The Licua Sample, and Chemical Weapons in the Bush War...

MacCaulay

Banned
I pitched this awhile ago, but no one bit so I'm going to try again when the waters are hopefully a bit friendlier to the topic. I'm not normally a WMD-POD kind of guy, but this one interested me:

The following is taken from the June 1993 issue of Jane’s Intelligence Review:
“From 1986 onwards, a series of incidents occurred which allegedly produced chemical casualties among UNITA forces. These patients exhibited a medically intriguing, neurological syndrome which became known as ‘steppage-gait’ syndrome. Briefly, the patients exhibited the progressive onset of a permanent, spastic paralysis. This mainly affected the lower limbs. There was a variable mix of motor and sensory affects...The author personally saw approximately 50 of these patients, although claims have been made that more than 400 existed.
…only young men from military areas were affected. Moreover, groups of affected men from particular units were seen. To date, no woman or child has been seen with the syndrome. One would expect that if dietary or infective conditions were responsible then a cross section of the population, including soldiers, would be affected, especially as UNITA troops lived in close contact with the local population.”

So there you go. I've been thinking about writing a story about this. The Jane's Intelligence Review article said they estimated the dates of Chemical Weapons usage in South West Africa between 1986 and 1990, which would mean that the South Africans could've found them during their campaigns into Angola. (Operation Hooper, etc.)
If the South Africans had found Cubans in possession of chemical weapons in the 1980s, I think things might have gotten much worse in the Bush War before they got better.

South Africans on the board, feel free to shoot it up, shoot it down, whatever. I'm not South African, I've just read a few books. So I'm just letting my imagination go free.
 
So there you go. I've been thinking about writing a story about this. The Jane's Intelligence Review article said they estimated the dates of Chemical Weapons usage in South West Africa between 1986 and 1990, which would mean that the South Africans could've found them during their campaigns into Angola. (Operation Hooper, etc.)
If the South Africans had found Cubans in possession of chemical weapons in the 1980s, I think things might have gotten much worse in the Bush War before they got better.

South Africans on the board, feel free to shoot it up, shoot it down, whatever. I'm not South African, I've just read a few books. So I'm just letting my imagination go free.

I am not a chemist, but the symptoms described do not sound like the effect of most well-known CWs.
 
McAulay, I think we had this discussion a while ago. What you describe are definitely some effects of neurotoxic agents - but rather something with mild neurotoxicity. But any side would have used a nerve gas the effects would have been much, much more grave than just motoric distortion. The stuff is so toxic that most of the vertebrates in the area of the battle would die. In a Dugway incident, just the amount of VX that was released by blowing an already emptied spray tank - in a few km altitude - resulted in a lot of dead sheep over a huge area.
It definitely is not an effect of more "conventional" CWs.

Mild to moderate neurotoxicity withs low onset is a feature of a huge amount of phosphor-organic and tin-organic compounds which are used in a huge variety of application from fuel stabilization to corrosion protection. It appears much more likely to me that one of the sides used some of the compunds in their tanks or any other machines, and their destruction released the stuff.
 
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