May 18, 2004

By John J. Lumpkin
Associated Press

The discovery of an artillery shell apparently filled with a deadly nerve agent has raised fears among U.S. officials that insurgents may have more — and will learn how to use them to greater effect.
But officials stopped short of claiming the munition was definite evidence of a large weapons stockpile in prewar Iraq or evidence of recent production by Saddam’s regime — the Bush administration’s chief stated reason for invasion.

Some U.S. officials and weapons experts suggested the artillery shell may be an experimental design that predates the 1991 Gulf War.

A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the origin and age of the artillery shell are under investigation, but said shells of this type have a long shelf life, so it could have been constructed some time ago.

Iraq first field-tested such a shell containing sarin in 1988, the defense official said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned that the results were from a field test, which can be imperfect, and more analysis is needed. “We have to be careful,” he told an audience in Washington on Monday.

It may take some time to determine precisely what the chemical was, what risks it may pose to U.S. forces and other implications, Rumsfeld said.

Also on Monday, two U.S. officials acknowledged finding an old artillery shell that apparently had been filled with mustard agent, a chemical weapon that was also part of Saddam’s arsenal. They said initial tests suggested at least some residue of mustard remained in the shell, found in Baghdad earlier this month.

David Kay, the former top U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq, said it’s possible the sarin shell was an old one, overlooked when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein said he had destroyed such weapons in the mid-1990s.

Kay, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, said he doubted the shell or the nerve agent came from a surviving hidden stockpile, but didn’t rule out that possibility.

“It is hard to know if this is one that just was overlooked — and there were always some that were overlooked, we knew that — or if this was one that came from a hidden stockpile,” Kay said. “I rather doubt that because it appears the insurgents didn’t even know they had a chemical round.”

The 155-millimeter artillery shell, which was converted into a roadside bomb, bore no special markings indicating it contained a chemical agent, so officials speculate that the bombers may have believed they were using a conventional artillery round.

Often chemical and biological weapons are marked to differentiate them from conventional artillery rounds, so people know how to handle them. Officials have said Saddam may have disguised his alleged weapons as conventional rounds to fool weapons inspectors.

No one was injured in the initial detonation Saturday. However, two U.S. soldiers who later removed the round experienced symptoms consistent with low-level nerve agent exposure, officials said.

The shell was a “binary” type, which has two separate chambers containing relatively safe chemicals, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq. When the round is fired from an artillery gun, its rotation in flight mixes the chemicals to create sarin that disperses when the shell reaches its target.

Since it was not fired from a gun but set up as a bomb, the explosion dispersed the precursor chemicals, apparently mixing them in only small amounts, officials said.

On the battlefield, such shells would be fired in the hundreds to affect a large body of troops, said Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

Saddam’s government disclosed binary sarin testing and production after Iraqi weapons chief Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Saddam’s son-in-law, defected in 1995. Saddam’s government never declared that any sarin or sarin-filled shells remained.

Because of that, the U.S. government views the discovery of the sarin shell as significant and is trying to determine if more exist, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity.

Since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. weapons hunters have been searching for weapons of mass destruction. So far, they’ve found only signs of a weapons program — but no evidence of actual weapons.

Associated Press Writer Katherine Pfleger Shrader in Washington contributed to this report.