I wasn’t much interested in the reports that Israel had struck a possible Syrian nuclear development site but I was interested in the report of a chemical weapons accident in Syria due to the provenance of the story:
LONDON, Sept 19 (Reuters) – An explosion at a Syrian military complex in July which killed 15 soldiers was a bid to arm a chemical warhead and was not caused by a heatwave as Damascus said, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly.
Syria had said temperatures up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) caused an ammunition dump to explode, killing the soldiers and wounding another 50.
But Jane’s Defence, quoting Syrian defence sources, said the blast occurred as Syrian weapons experts, with Iranian backing, were attempting to activate a 500-km-range (300-mile-range) “Scud C” missile with a mustard gas warhead.
“The explosion occurred when fuel caught alight in the missile production laboratory,” the magazine said, quoting the sources.
“The blast dispersed chemical agents (including VX and Sarin nerve agents and mustard blister agent) across the storage facility and outside. Other Iranian engineers were seriously injured with chemical burns to exposed body parts.”
The sources said dozens of Iranian missile engineers were killed along with the 15 Syrians.
As usual, Armchair Generalist offers sane commentary:
Mustard agent – it’s not a gas – isn’t banned under international law as much as it’s not supposed to be produced or stored by signatories of an international treaty – one which isn’t signed by Syria (or ratified by Israel). Iran, however, did sign and ratify the CWC, so that’s not a good thing for their image. The accident is unfortunate, but every nation (including the United States) has had ordnance systems blow up under testing and evaluation efforts, killing the operators. It’s the price of progress, in a sense.
I don’t have a lot to add to this story but I will offer one observation and a question. My observation is that the technicians reported killed were probably scarce and valuable resources. Here’s my question: does this alter Israel’s strategic or tactical considerations in any way?
You might find GlobalSecurity.org’s briefing on the Syrian chemical weapons program enlightening.
It’s certainly not a good thing that Syria and Iran have chemical weapons. But they are generally overrated. Lumping them in with nuclear weapons or infectious biologicals as “WMD,” as has been done in the past, is misleading. This is a WW1 era weapon, not exactly a technological breakthrough, useful for terrorizing civilians, useless against the Israeli army — unless the IDF is considering trench warfare. All in all, if you told me I had a choice between high explosive rounds raining down on my neighborhood and mustard gas, I’d say it’s a flip of the coin. And if I had a gas mask — as most Israelis do — I’d take the gas.
I’d suspect this “accident” was another message to Syria and Iran from Israel. Syria has been amassing thousand of rockets from Iran, making what Hezbollah had seem small. Israel is sending a warning….we have agents in your countries, and you’d best not mess with the IDF.