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CHEMICAL WEAPONS
When you think of a redundant system for detecting chemical warfare agents, chickens are not the first thing to come to mind. Unless you’re the Marine Corps. In past conflicts, chemical agent detectors have been notorious for sounding false alarms, which troops eventually ignored. With that in mind, the Marines searched for a viable backup and lighted on chickens. The idea is not as bizarre as it first appears. Birds and rabbits were sometimes used as sentinels for the presence of chemical agents in WWI. With little success, however, Marines have been tending chickens in the Kuwaiti staging area despite deployment of an enhanced automatic detector, the M22. The M22 uses ion-mobility spectrometry to tag nerve and blister agents. Its technology is “99% effective in detecting agents and has eliminated false alarms” caused by such past battlefield “interferents” as diesel fuel and smoke from burning oil wells, says Mickey L. Morales, spokesman for the Army Soldier & Biological Chemical Command, which developed the detector. Still, there have been reports of false alarms in Kuwait. |
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