Leftover nukes and other WMDs?

[swaghauler]

Originally Posted by Tegyrius

Found this thread while looking for something else and it prompted a couple of thoughts.

At the time of the Twilight War, US Army chemical munitions inventory consisted of:

• Sulfur mustard blister agent in 105mm and 155mm artillery shells and 4.2" mortar projectiles;

• GB (Sarin) non-persistent nerve agent in 105mm, 155mm, and 8" artillery shells and M55 artillery rockets; and

• VX persistent nerve agent in 155mm and 8" artillery shells, M55 artillery rockets, and M23 chemical land mines.

I believe the USAF also maintained aerial spray capability but I have no direct knowledge of those systems or which agents they were capable of dispersing.

A real-world per-site inventory of these as of 1997 is available here (the link I posted above is now defunct):

https://fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/cbw/cw.htm

The blister agent is mostly 1940s-50s production. The nerve agents date to the 1950s-60s.

Due to the mustard's age and its long storage period, a large quantity of the inventory has settled and solidified inside the munitions. This is a problem for the disposal efforts currently ongoing at Pueblo and Blue Grass. In rules terms within the T2k timeframe, I would expect this to reduce the weapons' effectiveness in terms of burst radius and damage dice.

The nerve agent is still viable with no effective loss of lethality.

The artillery shells are stored unfused. I have no info on the mortar shells but I expect they also were stored unfused. The M55s are solid-fueled artillery rockets, stored in their transport/launch tubes with both rocket motors and bursting charges in place. They are electrically-ignited - theoretically, an operator can initiate with a car battery. In a T2k recovery/theft scenario, the M55s are the munitions most likely to be usable by marauders, New America, or other factions in the absence of artillery and the requisite skill set.

- C.

All of the artillery shells used in Special Weapons after the 1980's remanufacture were M687 Binary Chemical Munitions (base ejection using the M577 VT proximity fuse). These rounds combined the agent (GB, DF, BZ and several more) with an "accelerant" (OPA or Isopropyl Amine) during the launch of the round. Accelerating the round out of the gun caused a "diaphragm" between the two canisters to burst, allowing the chemicals to combine and react. The agent was then "distributed" by a "nebulizer device" which activated when the VT fuse "detonated" the round. The Chemical canister was NEVER STORED inside the round but rather installed by the Special Weapons team immediately before the round was fired. Binary rounds could be configured to deliver whatever chemical agent you desired (both liquid and powdered) and would outnumber every other delivery system 10 to 1 in 2000.

The M55's were not the best option and many were destroyed during Operation Red Hat in 1990. This would have STILL occurred in the Twilight timeline because of an unforeseen issue. Sarin breaks down over time and forms an acid that began to eat the aluminum casing of the M55 rockets. The Nitrocellulose can also break down and become dangerous. This is why the rockets were refrigerated (to keep the rocket motors from becoming unstable and becoming "Vertical Limit Nitro"). Not (as is assumed) to preserve the GB2. Many of these rockets were leaking by the late 80's and early 90's and so "disposal" was mandatory for safety reasons. The Rockets could be either electrically ignited or set to explode by kinetic option (a small "kicker charge" could set off the nitrocellulose... one of the reasons they were "decommissioned").

[Tegyrius]

PM inbound, Swag. I believe you and I are working off of different knowledge bases of different vintages.

- C.