COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PHYSICOCHEMICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHEMICAL WARFARE AGENTS AND THEIR SIMULANTS

Abstract

Unfortunately, the use of Chemical Warfare Agents (CWA) as a weapon of choice is still a terrorist and military practice, despite the International Chemical Weapons Convention. Due to their extremely hazardous and lethal characteristics, they can only be used in a strictly controlled environment (laboratories and isolated platforms) by trained personnel. In order to avoid accidents and achieve adequate safety level, during personnel training or equipment testing, it is a common practice to use CWA simulants (a mixture of different compounds that has similar physicochemical properties as CWA but no toxic properties) or CWA mimetics (chemical compounds of similar molecular structure with a significantly lower degree of toxicity) prior to CWA themselves. In this study different characteristics of these three chemical groups have been compared including viscosity, colour, volatility, and detection behaviour when ion-mobility spectrometry (IMS), flame photometry (FP), and colorimetric methods have been applied. The use of simulants creates no psychological stress during the training process, they exhibit similar physicochemical properties as CWA, but some of them give a false positive indication of the presence of a different type of agent. Mimetics do create psychological stress due to their toxicity and exhibit similar physicochemical properties, but a number of them cannot be detected properly by standard detection techniques, or the detection time is prolonged. Nevertheless, the use of both simulants and mimetics is justified through common training and testing practices.