Chemical munitions used in 8/21 attack carried larger payload than previously estimated
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, some analysts said that they doubted that the rockets identified as having been used in the attack could have carried sufficient quantities of deadly agent to have caused such a large number of casualties. Lloyd and Postol say their analysis explains how the misidentification of a central rocket part led to the excessively small estimates of the chemical payload.
Lloyd told the Times that the manufacturing of the rockets – but not of the deadly nerve agent – could possibly be within the capabilities of the rebels, not only the Syrian government.
Stephen Johnson, a former British Army chemical warfare specialist who is now a forensic expert at Cranfield University, at Wiltshire, Shrivenham, United Kingdom, agrees, saying that a 50-liter payload means that only the Syrian army could have been behind the attack because only the Syrian government could have achieved such a large volume of production.
“That’s a fairly substantial amount to produce yourself and beyond the opposition in its wildest dreams,” he told the Times. Suggestions that the Syrian rebels seized or secretly obtained such amounts of deadly agents, Johnson added, lacked credibility. “It’s more supportive of the argument that it was the government,” he said.
Lloyd and Postol said experts analyzing pictures of the rocket debris in Syria had misidentified thin tubes found sticking out of the ground as the payload canister. Instead, Lloyd and Postol say, the tubes made up an inner explosive device which, when the rocket slammed into the ground, caused a much larger container to burst open and disperse large volumes of gas.
Images of impaled rockets, the two experts say, show the crumpled skin of the larger canister lying nearby.
“This design explains the evidence on the ground,” Postol said. The cloud from the impacting rocket, he added, probably rose to a height of ten or fifteen feet.
Raymond A. Zilinskas, a senior scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and a former UN weapons inspector, told the Times that the analysis of the two weapons experts was plausible. He said that deadly rockets that Iraq fired at Iran in the 1980 held nine liters of toxic chemicals, and that the Syrian rockets involved in the massacre looked like those but with an added secondary canister.
“I can’t say if it was 50 liters,” Dr. Zilinskas said, “but it would certainly add to the payload.”
— Read more in Theodore A. Postol, A Preliminary Analysis of the Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013 Against Unprotected Civilians in the Suburbs of Damascus, Syria (MIT, 2013); Richard M. Lloyd, Initial Investigation On Potential Chemical Weapons Found In Syria (Tesla Laboratories, 2013); and U.S. Government Assessment of the Syrian Government’s Use of Chemical Weapons on August 21, 2013
