US troops may have been exposed to nerve gas

A scary report in The Register about some 100,000 American troops who may have been exposed to low levels of Sarin nerve gas after the 1991 Gulf War:

It is believed that US soldiers occupying an Iraqi munitions depot at Khamisiyah mistakenly blew up a stockpile of gas rockets in March 1991, believing them to be ordinary explosive munitions. Nobody noticed any ill effects at the time.

It was only two months later, when Iraqi chemical weapons facilities were inspected by the UN as part of the ceasefire agreement, that the US began to realise that nerve gases might have been released into the atmosphere. [. . .]

It's perhaps also worth noting that declassified CIA reports suggest that some or all the sarin rounds blown up at Khamisiyah were of binary construction, meaning that they contained not sarin but two precursor chemicals which would be mixed to form sarin when the weapons were fired. Blowing up kit like this wouldn't release large amounts of nerve agent into the atmosphere; just precursors.

If the rockets weren't binaries, there would be an excellent chance of their sarin payload having decomposed to uselessness. This was a major problem for the pre-1991 Iraqi chemical weapons industry.