Chemical warfareMissing vial of VX nerve agent causes Army base lockdown
VX is an amber-colored, odorless, tasteless oily liquid that evaporates very slowly, almost like motor oil; one of the most lethal chemical weapons agents ever synthesized, it can be absorbed through the skin or inhaled as a vapor; VX affects the body’s ability to carry messages through the nerves, causing rapid death by paralysis; the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah was locked down over night — with between 1,200 and 1,400 people inside the facility — after a small vial of VX went missing; the missing vial was found at 3 a.m.; the base commander told reporters that the mishap resulted from VX liquid “misplaced into a different container that was improperly marked.”
Dugway Proving Ground, southwest of Salt Lake City // Source: abovetopsecret.com
Officials say a missing vial of nerve agent is responsible for a lockdown overnight at a Utah military base that carries out tests to protect troops against biological attacks.
Fox13now.com reports that the U.S. Army says Dugway Proving Ground, where military weapons are tested, was locked down for hours over a missing vial of VX “nerve agent.” The amount missing was less than one fourth of a teaspoon and it was recovered at around 3 a.m.
The Army says no one was in danger and the lockdown was ordered as a precaution. Between 1,200 and 1,400 people were inside the facility at the time.
The Proving Ground, covering a 798,000-acre swath of desert — about the size of Rhode Island — some ninety miles southwest of Salt Lake City, is the Army’s principal facility for testing of conventional munitions as well as chemical and biological weapons.
National Guard troops and the U.S. Air Force also conduct bombing and combat training exercises there, as do Special Forces troops headed for deployment in Afghanistan.
VX is an amber-colored, odorless, tasteless oily liquid that evaporates very slowly, almost like motor oil. One of the most lethal chemical weapons agents ever synthesized, it can be absorbed through the skin or inhaled as a vapor. VX affects the body’s ability to carry messages through the nerves, causing rapid death by paralysis.
A small drop on the finger can soak through the skin, attacking a person’s nervous system and proving fatal in minutes.
One milliliter of VX “certainly would be enough to kill one person. It could kill a hundred if it were sprayed properly,” Martin Caravati, medical director of the Utah Poison Control Center, told Reuters.
A news release from the base on Thursday said, “during a routine inventory of sensitive material in the chemical laboratory, Dugway officials discovered a discrepancy between the records and the agent on-hand. As a precaution, the commander immediately locked down the installation and began efforts to identify the cause of the discrepancy.”
The base commander, Colonel William King, told reporters in a news briefing carried on local television that the mishap resulted from VX liquid “misplaced into a different container that was improperly marked.”
“We’re still investigating because that to us is a serious mishandling of our agents,” King said.
He added that the lock-down was necessary to ensure “that there was no malicious intent to put (the chemical) somewhere else so that someone could later steal it.”
“As of right now, we have determined that there was no malicious intent. This was simply an administrative error in handling in our process,” he said.
No employees on the base were injured, a spokeswoman for Dugway told the station.
