The Rock VX Gas Canister Build (2022)(therpf.com) |
The Rock VX Gas Canister Build (2022)(therpf.com) |
[0] https://propstoreauction.com/lot-details/index/catalog/319/l...
There was a famous bit from the Iraq Inquiry Committee (aka the Chilcot Report) where they found that MI6 reported a bit of intelligence to Tony Blair that a source in Iraq claimed that they produced VX at the Al-Yarmuk plant- but described what was in the movie, not real life. After it was reported to Blair that they had sources who had seen VX in Iraq, they showed the raw intelligence to someone who knew something about chemical weapons and they said "Whatever your source saw, it wasn't VX" and MI6 realized that the source was lying. (I think that this source is different from the more famous liar Curveball.)
1: Besides being bad for humans, VX is also bad for metal, and will destroy any case if kept in long term storage. Basically if you load a normal chemical weapon shell with mixed, ready to go VX it will be unusable- more of a threat to the crew firing the howitzer than the enemy- within a few days.
By Michael Bay logic, injecting atropine also prevents one's skin from falling off.
I had forgotten about The Rock, but recently rewatched it - and halfway through I had to check, and sure enough. Michael Bay.
Also, for a more recent cheesy movie (with Nicholas Cage), Drive Angry is surprisingly good. In a bad way.
Recall that Iraq was well known to have used significant quantities of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War (against Iranian and Iraqi civilians): it was only after UN Security Council Resolutions 686 and 687- ending the Gulf War with the liberation of Kuwait- that Iraqi lost the ability to have Weapons of Mass Destruction. And so UNSCOM tracked down a lot of leads and visited a bunch of places inside Iraq for several years, looking for evidence of these, and the idea that Iraq hid the massive programs necessary to develop state-of-the-art technologies like that, and produce them in significant quantities, while remaining totally covert seems unlikely.
Back in 2002 I was an intern at a non-proliferation group in Washington DC, and spent some time talking to a (now sadly deceased) MITRE expert on chemical weapons about all of this, but I didn't take more than 1 year of college chemistry so I'm not an expert on the chemistry myself.
But I did just spend hours of the holiday weekend playing a typical video game that's pretty much entirely about shooting people. (And in this case with a sprinkling of sometimes running them through with a machete instead.)
So maybe we already society-wide glamorize weapons and killing, but the nerve gas variety of that is... only unfamiliar?
Or it is innately less-appealing somehow?
Movies are all about how they make the audience feel, and everyone remembers the creepiness of this particular prop in The Rock. It's awesome that someone replicated it because yeah - it's a very impressive prop because of exactly that reason - it was basically a character itself in them movie, and was an impressively constructed visual piece which was meant to exude menace.
You're doing a weird thing of saying "obviously this is about nerve gas"...no it is first and foremost about a movie, a story, and the emotional narrative it told.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/rock-scr...
I got stopped once because they claimed I set off their explosives detector. My wife ran off laughing as I started to nervously unzip a case filled with bomb-looking parts.
The scene with the needle you have to jab in your heart reminded me of defibrillators (nothing deeper than medical heart thing = defibrillator) so as a kid I always assumed those defibrillator cabinets in public areas was nerve agent antidote! Just in case!
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
TL;DR is that it's not used these days because it wasn't actually all that effective, at least not when used in modern warfare. That is also why it's (mostly) honored, even though many other prohibitions under international treaties are ignored by the largest (ab)users.
However, if conditions similar to WW1 become dominant on the battlefields - and, looking at Ukraine, trench warfare at least is back in some way - this might get re-assessed.
We prosecuted the Nazis under the Geneva Conventions at Nuremburg.
Every US President since then has demonstrably broken them.
“After the defeat the Iranians said the attack killed more than four thousand civilians — welcome to the VX gas attack” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nem_uP-bpFs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_massacre
1: In roughly the same way that he had invaded Iran in 1980 when that country was in disarray after the fall of the Shah. Note that he doesn't seem to have noticed that his invasion was a huge disaster for Iraq, killing huge numbers of people, destroying massive quantities of stuff, going deeply into debt- so much debt that he decided to try and seize Kuwait, bringing the wrath of the United Nations down upon him- and gaining him exactly nothing. The idea that other leaders might be smart enough NOT to do that never seems to have crossed his mind.