Comment by logifail
4 years ago
> 3 barrels of the stuff
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!
You can't just tease us like this! If not the actual chemical... maybe an analogue or something? Chemistry is one of my great fascinations lol.
Not GP but one time we did a cyanation reaction (attaches a -CN group) in the pilot plant involving trimethylsilyl cyanide (TMS-CN). We had what looked honest to god like an 8lb propane tank of the stuff ("cyanide and cyanide accessories" lol), with an air-free delivery siphon, typical for air-free, pyrophoric, and toxic reagents.
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...
Maybe azides.