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From: kissell@flairvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Soviet arms control violations - (nf)
Message-ID: <741@flairvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 29-Aug-84 14:52:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: flairvax.741
Posted: Wed Aug 29 14:52:29 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Sep-84 12:10:20 EDT
References: <29200142@uiucdcs.UUCP>, <1540@proper.UUCP>
Organization: Fairchild AI Lab, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 53

(ahem)

> Possibly the biggest problem with verification of any arms agreement is
> that there are lot of Soviet apologists out there who are ready and willing
> to "prove" (simply by vigorous assertion, mostly) that the violations
> unearthed by any verification program aren't "really" a violation.  Some
> on this net have gone so far as to claim that "yellow rain" is simply pollen
> or such.  Funny, I've never heard of any kind of pollen that causes people
> to die in agony, hemorraging (sp?) from every body orifice....

Let's talk about "yellow rain", then.  The original story, as put forth
the U.S. Department of State, was that the Vietnamese were spraying
areas resistant to their control with deadly chemical warfare agents.  
This was supported by eyewitness accounts of spraying aircraft, clouds 
of yellow droplets, and horrible death.  Survivors of such attacks were
found to have mycotoxins (nasty compounds naturally produced by some
fungi) in their bloodstream.  This was good enough for Mr. Schultz.
Since then, a number of findings by relatively apolitical researchers
has cast doubt on the story.

1)  The compounds found in the blood of the survivors were mycotoxins,
    but the blood tests were done several days/weeks after the exposure
    to "yellow rain", and the compunds detected are too unstable to
    persist in the body for that long.

2)  Samples of "yellow rain" have been shown to contain measurable
    amounts of mycotoxins, but they have also been shown to consist
    largely of pollen, bound together in a manner consistent with
    that of bee excrement.  I have seen photomicrographs of
    honeybee dung beside those of yellow rain samples.  They look
    very much the same, and the pollen in "yellow rain" is obvious. 
    Since then, etymologists have reported mass "cleaning flights" of
    tropical bees in southeast Asia, in which large swarms excrete
    considerable quantities of the stuff.  The bee dung is a reasonable
    growth medium for all sorts of fungi, so the mycotoxins found
    in the "yellow rain" samples could have occured naturally.

3)  Mycotoxins are a pretty dumb weapon of war. They are neither as
    swift, sure, stable, cheap, or easy as the usual run of 
    organophosphate nerve gasses.

These are not merely "vigorous assertions", but results of scientific
investigation reported in Science, Science News, and the Economist.
My own conclusion from all this is that, while the Vietnamese may
well be spraying *something* unpleasant in Cambodia (did they capture
any of our stockpiles of Agent Orange? :-{), the "yellow rain"
mycotoxin hypothesis is not well supported.

Kevin D. Kissell
Fairchild Research Center
Advanced Processor Development
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