04.18.13
Ricin — odds and ends
The Congressional Research Service updated its review on ricin poison for quick reference. Steve Aftergood of the Secrecy blog has put it on-line here.
It is of generally good quality although the authors have a slight case of the disease of national hedging on how easy ricin is to make.
Yesterday, I put unequivocal evidence, from a domestic ricin case, of what a castor powder mixture contains on the web and stated flatly that ricin recipes on the internet fail to change it in any significant matter.
It has been reposted at GlobalSecurity.Org here along with a host of other very legitimate resources on the topic.
From the CRS report, Ricin: Technical Background and Potential Role in Terrorism:
The quality of [instructions for making ricin] varies. Some directions would produce only crude preparations while others would produce nearly pure ricin. Even the crude preparations have been considered deadly.
They all produce crude preparations, a mix of proteins and polypetides, including ricin, that comprise the 5 percent component of proteinaceous material in the castor seed.
Crude castor powder can be deadly, if eaten. Eating a castor seed, specifically — chewing it, can cause death or a bad incident.
But not always, as discussed here in January of last year:
The National Institute of Health furnishes a report on a single case of poisoning by castor bean in Oman, where a patient used one to mistakenly treat a cough.
Apparently, some old methods of “traditional??? medicine employ castor seeds. And the castor seed does not usually poison unless it is chewed, a factor pointed out by the journal article.
“In various countries castor beans are the base of many traditional remedies. Our patient believed that they could treat his cough. Ingested castor beans are generally toxic only if ricin is released through mastication or maceration …”
And from the abstract, the outcome is summarized:
“Increasing the awareness of the population to the dangers of ricin would be a way to avoid the utilisation of castor seeds in traditional therapies. Here we are reporting a case of mild poisoning after ingestion of a single castor bean. The patient, who presented at Nizwa Hospital, Oman, fortunately recovered completely as the ingested dose was quite small.”
And many years ago it was not uncommon to find castor powder, of course containing ricin, used by gardeners in attempts to control pests.
Castor seed powder was frequently used as fertilizer in this country. In the periodical called Timely Turf Topics, the publication of United States Golf Association Green Section, an issue from November 1942 reported that the country was using over 80,000 tons of castor seed mash as fertilizer annually. The Golf Association Green Section periodical was devoted to providing information to golf green managers on the maintenance of beautiful grass turf. During World War II, nitrates were diverted for the war effort, necessitating use of alternative fertilizers, of which castor seed mash was one.
In the November 1941 issue of Timely Turf Topics, the association grapples with the problem of controlling mole crickets in southern golf courses.
“It is reported that turf in some sections of Georgia and Florida has just experienced the worst infestation of mole crickets in a number of years,??? reads the issue. “Attempts to eradicate them from turf by the use of well-known poison bait as well as by treatments with arsenate of lead, ground tobacco stems and castor meal have not been successful in several localities this fall.???
The point to be made is that people once worked with large quantities of the grind of castor seeds in this country without dropping like flies.
Pure or nearly pure ricin can only be produced using the methods of protein chemistry. Of course, such procedures exist in the scientific literature. They have been beyond the capability of that demographic that messes with castor seeds.
Continuing with the CRS technical report on ricin:
“Many experts believe that ricin would be difficult to use as a weapon of mass destruction. Ricin needs to be injected, ingested, or inhaled by the victim to injure. Biological weapons experts estimate that 8 metric tons would be required to cover a 100 km2 area with enough toxin to kill 50% of the people. Thus, using ricin to cause mass casualties becomes logistically impractical even for a well-funded terrorist organization.
“Furthermore, some experts have stated that the required preparatory steps to use ricin as a mass casualty weapon also pose significant technical barriers that may preclude such use by non-state actors.”
This is certainly right. Eight metric tons of pure ricin, or even close to pure — like, say 50 percent, is not doable. Never has been. Eight tons of such a material is an absurd and incomprehensible amount.
