161–170 of 187 posts
I had thought it was going to be a fentanyl or carfentanyl aerosol spray, I suppose that might have rendered him incoherent sooner though. The use of VX seems like bragging really (as if the act wasn't already adolescent enough).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. And who knows what the affects of that were. But I do not agree with the claim that this is interesting in this context as it seems irrelevant to the discussion.
> But I do not agree with the claim that this is interesting in this context as it seems irrelevant to the discussion The discussion appears to be on the topic if we assume the topic is VX or nerve agents in general. I assume this is in line with your intention for posting a series of Wikipedia links on the subject in this thread, which I found both relevant and interesting. The reasons why I suggested that the dumpi…
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1wa1lrqxQpPqPXwnkmJ...
Doesn't North Korea has ICBM missiles capable of reaching Italy or Washington DC? A missile full of VX agent is scary to me. The most North KOrea can fit on a missile is a warhead as powerful as Hiroshima's but a missile full of VX could potentially kill everyone in Washington DC Plus think of all the implications of transporting VX through international borders. Did China accept having North Korean agents transporti…
No[0]. The missile Iran recently tested was thought to be a Musudan[1]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas...
[1]https://warisboring.com/was-irans-new-missile-born-in-north-...
I disapprove of assassination but I've got to admit this one scores 10/10 for sheer style.
Certainly the attempt to kill Castro, of all people, with an exploding cigar should rank higher. Just imagine how that CIA brain storming went: A: "We're tasked with killing Castro. Again. Any ideas? Anything? Nothing is stupid! Castro! Go! B: "Cigars" C: "Boom!" A: "I see we're in mind-melt here. No wonder the western world trusts us with their lives during these troubling times" If you insist on actually successful…
Doesn't North Korea has ICBM missiles capable of reaching Italy or Washington DC? A missile full of VX agent is scary to me. The most North KOrea can fit on a missile is a warhead as powerful as Hiroshima's but a missile full of VX could potentially kill everyone in Washington DC Plus think of all the implications of transporting VX through international borders. Did China accept having North Korean agents transporti…
Not quite. The longest-range operational missiles they have are intermediate-range only, capable at best of reaching targets in Guam and Siberia. They've test-launched a few longer-ranged missiles as technology demonstrators, but even the best of these (the Taepodong-2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taepodong-2) only had enough range to reach India or Alaska.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> While addressing a spellbound audience of young officers, he would sometimes partially immerse one finger in a small beaker of pure VX for a few seconds. Without interrupting his lecture, he would then amble to a nearby sink and casually wash the deadly chemical from his finger. The teaching point was that VX could not enter the skin instantaneously, and that accidental exposure of a small area would not be harmful…
I'm grateful for the edification, but dude, that's a very specific reference from a >$100 (text?)book on a very particular subject. I'm afraid to ask about your background :P
Is the chemistry of VX well enough known that countries without access to it can recognize it when they see it?
It is. See the various Wikipedia links given here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13720517 - it also contains the chemical structure. That's actually one of the things which makes chemical weapons far more dangerous than nuclear weapons - it is comparatively easy to produce them without much specialized equipment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that they tried pretty much anything... There were 600+ attempts on Castro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/638_Ways_to_Kill_Castro Granted, that's a figure from Cuban counterintelligence, so maybe slightly too high ;) But most of them are documented. And not only 'weird' ideas like exploding cigars - the last one, in 2000, involved 90kg of explosives: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-38121583
The method seemed to be specifically selected to implicate only one person, without any direct evidence that could prove that he ordered it. It's already bad enough to execute political rivals in your own territory, but when you go and do a public "message" assassination in another country, people might start to think you may be too dangerous to be a head of state--even those in your nominally allied states. The best…
That's what I call dedication!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that they tried pretty much anything... There were 600+ attempts on Castro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/638_Ways_to_Kill_Castro Granted, that's a figure from Cuban counterintelligence, so maybe slightly too high ;) But most of them are documented. And not only 'weird' ideas like exploding cigars - the last one, in 2000, involved 90kg of explosives: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-38121583
The method seemed to be specifically selected to implicate only one person, without any direct evidence that could prove that he ordered it. It's already bad enough to execute political rivals in your own territory, but when you go and do a public "message" assassination in another country, people might start to think you may be too dangerous to be a head of state--even those in your nominally allied states. The best…
In any state, ideas flow upward while authority flows downward. Let's consider a dictatorship for simplicity: it's not realistic to expect the dictator to think of everything other than for propaganda purposes. The dictator is presented with an endless supply of conflicting demands and requests, with different cost/benefit ratios. For any given idea, including his own, he needs to know roughly what the consequences are for implementing it.
For that to happen, junior intelligence and policy officials have to buy into and invest their political capital in an idea, and so on down the organizational pyramid of government. And the lower you get to the bottom of the pyramid, the more accessible you are to malefactors. So if you're a minor cog in the Chinese foreign ministry whose brief is to monitor North Korean affairs, North Korea might well take an interest in you and your extended family. And if you were to develop a reputation within the ministry for disliking Kim, it might become risky for your relatives to take foreign holidays, so you are incentivized to be cautious rather than prompting your boss to prompt their boss to Do Something about the Kim regime.
The messiness and made-for-TV aspect of it are the means of leveraging sustained attention. A simple shooting not have garnered anywhere near the same level of attention. It's high-precision terrorism as opposed to the mass casualty variety.