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2004-10-06 Iraq-Jordan
Is this one of Saddam's mobile bio-weapons labs?
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Posted by Mark Espinola 2004-10-06 03:33|| || Front Page|| [11129 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 Does anyone have any direct knowledge about the normal process for creating pure hydrogen for balloon use? Do armies still use weather balloons to support artillery?
Posted by Super Hose 2004-10-06 4:01:17 AM||   2004-10-06 4:01:17 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 When we were children we used to mix water, hydrochloric acid and iron filings(zinc) in a coke bottle, (I can't remember in what sequence we added the ingredients, but I remember one sequence was dangerous because the mixture got quite volatile) slip a balloon over the top and tie the balloon with a piece of string when it was full of the resulting hydrogen.

Those balloons really used to lift off.

I'm trying to remember the formula:

ZN + H2O + HCL = ZNCL + H3 + O

Don't quote me, because my recollection is very hazy. It was something like that.
Posted by Bryan 2004-10-06 6:15:31 AM||   2004-10-06 6:15:31 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 We never had any hydrochloric acid around the house. :(
Posted by Shipman 2004-10-06 8:01:03 AM||   2004-10-06 8:01:03 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 ask your muslim neighbors they all seem to stock a lot of it
Posted by Frank G  2004-10-06 8:30:12 AM||   2004-10-06 8:30:12 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 They use it for cosmetics.
Posted by Mrs. Davis 2004-10-06 8:37:15 AM||   2004-10-06 8:37:15 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 Late in the 60’s there was a document floating around called the “Anarchist’s Cookbook” that outlined various ways to concoct bombs, pick locks, blow up school toilets and make anti-personnel devices.

During a presentation to a group of military wives I was asked why, if the book was so dangerous, the government wasn’t actively trying to ban its possession. My answer went something like this, “…although there are indeed several formulas that work, in the main, the majority are inaccurate, or even dangerous to attempt. Often resulting in a premature explosion either maiming or killing the bomb maker.” Darwin at his best!

Today the book has morphed into the “Terrorist’s Cookbook” with similar results.

My personal favorite chapters: 022: Fertilizer Bomb ; and 028: Exploding Lightbulbs
Posted by RN  2004-10-06 8:49:52 AM||   2004-10-06 8:49:52 AM|| Front Page Top

#7 Oh my Mrs D. - that was cold. (But true!).
Posted by Doc8404 2004-10-06 9:09:36 AM||   2004-10-06 9:09:36 AM|| Front Page Top

#8 My experience in the chemical industry leaves me believing two things after reading this article:
1. This is not a hydrogen unit. Aside from reasons mentioned, a hyrdogen unit would be hughly ventilated to reduce explosion risk. This unit, when coupled with its mate, appears to be designed for containment, not ventilation.
2. Elements of this story are very dubious. For example, the story says that the "brewing cannister" is stainless steel, but that's not what I see in the photo. The unit in the photo is painted. I've never seen stainless steel vessels painted. There's no need, and the paint wouldn't adhere well anyway. Another example: the vessels shown are uninsulated -- that would be odd if temperature control is indeed important, so I doubt that biologicals and brewing are involved. Maybe just chemical weapons.
Posted by Tom 2004-10-06 9:12:29 AM||   2004-10-06 9:12:29 AM|| Front Page Top

#9 Iraqi defectors have reportedly told the U.S. that an accident on a similar trailer killed 12 during a production run in 1998.
Boy, that must have been some fun. I'm sure Saddam had his own version of OSHA on top of that right away.
Posted by Dar  2004-10-06 9:26:49 AM||   2004-10-06 9:26:49 AM|| Front Page Top

#10 #3 "We never had any hydrochloric acid around the house. :("
We didn't either. And I'm damned if I can remember where we got it from. That's one of the frustrating things about reflecting on childhood. There are huge gaps in the recollection.

#6 Exploding lightbulbs? Maybe the guy who told me this trick intended the light bulbs to explode:

When you find that your lamp suddenly leaves you in the dark, the cause is often a detached filament in the bulb. Have a look at the bulb under another light, and you may find that the filament is hanging down because it has become detached from one of the two wire prongs in the bulb that lead to the innards of the lamp and ultimately to the power station. If the lamp in question is small, say a desk lamp, pick it up. If it's a big, standing lamp, you'll have to transfer the bulb to a smaller lamp, ouch, after letting it cool down first, silly.

Right, now make sure the lamp is switched on and then move it around in such a way that the filament touches the end of the prong from which it originally became detached. It welds itself to the prong and light dawns.

Your bulb now has a new lease on light.

Disclaimers:
If the filament is broken, not simply detached, this method is unlikely to work.
If the filament is intact and attached, but the bulb still doesn't work, then you'll have to consult a specialist.
Only attempt this job under the supervision of a qualified, reputable light bulb maintenance technician.

