Dr. Christopher Busby is a physical chemist and the scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk.
Sputnik: Does it come as a surprise that Europe-manufactured chemical weapons were found at the place where the so called attack took place?
Dr. Christopher Busby: There're two types of chemical weapons essentially. You can classify them as materials which were designed as weapons like the nerve gases and the WW1 agents like mustard gas and so forth. But there're also materials that can be used as chemical weapons, but actually are really quite common and they're used for other things as well. So I see that people have mentioned that they find chlorine cylinders. Chlorine can certainly be used as a chemical weapon and was in WW1 but it's not essentially a chemical weapon. It's used for purifying water and of course in the Middle East it's necessary to purify water because it's quite warm. And then smoke bombs were mentioned also. But then again smoke bombs could be materials that are used by farmers for fumigating moles. So if that is all that was found I don't think that it's necessarily a find of chemical weapons, it's just a find of materials that could be used as chemical weapons.
Sputnik: At the recent gathering in The Hague Russia brought witnesses from the town of Douma, I think very famous is the young man who everybody saw in the attack. And of course Western powers called that a Russian stunt. What do you make of the adequacy of that reaction?
Sputnik: I was just wondering, in Douma there've also been accusations that that Russia and Syria may have tempered with evidence. How realistic is that to temper with evidence? Is it possible to clean up a site where these chemicals had been used in such a way that the OPCW wouldn't be able to find them once they entered that area?
Dr. Christopher Busby: No, there's no way that could be done. Absolutely no way that could be done. If the chemical weapons were there and if we can trust the OPCW and their laboratories then they would find them. There's no question….The only way you could tamper it was to alter the samples between the time that they were taken and the time that they appeared in the laboratories of the OPCW. And then to do that, if you were going to get rid of the evidence, you'd have to replace the samples with pure samples. You'd actually have to steal the entire sample and put back a sample that was pure. But a more easy way of doing it if you want to do the opposite would be to add some nerve agent or some chemical weapon material to the sample before it got to the laboratory and I believe actually there has been an accusation of that in the case of the Skripals.
Sputnik: Do you think that there's a connection between the Skripal matter and Douma?
Sputnik: So, would you tend to think that the Skripal matter was sort of an attempt to discredit Russia prior to the events in Douma?
Dr. Christopher Busby: Yes, I do. I think it's all one operation. Otherwise there're too many coincidences here. It's all about chemical weapons and it starts in Britain and then it moves to Syria. It's very crudely done, rather stupidly done and it's brought in a kind of joint operation by the, I don't know who you'd call them, by those militaristic hawks and their secret service operators that have existed ever since the Second World Warw right through the Cold War and right through to the present day in the Pentagon and in the British Secret Service. They're really trying to stir up something against Russia. They're trying to bring Russia down. So you have to think about why that would be and at the same time you have to bring in the fact that Brexit has suddenly occurred out of the blue. And I think that's all part of the same thing. There's some large plan going on behind the scenes here that has to do with the petrodollar, it has to do with global spheres of influence. And of course as far as that's concerned, one of the most powerful countries in the world is Russia. It has enormous natural resources — it's got gas, it's got oil, it's got uranium, it's got everything. So really Russia can just sit back and laugh, whereas the Americans have got some gigantic national debt. And that national debt is only underpinned by the petrodollar and if the petrodollar goes down and these Middle Eastern countries start selling their oil in non-US currency then of course the US economy will completely melt down and I think what all this is about.
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