The mainstream press and social media have given us yet another example of how conventional wisdom is more an information weapon than a battlefield weapon.
12 April 2022 – Last night across main stream media and social media (is there really a difference now?) we saw a stream of reports that the U.S. and German intelligence services were looking into reports that chemical weapons have been used by Russian forces attacking the Ukrainian port of Mariupol. Ukraine’s Azov regiment said three soldiers were injured by “a poisonous substance” in a small drone attack on Monday. They are entrenched at the massive Azovstal metals plant in Mariupol. However, no evidence has been presented to confirm the use of chemical weapons.
Trying to bring perspective to this in media appearances and across social media have been Dan Kaszeta and Andy Weber:
Dan Kaszeta is a specialist in defence against chemical, biological, and radiological weapons and warfare. Although he now lives in London, the first part of his career was in the United States. He was commissioned as an officer in the US Army, assigned to the highly skilled U.S. Army Chemical School. He has three decades years experience in Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) response, security, and antiterrorism. He works with the OSINT Bellingcat and tightly involved with covering the war.
Andy Weber was Obama’s assistant secretary of defense responsible for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs. He was the man tasked with finding, removing and destroying the Syrian arsenal of chemical weapons.
I had a brief Twitter exchange with Dan and the following is a mash-up of that conversation with what both Dan and Andy have noted in their media appearances and across social media:
First off, we still have a paucity of information. It is legitimately difficult to assess these situations remotely, particularly when we largely have second-hand or third-hand reports rather than actual evidence from the scene. Even if we did have video of, say, sick people, it is difficult to do telemedicine.
And we have social media pundits jumping straight to nerve agents and even a specific diagnosis of Sarin. Cut that out. That’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because if someone gives nerve agent drugs to someone who isn’t a nerve agent casualty, it will make them worse or kill them. Nerve agent antidotes are specifically that. They are not some kind of universal chemical agent antidote.
Back to the alleged incident. Let’s look at what we have as our thin basis of evidence. We have a witness account citing a drone. Question: do we have a picture or video of the drone? We don’t know if the drone was actually involved or a drone just appeared and was coincidental.
We have a handful of sick, but not dead, Ukrainian soldiers. They’ve had difficulty breathing and ataxis. This does not tell us much. People leaping onto nerve agent diagnosis from this presentation of signs and symptoms are way off.
We have seen the phrase “vestibulo-atactic syndrome” bandied about with much evident authority, but our opinion right now is that’s a quite advanced medical diagnosis. Question: did someone put some signs and symptoms into Google and come up with that phrase? What we really have is people being dizzy. What we don’t have is signs and symptoms (and any kind of medical diagnostics) that narrow the investigative focus to chemicals, let alone a specific chemical warfare agent. For us to get to a conclusion that a chemical weapon was used, we need a few things that are missing at this point.
You need to look at the location. It’s a steelworks. There’s lots of scope in an industrial setting for conventional or incendiary weapons to cause chemical problems because of fires and explosions.
Also, look at the broader environment. Mariupol is one big toxic burn pit at the moment. Somehow we’re supposed to assume that one small drone payload of something is tragically unhealthier than the rest of this toxic mess of an environment. It is, in fact plausible. But it’s also plausible that we have a classic problem of smoke and flame and modern industrial materials (plastics, etc.) burning all over the damned place.
Also, we do not have any actual description of the alleged chemical. Is it a powder, a liquid spray, a mist, a gas, a vapour? Does it smell? Does it have a color? The answer we get was that it was invisible and odorless. This raises the question – how do you know it was there or tie it to the drone? Without environmental and/or biomedical samples, this will always remain an unknown. Remember: a steelworks. Is it metal fume fever? SOB and convulsions are not uncommon. A fire/exposion would vaporise the metal oxides.
The point is that if it’s a steelworks there are bound to be all sorts of toxic materials there irrespective of war. Bombardment will release them into the atmosphere as toxic dust. Even cement dust can have effects similar to toxic chemicals if it’s ingested.It doesn’t have to be “chemicals”.
By the way, we are not accusing anyone on the scene of lying. It’s just that chemical attacks are, in fact, a rare thing, and people might not know what to expect or look for or what smart questions to ask on the spot. But we have been down this road dozens of times in the Syrian war and you cannot make a definitive diagnosis based on very vague information.
By going all apeshit on Facebook and Twitter about a vague and ill-defined incident, you’ve all just demonstrated how conventional wisdom is more an information weapon than a battlefield weapon.
Now, we’re still waiting for someone to tell us how making a few soldiers sick actually wins the battle for the Russians. Trying to work out a cost/benefit equation here and something is missing.
This is a tough war to follow. Any war is tough to follow with a layer of information warfare. But I’ll end with a note Greg made: the fog of war is real. And Ukraine is a swamped and fragile information space. It’s a front in an information war.
NOTE TO READERS: Dan wrote this about his work in Syria 9 years ago and it is still valid: