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Comment by mandevil

Just as a note, real chemical weapons are not like this at all. Basically, VX (in the US and basically all other countries) is stored in binary form(1), two separate, basically clear chemicals with a glass wall that separates them, and the wall breaks from the force of the blast and the chemicals mix and you have VX, but it doesn't look cool. So Michael Bay had them make this instead, because it looked better on film.

There was a famous bit from the Iraq Inquiry Committee (aka the Chilcot Report) where they found that MI6 reported a bit of intelligence to Tony Blair that a source in Iraq claimed that they produced VX at the Al-Yarmuk plant- but described what was in the movie, not real life. After it was reported to Blair that they had sources who had seen VX in Iraq, they showed the raw intelligence to someone who knew something about chemical weapons and they said "Whatever your source saw, it wasn't VX" and MI6 realized that the source was lying. (I think that this source is different from the more famous liar Curveball.)

1: Besides being bad for humans, VX is also bad for metal, and will destroy any case if kept in long term storage. Basically if you load a normal chemical weapon shell with mixed, ready to go VX it will be unusable- more of a threat to the crew firing the howitzer than the enemy- within a few days.

parent mandevil 1 year ago

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