Active proteins, which is what ricin is, are perishable, even more so when you do things to them that take them out of their natural circumstances.
The US military fiddled with ricin many decades ago. There is no compelling evidence it was successful.
The idea was to make a ricin bomb, a foolish undertaking on its face.
Proteins — bluntly, meat — react the same way to shearing, tearing, explosions, heat and fire just like the good stuff on the grill as raw hamburger. They are cooked.
I wrote on the US Army’s ricin patent for GlobalSecurity in 2004. From it, the germane portion:
The authors of the patent only vaguely grasp that during purifications, proteins are degraded by rough-handling and heat. They admit that their preparations were damaged by exposure to steam (“…considerable detoxification results”) in the text of the patent, which would be natural to expect in the practice of protein chemistry. And they mill and grind their rough preparation, noting “… dry ball and hammer milling … produced considerable detoxification perhaps due to the generation of excess heat.”
Such results would, for example, provide evidence to a good scientist that making a ricin bomb or artillery shell might be counterintuitive, shearing forces from blast and vigorous heating generally being unavoidable in such things.
Again, Ricin: Technical Background and Potential Role in Terrorism is here.
In a somewhat related matter, the German news magazine Spiegel Online published an article entitled, Poisonous Instructions: FBI Has Recipe for Ricin on Website, a now typical case of trying to throw a scare into readers.
Star, arrow, rune, figure eight — at first glance, it looks like nothing more than a series of hieroglyphics strung together on the website of the FBI, the federal investigating authority of the United States. But it’s an easy-to-follow recipe for the deadly poison ricin, handwritten in a code that even laymen can decipher.
The text was published in March 2011 on the pages of the Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU). There it served as an example of the work of the bureau’s decoding experts. Curiously enough, no secret is made of the document’s contents
For the rest of it the reader gets what everyone does on ricin. The combination of journalists wishing for eyeballs, a scary story of behavior that superficially looks incomprehensible, and the usual performing experts who state that the recipe is effective.
It’s an industry of fear, mutually beneficial to both parties.
Indeed, the FBI’s puzzle was solved on the web by an interested crypt-analyst blogger here on tax day.
The blogger correctly characterized the nature of the recipe:
The enciphered recipe is very crude, producing only a mash form that is not further purified for dangerous potential. Similar recipes in terrorist “cookbooks??? are “deemed incapable of achieving a good product for causing a large number of casualties by any exposure route, mainly because of the low content of toxin of the final extracts.???
Having originally posted the plain text of it, the blogger later redacted the material.
Nevertheless, DD blog saw a copy and it is one of the old ricin recipes. Specifically, it’s origin lies in Kurt Saxon’s The Poor Man’s James Bond, Vol III.
“It is bad to poison your fellow man, blow him up or even shoot him or otherwise disturb his tranquility. It is also uncouth to counterfeit your nation’s currency and it is tacky to destroy property as instructed in [the chapter] Arson and Electronics …
“But some people are just naturally crude … It is your responsibility, then, to be aware of the many ways bad people can be harmful …
“Also, in the event that our nation is invaded by Foreign Devils, it is up to you to destroy them with speed and vigor. Or — and perish the thought — if our Capitol should fall to the enemy within, I expect you to do your duty.
“It is right to share with your enemies, the knowledge in this wonderful book …???
Hat tip to Pine View Farm for the head’s up on the Spiegel piece.
Again, The Ricin Kook, today at GlobalSecurity.Org.
Like this blog, as well as Congressional Research Reports, it contains much thoughtful and expertly derived and delivered information, the product of years of careful study. And I have a Ph.D., even if you don’t like the nickname and are afraid it will bring ridicule if mentioned in polite company.
Twitter “The Ricin Kook” in tweets, spread it in e-mail to your friends, share and “like” it on Facebook, post it to Reddit or your blog. Help make is a useful addition to public information on the subject.
What can be the harm? Perhaps someone important will see it and I will be empowered to write a fine book on the subject.