-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In <7k3Tce1w165w@bwalk.dm.com>, on 09/10/97 at 04:54 PM, dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM) said:
"William H. Geiger III" <whgiii@amaranth.com> writes:
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In <19970909130000.60003@sequent.com>, on 09/09/97 at 01:00 PM, Unicorn <hvdl@sequent.com> said:
Destruction by a nuclear blast is most likely not even the issue here. Using a relatively small amount of plutonium (ie. not even enough to produce a critical mass) and enough explosives to blast this into the atmosphere you can kill a (very) large number of people over a relatively small amount of time due to plutonium toxication. These devices are the real "dirty gadgets", not really expensive and therefor perfectly suitable for terrorist organisations.
But what a dreadfull way to die...
The US military during WWII had plans of doing just that in Europe to poison the crops and aid in the defeat of Germany.
Luck for Europe this was never followed through.
Actually, the Germans were aware of the plans and indicated that they'd kill the about 500K U.S. and British POWs if this happened. (They treated the latter much better than they treated Polish and Russian POWs, who were often summarily gassed.) For the same reason the Germans and the Allies didn't use poison gas in Europe during WW2, although both sides used it liberally in WW1, and the Japanese used it a lot against the Chinese. Game theory and stuff. :-)
Well part of the problem with using chemical agents is they are not very efficient. This is a lesson that was learned in WWI and most likely was the largest factor in them not being used durring WWII (durring WWI one was just as likely to be hit by one's own gas as the enemy was). It is even questionable as a terror weapon against civilian targets due to the quantities that would be needed to attack a large city like London. - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://www.amaranth.com/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBNBdYgI9Co1n+aLhhAQFXmAP9FIzNc52j7GNvypM8xCJh46+oB49en0oP yxc5eP3TKhF2txGjhq0FXmLzFvb78ObbZOnPRSI+sIy97dTcTyYHGni27ONy/aZc 2/ijx06c92bb/KOLJkl7doLD3kTi/quB7djQvceR6BJjr7bvY7onPmYOJ02FRqRC biHUV7bQ9I4= =3HkY -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----