Light bulb maintenance is useful for those on a limited budget and those who never have spare bulbs around when they need them.

Please don't tell anyone about this. I don't want to get into trouble with the manufacturers.
Posted by Bryan 2004-10-06 9:37:45 AM||   2004-10-06 9:37:45 AM|| Front Page Top

#11 #8.Good points about paint and insulation and ventilation.
Posted by crazyhorse  2004-10-06 9:39:17 AM||   2004-10-06 9:39:17 AM|| Front Page Top

#12 Bryan:

Iron Filings (Fe) and Zinc (Zn) are different...

Iron Reaction:
Fe + 3HCl = FeCl3 + 1.5 H2
Zinc Reaction:
Zn + 2HCl = ZnCl2 + H2
Posted by BigEd 2004-10-06 10:42:30 AM||   2004-10-06 10:42:30 AM|| Front Page Top

#13 For example, the story says that the "brewing cannister" is stainless steel, but that's not what I see in the photo. The unit in the photo is painted. I've never seen stainless steel vessels painted. There's no need, and the paint wouldn't adhere well anyway. Another example: the vessels shown are uninsulated -- that would be odd if temperature control is indeed important, so I doubt that biologicals and brewing are involved. Maybe just chemical weapons.
Posted by: Tom

Tom, I don't agree with you on that one. In the photos a lot of the equipment is painted a uniform colour - if it's a nice resistant enamel paint that helps with washing everything down with alcohol and bleach, something you do on a regular basis when working around pathogens (trust me). It might also have been done as part of a prior decontamination - anything left just gets painted over. The insulation wouldn't necesarily be visible, the most common temperature control system is a water jacket between external and internal walls. In this case, the external wall wouldn't have to be stainless steel, only the internal wall. Together with the powerful heating/cooling system for the water, this would let you grow bugs that are fussy about their ambient temperature even where it hits 50C in the shade.

What puzzles me about the story is that if they found this so many months ago, why leak it now? It seems a weak response to the official evaluation of no WMDs.
Posted by MendoScot 2004-10-06 10:53:07 AM||   2004-10-06 10:53:07 AM|| Front Page Top

#14 From the article: Some in British and American intelligence groups charged the trailers were used for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery and weather balloons.

I can't speak for British intel, but it sure seems to me that "some" in the CIA are working at cross-purposes with the administration. Not necessarily to the extent that the State Dept is, but similar.
Posted by eLarson 2004-10-06 11:16:58 AM|| [http://larsonian.blogspot.com]  2004-10-06 11:16:58 AM|| Front Page Top

#15 Okay, MendoScot, we need discussion:
1. Stainless steel cladding (internal stainless, external carbon steel)is very expensive and is used for higher pressures to avoid making very thick vessels all-stainless, which would be more expensive. Unlikely for this application, but the vessel may have originated in Germany and been designed for a different application.
2. Epoxy over stainless steel does make sense for bleach washdown. It would avoid stress-corrosion cracking issues. That would help make the biological case if the vessel is indeed stainless. The article refers to signs of caustic washdown, though, not bleach. Is that applicable for biologicals?
3. Water jackets may not need insulation under some controlled low-humidity conditions, but this is not a humidity-controlled clean-room, it's out in the countryside, and the trailer seems designed for containment. Either way, that's a ticket to condensation and slippery puddles on the floor. Besides, it could be a little tricky to route all those gauge nozzles and other connections through the jacket in the configuration shown in the photo.
4. Note the manhole in the relatively-small "brewing canister". That's a heck of a jacket penetration and the cover is not insulated.
5. Anybody know why they might have to have such large access to the inside of such a small vessel? Maybe frequent weld inspections due to the hazards of the materials processed? Or clean-out of boilogical residue after decontamination?

Whatever this is, somebody needs to explain it. Saddam went to a lot of effort and expense to build this, he kept if far from U.S. forces invading through Kuwait, and this is NOT a hydrogen balloon filling station.
Posted by Tom 2004-10-06 12:12:15 PM||   2004-10-06 12:12:15 PM|| Front Page Top

#16 Sounds like a lot of hot air to me!
Posted by RN  2004-10-06 12:18:57 PM||   2004-10-06 12:18:57 PM|| Front Page Top

#17 lolol hot air lol
Posted by Mark Espinola 2004-10-06 12:26:53 PM||   2004-10-06 12:26:53 PM|| Front Page Top

#18 When you guys finish laughing, consider this:
Your government, either through ineptness or choice, has dismissed this odd and expensive contraption as not being part of a WMD program. It is an odd contraption -- and I'm not convinced whether it is for WMD chemicals, WMD biologicals, or WMD scam -- and your government doesn't seem to know what it is. I can't think of any reasonable explanation for why they would not, nor can I think of any legitimate reason why they would keep a secret on this. So are they inept, conspiring to hide a program, conspiring to infer a program that wasn't there, or what?
Posted by Tom 2004-10-06 1:13:56 PM||   2004-10-06 1:13:56 PM|| Front Page Top

#19 Hydrogen is not used for ballons these days. The Hindenberg seemed to be a turning point. Helium is heavier but safer.

