Military and terrorist attacks against chemical weapons sites and the prospect of a Syrian War Syndrome

Abstract

Sarin explosive dispersion simulations indicate that the effects of military, terrorist and accidental explosions on Sarin storage areas could be devastating at large distances from ground zero as they would practically amount to gigantic lethal chemical weapon explosions. As a case study, the April 14, 2018 military strikes on the alleged Syrian chemical weapons sites are investigated due to their high relevance and similarity to the Sarin releases occurred in the US demolition operations at the Khamisiyah Pit in Iraq (1991) believed to have been a possible source of the Gulf War Syndrome. The results show that even if a few kilograms of Sarin had been explosively released from the alleged chemical weapons sites targeted in Syria then hundreds to thousands of people would have experienced lethal or serious irreversible health effects in Syria. The prospect of the appearance of a Sarin-induced Syrian War Syndrome is also discussed for the first time.

After the publication of the first version of the paper its author detected and corrected errors in the library of EPICODE which were acknowledged by the creators of the code at LLNL. Unfortunately, those errors had affected some of the calculations of the first version and therefore its revision was deemed necessary. However, the general results and conclusions of the paper remain the same