Talk:Sulfur mustard

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chemicals WikiProject
Chemistry Portal
Sulfur mustard is within the scope of WikiProject Chemicals, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of chemicals. To participate, help improve this article or visit the project page for details on the project.
Chemistry WikiProject This article is also supported by WikiProject Chemistry.
Start This article has been rated as start-Class on the quality scale.
High This article has been rated as high-importance on the importance scale.

Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments here to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it will need.
MILHIST This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see lists of open tasks and regional and topical task forces. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.

Is it known how the Mustard gas causes blisters? AxelBoldt 19:03 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)

http://www.inchem.org/documents/pims/chemical/mustardg.htm has more detail than some of the other Web pages I've seen. Any help?

mustard gas does have an odor, it is one that made people tear and start to bleed from the inside. Coughing and vomiting came after being exposed to the poison their blood was full of monkey semen.

There is something not quite right here: it the first section, Mustard gas is said to be odorless, while further down in the article is "has a distinct odor", these two don't mix.

Also I am in doubt whether the first statement of Mustard gas being odorless is really true, as far as I know the name does NOT come from the color of the substance, but from a very light odor resembling mustard or garlic. I will try to find references on this.

I changed the statement about odorlessness a bit to correspond with the source mentioned in the link at the bottom. -- Jörgen Nixdorf
There is still the odorless...smells like mustard inconsistancy in the first two sentences. Can someone competent fix this?69.207.22.219 06:05, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
It also says that they are colourless and then that they're yellow-brown coloured in the next sentence. I'm assuming that one means in its purified form and the other in its common form (whatever that might be) but I'm not changing the article on the basis of a guess...Chris 12:52, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

How the compound with single bonds only can be polymerised? --Grzes 01:23, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)


Elimination of HCl could generate double bonds; also homolytic cleavage of C-Cl and C-S bonds could give rise to unclean polymerisation via radical mechanisms.

Contents

[edit] Fatality Rate

The Wikipedia article states:

"Mustard gas was dispersed as an aerosol in a mixture with other chemicals, giving it a yellow-brown colour and a distinctive odour. Mustard gas was lethal in only about 1% of cases."

The article I linked to: https://ccc.apgea.army.mil/sarea/products/textbook/Web_Version/chapters/chapter_7.htm#mustard states:

"The British had 180,983 chemical casualties; the injuries of 160,970 (88%) were caused solely by mustard. Of these casualties, 4,167 (2.6%) died. Of the 36,765 single-agent U.S. chemical casualties, the injuries of 27,711 (75%) were caused solely by mustard. Of the casualties who reached a medical treatment facility (MTF), 599 (2.2%) died."

With a reference to: Gilchrist HL. Statistical consideration of gas casualties, I: Gas casualties. In: Weed FW, ed. Medical Aspects of Gas Warfare. Vol 14. In: The Medical Department of the United States Army in the World War. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office; 1926: 273–279."

Later in the textbook:

"Mustard-related death occurs in about 3% of the casualties who reach an MTF; of those who die, most die 4 or more days after exposure ... Of the casualties who died, 84% required at least 4 days of hospitalization. The causes of death are usually pulmonary insufficiency from airway damage, superimposed infection, and sepsis. Rarely, the amount of mustard will be overwhelming and cause death within 1 to 2 days; in these circumstances, death might be due to neurological factors or massive airway damage."

However, it does state that in modern times (The Iran-Iraq war) there are even fewer fatalities due to mustard exposure.

The Textbook of Military Medicine Article aligns with my previous knowledge of the fatality rate of mustard gas, and provides a reference.

Perhaps an even more ambitious edit could go through both the textbook and the wiki article and add references to the wiki article backing up some facts. I may do it in about a month, but I have never edited an article before, and time is scarce at the moment.

BTW, I am assuming that this textbook is under the public domain - it is produced by the government.

[edit] This was in the article

I just noticed, www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Mustard-gas has the exact same data for mustard gas as wikipedia does. Who has the rights to this?

Some guy posted this in the article, thinking it was the discussion.

