Al Qaeda terrorists contemplated an attack on New York subways in 2003 using an “easily constructed” device called a “mubtakkar” to release cyanide gas, according to a story in Time Magazine this week.
But there are reasons to question the reliability and significance of the story, suggested chemist George Smith of GlobalSecurity.org.
For one thing, “why, if the mubtakkar of death is so easy to make has it not been seen since, or employed in Iraq, or used anywhere there have been other terror attacks?”
See Smith’s skeptical account on his new blog Dick Destiny here and here.
An overview of chemical warfare agents and analytical methods for their identification was prepared this year by Defence Research and Development Canada.
See “Analysis of Chemical Warfare Agents: General Overview, LC-MS Review, In-House LC-ESI-MS Methods and Open Literature Bibliography” (pdf), Defence Research and Development Canada, March 2006.
To tune into the action on the ground, we convened practitioners, state and local officials, advocates, and policy experts to discuss what it will actually take to deploy clean energy faster, modernize electricity systems, and lower costs for households.
From grassroots community impacts to global geopolitical dynamics, understanding developing data center capacities is emerging as a critical analytical challenge.
Over the past few months, the Trump administration has been laying the foundation to expand the use of the Defense Production Act (DPA) for energy infrastructure and supply chains.
Get it right, and pooled hiring becomes a model for how the federal government decides what to do together and what to do apart. That’s a bigger prize than faster hiring. It’s a more functional government.