Last Nazi Chemical Weapons Destroyed in Utah

[folti78]

IIRC they are used for clearing snow from airports and/or blowing out oil well fires. Making hot air with jet engines is bit problematic to use when you have to clean indoors or insides of vehicles.

[Simon_Jester]

Hmmm. This isn't really evidence, but I distinctly remember Stuart talking about the use of a jet engine on a truck to decontaminate the exterior of an armored vehicle after it had been exposed to nerve gas.

For "quick and dirty" purposes like that, the hot air blast might actually work (assuming you can get rid of nerve gas with a jet of hot air).

[PeZook]

I have a 1990s book about armored warfare that showed photographs of this huge jet-engine like contraption used to spray high-pressure water at tanks.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Hmmm. This isn't really evidence, but I distinctly remember Stuart talking about the use of a jet engine on a truck to decontaminate the exterior of an armored vehicle after it had been exposed to nerve gas.

Yeah, it was the Soviets who did that.

[Simon_Jester]

Although I think the way Stuart described it, he was talking about first applying decontamination foam of some kind, then applying a blast of hot air. That would make some sense- you're increasing the temperature to speed up the chemical reaction that breaks down the nerve gas.

[Sea Skimmer]

WRT hot air decontamination didn't the soviets have jet engines mounted on the back of trucks for said purpose?

TMS-65; several similar Warsaw Pact variants exist but the jet engine is used to blow bleach or other cleaning solutions onto vehicles as they drive past, it doesn't work primarily by heat though the heat is helpful to speed up the process. The same systems could be used to blow out massive smoke screens, and in a modified form they also used it as a snow blower.... on aircraft carriers even. The US Army did work on a similar concept in the 1980s, but wasn't fond of it because of high fuel consumption and various technical problems which were never solved before abandoning it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBI43LKuW00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sJm9MIk ... re=related

Hot air systems really aren't suitable for doing massive numbers of passing vehicles (all the more so in say, winter or when said equipment is covered in mud), but its basically the only thing that will work for the interior of tents, protective clothing or on aircraft, especially stealth aircraft which cannot have bleach ect.. used even on the exterior let alone the interior because it will ruin all the special paint coatings. I've read some stuff on the F-35 decontamination procedures, as its basically the first aircraft designed from the ground up with modern NBC warfare requirements in mind mind, and the plan is basically to park it in a special tent which doubles as a sealed work shelter for maintenance and bake the entire plane to 150 degrees F. In this way you don't just decontaminate the exterior, you also vaporize chemical weapons out of the engines and various internal compartments on the plane.

An example of a hot air system would be the FB 60 E used by the US Army and designed by the GERMANS. It uses an electric fan for the blower and generates heat from burning gasoline or diesel fuel in a dedicated burner. You can also use it for winter heating as it is NOT blowing combustion air at you.


Of course, hot air will not work on most bioweapons but those are a lot less of a concern, and much easier to protect personal against in the first place. Most bioagents simply aren't a hazard unless you inhale them or get them in a wound for example, and they won't eat through basic protective materials like nerve agents will. Also hot air has the limitation that the air being blown away will have some of the nerve agent suspended in it, but that's not a deal killer when you'd be using very small amounts to murder people in a closed space. All the more so when you murder all the slave workers about once a month anyway.

This is an example of a big hot air system for baking cloths. The Soviets had whole battalions at the Front Level just to operate clothing bakers like this and thus clean tens of thousands of uniforms per day.
http://www.vahamaa.fi/media/MVdocument060820.pdf