Why invest a bunch of time and effort making more and more deadly poisons when we've already got a wide variety of them that are cheap to manufacture, well known in how they work, and don't cost a bunch of research money to uncover?
One could optimize for compounds with hard-to-monitor precursors. Compounds that can be transported with low vapor pressure and volatility, so they cannot be easily sniffed out.
Or imagine a lethal compound with a high delay factor. Or something with specifically panic-inducing effects, perhaps hemorrhagic with a side effect of your skin sliding off in great slick sheets. Another interesting high delay factor compound might induce psychosis: have fun tracking where these gibbering maniacs were a week ago.
With a sufficiently dark imagination, "needs" could be identified for all sorts of compounds.
Remember, the goal is to throw a monkey wrench into the gearwork of an opposing civilization, not necessarily to kill. Fear of the unknown is very effective for this.
Errm, maybe They Do.
On the other hand, I used to work in an organic chemistry research lab, and at least within my ex university's context, we could basically order anything we wanted from the standard chemical suppliers without anyone batting an eyelid. Pre-signed but otherwise blank order forms were freely handed out, you just filled in what compounds you wanted and handed it over, two days later it arrived and you collected it from Stores.
I personally ordered a compound for a reaction I was planning and it was only after it arrived - when I read the safety data sheet - that I realised just quite how toxic it was.
I backed carefully away from that particular bottle, and left it in the fridge, still sealed. Then found another - safer - way to do the reaction instead...
Barrels? Based on what the LD50 was / what the data sheet said, the bottle I briefly had in my hands - and yes, they did start shaking - would have done for a good proportion of the residents of a small city had it managed to be spread around in a form that would have been ingested.
Chemistry labs are typically well-stocked with quite a lot of fairly unpleasant things. They're also the places where a lot of genuinely amazing and potentially live-saving work gets done!
Normally we'd do this in the high potency suite but the reaction scale was too big so we did it in the conventional GMP pilot plant. Bunny suits and cyanide meters for all three chemists.
I calculated that dose-wise, it was enough to kill tens of thousands, were it directly delivered, however if it were merely vaporized, it would only kill those in the immediate area, and would hydrolyze quickly. There's a great article linked elsewhere in thread about the ineffectiveness of chemical weapons, I've added it for convenience because it's a great read. Air is big, the distance-cubed law really dilutes any toxic agent beyond dangerous limits quite fast (comparing pound for pound lethality of conventional explosives).
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.
They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it.
EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
I really dislike these sorts of "name drop" comments. They're just equivalent of "F" or "the front fell off" with a high enough brow for HN veneer on top.
Here's a relevant software-related analogy:
I work in a situation where if we receive certain types of data, we have to go through proper procedures (including an official incident response team). It would be very easy for me to say "I've verified that nobody accessed this data, and we can just delete it," instead of going through the proper channels, which are VERY annoying and require a bunch of paperwork, possibly meetings, etc.
Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach.
And then people go back through the records, and both the junior engineer and I get fired for bypassing the procedures which we've been trained on, all because I wanted to save some time.
You are assuming rules say what they mean and mean what they say (and are even written where you're looking, and if they are that they're up to date). If it's your first week on the job, by all means, do the most literal and conservative thing. If it's not, well you should know what your organization actually expects of you, was is expected to be reported and what isn't.
There's a fine line to walk between notifying other departments when they need to be notified and wasting their time with spurious reports.
When maintenance discovers their used oil tank is a hair away from being a big leaking problems they just fix it because they are the guys responsible for the used oil and keeping it contained is part of their job.
Your bio lab or explosives closet isn't special. If the material is within your department's purview then that's the end of it.
Not every bug in production needs to be declared an incident.
>Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach.
You can sling hypothetical around all you want but for every dumb anecdote about informal process breaking down and causing stuff to blow up I can come up with another about formal process leaving gaps and things blowing up because everyone thought they had done their bit. It's ultimately going to come down to formal codified process vs informal process. Both work, both don't. At the end of the day you get out what you put in.
>The fact that you're posting this as a throwaway indicates that you don't want your HN account associated with these proposals.
This account is how old? Maybe I just use throwaways because I like it.
sadly, after 30 years of training to be a superhacker on ML, my greatest value is actually in dealing with intra-organizational politics.
At the root of researchers' reactions to EH&S are two things:
1) EH&S will frequently be the source of unfunded and unresourced mandates. "You must stop your research until you've properly tidied up all of your electrical cords" is, in the short term, an impediment to forward progress. Researchers frequently under-budget for safety/disposal costs when submitting proposals, leaving nobody with money to foot the bill for expediting the resolution for a safety stoppage.
2) The statistical likelihood of a single accident is greater for a large organization than for a single research group. One group can get away with a lethal practice for a hundred years before the first death. A hundred labs will only get away with a similar practice for a year.
If you find a competent and reasonable EH&S auditor, they are a great resource. They may ding you for some safety violations, but they'll be able to point the way toward safer practices. In the best case, even if they don't have mitigation funds for longstanding problems, their voices carry real weight and can expedite the allocation of scarce resources toward real safety concerns.