Does anyone ever recall or remember reading that the Japanese floated ballons to our West Coast with bombs attached. Some of them did detonate in the State of Washington. Not particularly effective.
Posted by John (Q. Citizen) 2004-10-06 1:21:56 PM||   2004-10-06 1:21:56 PM|| Front Page Top

#20 Tom...it's obvious you've extensive knowledge in this arena. Sometimes the din gets so loud that it hurts and only a good laugh will relieve the pressure.

Rant on!
Posted by RN  2004-10-06 1:24:43 PM||   2004-10-06 1:24:43 PM|| Front Page Top

#21 Tom: I believe that it's fairly clear that our government is not monolithic and that some agencies wish to undermine the war on terror.

At least that's how I interpret the "It's been disinfected with bleach, so you can't prove anything" argument.

(The weight of contradictions the anti-war side seems willing to assume is strange to me; after one of the recent sarin-artillery-shell incidents I exchanged messages with a person who maintained that a) we hadn't found WMD and the basis for the war was false, and b) the discovery of the sarin shell should have been kept secret, because of operational security concerns.

I think he had a definite point with b), but he couldn't seem to see that it invalidated a lot of what he said about a). And of course other things, such as work on long-range rockets and cruise missiles (which couldn't be accurate enough to be useful with conventional munitions), indicate that Saddam was working on something, but since it wasn't a talisman, they don't want to see/hear it. I read an interesting article on this earlier, but I think the link is at home. I can't remember where I saw it... it had McGuffin in the title.

I'll see y'all later in the evening...
Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-10-06 1:34:37 PM|| [http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com]  2004-10-06 1:34:37 PM|| Front Page Top

#22 The United States is just about the sole source for helium in the world. Doubt we were selling it to Iraq for weather balloons.

What about the electrical method of separating oxygen and hydrogen from water?

Don't know what this is, but my gut says chemicals not biologicals.
Posted by Chuck Simmins  2004-10-06 2:31:58 PM|| [http://blog.simmins.org]  2004-10-06 2:31:58 PM|| Front Page Top

#23 The electrical method is very simple and the photos show equipment and complexity very different from that.
Posted by Tom 2004-10-06 3:36:24 PM||   2004-10-06 3:36:24 PM|| Front Page Top

#24 High speed Beer brewing equipment!
Well whatever it is for it wasn't good you can bet that.
Posted by Sock Puppet of Doom  2004-10-06 4:02:22 PM|| [http://www.slhess.com]  2004-10-06 4:02:22 PM|| Front Page Top

#25 I wonder if we could get Scott Ritter to take some time from his busy schedule, stalking under age girls , to explain this whole thing.
Posted by Poison Reverse 2004-10-06 4:19:02 PM||   2004-10-06 4:19:02 PM|| Front Page Top

#26 #24, Haha, that's exactly what I was thinking.
Posted by Anonymous4021 2004-10-06 5:48:50 PM||   2004-10-06 5:48:50 PM|| Front Page Top

#27 BigEd "Iron Filings (Fe) and Zinc (Zn) are different..."

Thanks for the info.... That sound you just heard was me knocking my head trying to remember some very basic chemistry studied at school. Now I recall that iron is Fe, but I don't know whether we used iron or zinc for the balloons. I see from your formulae that both work. Anyway, the one thing I can say with certainty is that those balloons took off!

Super Hose kicked this whole thing off with his question. Super Hose?............ Super Hose??

Posted by Bryan 2004-10-06 6:53:12 PM||   2004-10-06 6:53:12 PM|| Front Page Top

#28 John (Q.Citizen)"Does anyone ever recall or remember reading that the Japanese floated ballons to our West Coast with bombs attached. Some of them did detonate in the State of Washington. Not particularly effective."

Sorry I can't answer the question, but it reminded me that when we used to play with the afore-mentioned hydrogen balloons we used to dip a length of cotton in something flammable like methylated spirits, tie the cotton to the balloon and light this cotton fuse before releasing the balloon, then watch in awe as the balloon exploded high up in the sky.

