Looking for vulnerabilities

Chemical weapons are often analyzed in terms of numbers of lethal doses. We can apply that to other substances. One possible weapon along those lines is the nicotine bomb. The LD50 for nicotine is 35 mg/kg of body weight. If we take a typical American body weight as 100 kg (a round figure but one which might be typical of Americans), we can see that a lethal dose is a mere 3.5 g. There are roughly 8,000,000 people in NYC. Eight million lethal doses of nicotine is a mere 28 tons—which can fit in a truck.

If nicotine is turned into a controlled substance (as seems increasingly likely), they might try using an aspirin bomb instead. Since the LD50 of aspirin is 1800 mg/kg, the necessary amount is 1440 tons. This is too large for a truck so the “militants” will have to take over an entire aspirin factory. This is an exceptionally humane weapon since the victims will feel no pain.

Of course, this implies that Clinton was completely correct in ordering the bombing of that aspirin factory in Sudan.