Oh yes, and this isn't a new phenomenon, for instance:
"When Cambridge's physicists moved out of the famous Cavendish laboratories in the mid-1970s, they unintentionally left behind a dangerous legacy: a building thoroughly contaminated with mercury. Concern about rising levels of mercury vapour in the air in recent months led university officials to take urine samples from 43 of the social scientists who now have offices in the old Cavendish. The results, announced last week, show that some people have exposure levels comparable to people who work with mercury in industry."[0]
[0] The mercury the physicists left behind https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817450-800-the-merc...
Quite possibly!
The previous occupant of my bench area (and hence adjoining fridge space) left some barely-labeled custom radioactive compounds(!!) in the fridge me to find shortly after I took over that space, so I know how that feels.
After consulting suitably-trained personnel, the contents of the vials were then disposed of ... by pouring down a standard sink, with lots of running water.
Those were the days :eek:
I've wondered how manufacturing plants handle this. You back away because you're afraid of touching the stuff - how does a giant factory that produces and ships the stuff handle it?
There is plenty of dangerous chemicals made on a huge scale - sulfuric acid, cyanide, explosives, ...
Although certainly over-confidence can also happen on the other end, e.g. if something that's quite similar to other dangerous things you work with suddenly has an additional trap. And Safety Datasheets are notorious for not necessarily representing actual in-use risks well.
But also a lot of what the GP says doesn't apply, because on the case of terrorism, "They" is either the police or random people, so "They" definitively do not have antidotes or training on how to handle known poisons.
You'll get nuked (or similar WMD) for that.
Imagine a somewhat more realistic set of applications for hot new research chemicals.
How about aircraft or shells or covert actors spray some "thing" that shorts out electrical insulators 1000x more often than normal. Or makes the vegetation underneath power lines 1000x more flammable than normal vegetation. Our power is unreliable causing a major economic hit both directly and via higher electrical bills. If "they" want to invade now the civilians won't have power and be more likely to get out of the way long before the front line troops arrive. I mean you could probably put nano-particles of graphite in a spray can right now, then stand upwind of a power station or substation, but I bet extensive research would do better. A lot of high power electrical "Stuff" relies on plain old varnish being inert for a long time ... what happens if it wasn't? Again you shut down a country they gonna nuke you, but what if electrical power transformers and switching power supplies only last one year on average instead of ten? Thats a huge economic and maybe military strategic advantage but would you get nuked back because some nation's TVs burn out in one year instead of the carefully value engineered ten years?
How about a spray or microbe or whatever that screws up air filters. Who cares, right? Well most troops (and cops) in most countries have gas masks. Zap their masks via whatever new magical method, then drop simple plain old tear gas the next day or until logistics catches up, which will take awhile assuming they even know they're damaged. Normally when hit with CS, they'd mask up and the CS would have no effect on mask wearers other than reduced vision, but now the side that didn't get their masks ruined has a HUGE tactical advantage.
If you make a bioweapon and kill half the population, they gonna be PISSED and you're gonna get nuked. So try something a little more chill. If your vitamin A reserves are gone, your night vision is temporarily essentially gone. Yeah for long term vit A deficiency you'll get long term skin, general growth, and infection risk problems, but if someone sprayed you with some weird compound that made you pee out all your bodies stores of Vit A before tomorrow morning, the only real short term effect would be night blindness, and that would go away in a couple days with a normal-ish diet or by taking a few days of multivitamin pill or a couple supplement vit A pills. So spray the enemy (and/or the civilians) and they can't see in the dark so magical automatic curfew for the civvies and attack the night blind military and absolutely pound them because they're night blind and can't see your guys. If they have NVGs then hit them at dawn/dusk when the NVGs won't work completely correctly but they can't see without them because of night blindness. Its temporary and never hurt no one other than the opfor "owning the night" until the victims figure it out or naturally recover, so at a strategic / diplomatic level would a country nuke another country because they couldn't see at night for a couple days? Naw probably not. And you can imagine the terror attack / psych warfare potential of leaflets explaining, "we turned off your night vision for a couple days, now obey or we shut off cardiac function next time" Either for the government to use against civilians (think Canada vs truckers) or governments to use against each other (China vs Taiwan invasion or similar). Or give them temporary weird fever sweats or turn their pee robins-egg blue or all kinds of fun.
Now the above is all sci fi stuff I made up and AFAIK I'm not violating any secrets act, unless this post magically disappears in a couple hours LOL.
Think of the new non-lethal battlespace like computer virus attacks. Yeah, we could "EMP" Russia to shut off most of their computers and they'd be really pissed off and nuke us right back so thats a non-starter. But release "windoze annoyance virus number 31597902733" and that could have real world effects. Especially if you release 20,30,4000 new zero-days on the same day.
Interesting example of how cyber attacks could blow back. Anything you put in a virus can be taken out and used against you.
Dropping anti-radar chaff strips is a very good lo-tech way of shorting transformers and power lines. I can't find a link, but IIRC the USAF discovered this accidentally when training missions led to power outages in nearby towns.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Graphite_bombs#/...
This kind of exists already. BZ gas is the well-known delirium-inducing compound with a delay of several hours: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-Quinuclidinyl_benzilate#Effe...)
The effects are probably mostly temporary though.
If you wanted to install fear into a country, I think being attacked by some custom, previously unknown chemical weapon would scarier than sarin.
Who might invent a bunch of time and effort in those areas?