I suppose at a stretch this could qualify as a bomb.
Posted by Bryan 2004-10-06 7:09:45 PM||   2004-10-06 7:09:45 PM|| Front Page Top

#29 When we were kids, we made balloons of mixed hydrogen and oxygen. Used jet-x fuse and a bettery for ignition. There was a righteous flash! And I still have all eyes, ears, fingers, and tozes. I read that some years ago, the chinese would do operations on light bulbs and put in new filaments. Now that is recycling!
Posted by Alaska Paul 2004-10-06 9:22:58 PM||   2004-10-06 9:22:58 PM|| Front Page Top

#30 BTW, the flanges on the pipe fittings and the access flanges do not look like more than 150# fittings, so we are not dealing in high pressures.
Posted by Alaska Paul 2004-10-06 9:25:52 PM||   2004-10-06 9:25:52 PM|| Front Page Top

#31 one thing i noticed was , why would they keep a balloon filling tank SO CLEAN?
Posted by smokeysinse 2004-10-06 9:28:15 PM||   2004-10-06 9:28:15 PM|| Front Page Top

#32 Bryan, I'm sorry for the confusing handle. When I began to frequent Rantburg a year ago, I signed on as Steve D, then noticed that there were quite a few Steve's on Rantburg. (In fact, there is an army of Steve's.) I changed my handle to a High School nickname that I earned for my outstanding ability to hose vomit and bubble-gum off of pavement as a summer maintenance worker in a popular Ohio amusement park.

With respect to the topic, I am familiar with the some industrial processes - to include heat-treating of bearing steel in an endogas atmosphere, which is 20 percent or so hydrogen. This gas is created by cracking methanol or by burning natural gas in the presence of a catalyst. It seemed possible to me that this equipment could have been used for either the generation of hydrogen or brewing up something. My hope was to solicit input from someone like Tom who is less of a generalist.

Frankly, the thread has been school call for me - more than I had hoped for. My only further input is:
1. Generation of industrial gases is conducted at high temperature or cryogenically. In both cases I would expect to see insulation.
2. I think hydrogen stress corrosion of stainless is usually not a problem unless the application is high temperature.
3. Stainless is left unpainted in medical wards on many navy ships because its surface is non-porous and cleanable with bleach. (Dr. Steve White might be able to speak to that topic better than I)
4. Many an artillery man could speak to whether the US, NATO or modern armies still use weather balloons and this types of trailers in particular, but If I were going to launch a balloon near a combat zone I would fill it from an armored truck full of compressed gas bottles.

Thanx to all.
Posted by Super Hose 2004-10-06 11:02:09 PM||   2004-10-06 11:02:09 PM|| Front Page Top

#33 If they needed to generate hydrogen for some balloons, it might have been easier to call Proton for a turnkey system. :-}
Posted by Super Hose 2004-10-07 2:35:00 AM||   2004-10-07 2:35:00 AM|| Front Page Top

#34 Super Hose - I wasn't complaining about your handle, I was just wondering where you were.
I found the debate fascinating, even though most of it was way over my head.
Posted by Bryan 2004-10-07 3:36:07 AM||   2004-10-07 3:36:07 AM|| Front Page Top

#35 I work nights and don't ususally check in at home.
Posted by Super Hose 2004-10-07 4:08:10 AM||   2004-10-07 4:08:10 AM|| Front Page Top

#36 Bryan, one of the guys that works for me was an artilleryman in the 70's. I have been meaning to ask about whether we used weather balloons to his knowledge. He says that he hadn't heard of their use since about WWI - the last time chem weapons were used extensively. What does that tell you? Neither ne nor I are experts, though.
Posted by Super Hose 2004-10-07 4:11:15 AM||   2004-10-07 4:11:15 AM|| Front Page Top

#37 Yes, I also work at night. Real drag. That's the reason I look like this ;-(
Posted by Bryan 2004-10-07 5:05:37 AM||   2004-10-07 5:05:37 AM|| Front Page Top

#38 Sorry Tom, been offline for a bit (orcs digging in the walls again).

1) I'm not sure expense would be a problem in the context. I'd have to dig out my catalogs, but units of this size aren't that costly. High pressure is not an issue for most pathogens, unless you want to sterilize that way. I would agree that Germany is a likely source for the equipment.

2) Caustic agents on a case-by case basic. Bleach is widely effective (e.g. Clostridial bugs) and sodium hydroxide generally more effective than acids - but particularly good for removing biological residues.

3) Don't know if condensation would be a problem out in the desert. It's true they don't have surface cladding on the pipes, but they do have a heating/cooling system for something. A 37C line wouldn't condense much.

4+5) I agree. It is a big one. Maybe they used Kurds to brush out the tank.

I also don't buy the hydrogen production story. I'd really like to know what units the guages on the tank are showing
Posted by MendoScot 2004-10-07 7:03:13 AM||   2004-10-07 7:03:13 AM|| Front Page Top

10:10 Antiwar
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