  • This data was copied directly from us (from me, in fact: I wrote most of that text). If you're skeptical, take a look at their main page Of course, they're allowed to do that under the GNU Public License, so long as they don't try to sell it. – ClockworkSoul 13:19, 17 April 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Pesticide?

Does anyone know of mustard gas left over from the World Wars being used as a pesticide? I've heard of it being used on tobacco and cotton crops in Georgia well into the 1960s.170.215.105.20 08:41, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

  • I've never heard of any such thing, and if it's true then it was an exceedingly reckless thing to use. While I think it's very unlikely, I'll look into it and see what I can find. – ClockworkSoul 13:20, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
http://www.statesman.com/metrostate/content/metro/stories/05/11cyanide.html
Cyanide gas canister found in an abandoned cotton gin. Says here it was used to kill insects in the grain and cotton seed, doesn't say if it was military surplus. Use of dangerous chemicals such as this was (and perhaps still is) actually quite common in poorer areas of rural America.12.150.117.30 17:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Cyanide is a very different thing from mustard gas, though: it was commonly used as a pesticide (an still is, in many places), whicle mustard gas has only seen very limited non-military applications. – ClockworkSoul 01:49, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article focus

Mustard gas redirects here. I think it's safe to say that many, many more people are going to be searching for that term than this one, looking for information on its use as a weapon. And yet this article only mentions its military use at the very end of the second paragraph, almost in passing! I think that, at the very least, if mustard gas is going to redirect here it should be the primary focus of the first paragraph. In general, though, I think that they should either be seperate articles or placed at mustard gas; aren't articles supposed to be placed under the name by which they're more commonly called? --Aquillion 00:38, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Removed some external links

In the external links section, two references were named which contain errors, I have moved them here:

This reference has several errors in it:
  1. The Fredrick Guthrie synthesis should be from ethylene and SCl2, not ethylene and Cl2 as stated.
  2. The hydrolysis reaction pathway produces two molecules of HCl and the last one produced is H2O, not three molecules of HCl as shown in the reference.
  3. The molecular structure given for nitrogen mustard (N-mustard) is not correct. The nitrogen atom should have a hydrogen bonded to it.
  4. The bulleted item describing HT at the beginning of the article suggests that T is a nitrogen mustard, this is incorrect. T is a sulfur mustard, specifically Bis[1(2-chloroethylthio)ethyl] ether, according to Department of the Army Field Manual (DA FM) 3-9, Potential Military Chemical/Biological agents and compounds, 1990.
This reference also has an error in it: in the sentence on synthesis of mustard gas, the phrase "sulfur monochloride, S2Cl2" should be "sulfur dichloride, SCl2"

Maybe someone can find better references for this? --Dirk Beetstra T C 15:26, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Use of references

The use of mustard gas described as "Soviet Union in Xinjiang, China in 1934 and 1936-1937" needs better references; ref. 4 does not seem to contain any mention of this, and ref. 2 is a table that merely repeats the assertion.

[edit] Corrections to HT

I have corrected the entry for the chemical composition of HT in the first part of the article. As pointed out by Beetstra, HT is a mixture of bis(2-chloroethyl) sulfide and bis[2-(2-chloroethylthio)ethyl]ether. See article http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/MHMI/mmg165.pdf. --Cwcchemist 15:35, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Ambergris?

I have been warned that stuff that looks like amber can be mustard gas. But how could it be mistaken for ambergris? There are no sperm whales in the Baltic sea and ambergris should be completely unknown. Amber is frequently found in the southern Baltic. Amber would make sense, ambergris not.

          --88.115.120.116 21:12, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge from Sesquimustard

I've merged the article Sesquimustard to Sulfur mustard. —Quarl (talk) 2007-02-28 06:35Z

[edit] CBWinfo.com

Is this really a valid source? The link provided is filled with historical inaccuracies, typos, original research, and personal bias. --NEMT 22:52, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lost

Wilhelm Steinkopf (* 1879, † 1949) and W. Lommel--Stone (talk) 10:25, 1 May 2008 (UTC)