I must have missed your diary. I was wondering if anybody wrote about DoD’s decision to halt their testing.
Here’s the link – Steven D. promoted it to the Front Page when this was current.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2006/4/27/2324/67649