Chemical weapons 101: Six facts about sarin and Syria’s stockpile

1.What is sarin?

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel speaks at the Pentagon in March. Hagel said that US intelligence has concluded 'with some degree of varying confidence,' that the Syrian government has used sarin gas as a weapon in its 2-year-old civil war.
(Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File)

Sarin is a nerve agent first developed by German researchers in the late 1930s. Up to 500 times more toxic than cyanide, it is a colorless and odorless liquid that causes severe muscle spasms, vision loss, and asphyxia, and which can kill within a minute of contact in extreme cases.

Sarin was classified as a “weapon of mass destruction” and banned in the United Nations’ Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. Syria is one of six countries that have not signed the convention.

2.How is sarin delivered?

Sarin can be deployed as a liquid (as in the Tokyo subway) but it can also be loaded onto missiles and mortars. In warheads it can be loaded with other chemicals or precursors that can convert the sarin to a nerve gas. Sarin-filled canisters can also be fired from anti-tank guns and shoulder-mounted launchers.

3.What is known about Mr. Assad’s sarin stockpile?

Syria’s Assad regime, under Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, is believed to have first stockpiled mustard gas in the 1970s, but in the 1980s it began converting pesticide plants to the production of sarin.

The Assad regime now stockpiles tons of the nerve agent in up to 50 locations. But so far the regime is believed by outside authorities (including the Israelis, who are most concerned about a transfer of chemical weapons to Assad’s non-state allies, such as Hezbollah) to have kept control of its stockpiles of chemical weapons including sarin, mustard gas, and perhaps the even more toxic gas VX that the CIA believes the Syrian government has tried to develope.

4.When has sarin been used as a chemical weapon?

A decade before Tokyo’s Subway Sarin Incident, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein used sarin against Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq war – and in 1988 as part of the cocktail of chemical weapons he unleashed against the Kurdish population of Halabja in northern Iraq. About 5,000 people were killed.

In 2004, Iraqi insurgents fired a shell containing precursors for sarin against a US military convoy. Two US soldiers were treated for symptoms of sarin exposure, but the exploded shell released only a small amount of sarin, perhaps because the chemicals were old or simply because the chemicals failed to mix inside the spinning shell as intended.

5.Why are the US and others having so much trouble proving Assad used sarin?

Syrian opposition forces say that up to 30 people died in attacks in March, but most of the photo evidence has shown survivors exhibiting signs of what could be sarin exposure, such as foaming at the mouth and constricted pupils.

Evidence of the use of sarin in Syria is coming in the form of photos, soil samples, and blood samples – the latter being the most conclusive form of evidence, according to military experts. But the blood samples have been provided by Syrian opposition forces, according to US officials speaking on the condition of anonymity – a fact that reduces the “degree of confidence” that US intelligence agencies have in them because they could have been tainted to provide a particular conclusion.

This is why the US and other countries, including Britain and France, want a UN chemical weapons investigation team to gain access to Syria as soon as possible.

Assad was originally supportive of a UN team investigating one reported March 19 attack – but when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for the team to look into all reported incidents of chemical weapons use, Assad balked.

Siding with Assad, Russia has said a broadened investigation risks turning into a repeat of the UN’s investigation of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” – weapons that as it turned out did not exist, but which nevertheless served as the pretext for the US invasion.

6.Hasn’t Assad said he would never use chemical weapons against his own people?

Last September, the Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, declared the regime would only use chemical weapons in the case of an “external aggression.” (Since then Mr. Makdissi has fled the country). The declaration was noteworthy because it was the regime’s first acknowledgment that it possesses chemical weapons stockpiles – but also because it offered some reassurance that Assad had his own “red line” about using his stockpiled sarin and mustard gas against Syrians.

But some skeptics of the regime’s intentions say it’s worth keeping in mind that Assad, who seems to have had no qualms about raining down Scud missiles and explosives from helicopters and bombers onto Syrian neighborhoods, has also made a point of describing the rebels fighting him as “terrorists,” and in some cases as terrorists who have come from outside Syria to fight.

George Lopez, a former UN sanctions expert now at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., says that not only does Assad insist that the uprising is coming from “foreign terrorists,” but US and other experts now agree that foreign extremists are increasingly involved in the fighting.

Put those factors together, he says, and one can see how Assad’s “sick logic” would “excuse and explain” the use of chemical weapons.

Echoing those who say Assad may have launched a small-scale chemical weapons attack as a test for something bigger, Professor Lopez adds, “We should be very, very worried.”