[Akmatov]

Thanks for the useful response Andy. I was toodling about in Germany in what we called MOPP 4 about five years after you. And yes, living in a rubber lined suit was a major pain; but, of course, dying from nerve gas would have been a lot worse. Anyway you guys must have picked a rare hot day. We even had an officer, looking to his next efficiency report I'm sure, run a 10k volksmarch in full MOPP4. Not happy at the end, but fully functional.

However, that being said, the Warsaw Pact had a major investment in both offensive and defensive chemical warfare. I'm sure they expected to receive some return for that investment. Very oddly, very little on the WP attack plans has ever made it into the public forum. However, some tidbits included the likelihood of a 10-20 km swath of the the Inter-German Border receiving a large dose of chemical munitions on day one. They must have thought it would do them some good.

I have to disagree that to a prepared military it is a mere inconvenience in a general sense. Years ago (back when we were out scaring the German cows with our NBC attire) there was a Canadian exercise with a substance that could be used to simulate nerve agents. In spite of extraordinary precautionary measures and unlimited resources, they had a 100% failure rate in fully decontaminating casualties and getting them into medical facilities without killing all the medical personnel along the entire evacuation chain. This kind of problem would have had major implications.

But I have to agree with you that within the scale of SPMBT and assuming prepared troops, it probably isn't worth the effort to code. Probably its only use would be against unprepared troops and no modern Western military would dream of saving the lives of their own troops by using 'nasty weapons'. Though I do wonder how much chemical protective gear they have with the NATO troops in Afghanistan. If there is any, I suspect it might be nicely crated in some supply depot somewhere. I know the Taliban occasionally mortar NATO bases, but I don't know what the minimum mortar size would be for gas. You would need more than just a few rounds here and there to do any real damage, but one could sure get the infidels attention with just a few sarin induced corpses.