In Popular Culture
A miniature binary weapon is used in an assassination in the Frederick Forsyth novel The Devil's Alternative. It consists of two half-capsules, a non-resistant one containing potassium cyanide and an acid-resistant one containing hydrochloric acid. The substances mix after the halves are assembled and the seal between them is broken, and form hydrogen cyanide. The surplus acid eats through the capsule walls of the non-resistant half, and after a delay of several hours, the lethal content is released into the intestinal tract of whoever ingested it.
While technically possible, the assassination tool as discussed in the novel is presumably fictional. However, there are claims that in September 2003 the SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) prepared to assassinate Boris Berezovsky with a similar device.
The 2002 movie xXx features a Soviet-made binary chemical weapon codenamed "Silent Night", after its supposed ability to render an area silent by killing its inhabitants. In the movie, the chemical was acquired by the terrorist group Anarchy-99, and their leader, Yorgi, plans to launch missiles containing Silent Night from an autonomous solar-powered submarine called Ahab, with the intent to sow chaos among civilized nations as they all blame each other for the attacks.
In the 1995 movie Die Hard with a Vengeance, the terrorists use timer and otherwise activated binary explosive bombs, where two inert fluid, a white and a red coloured, right before detonation mixed by the bombs' mechanism creating a highly explosive mixture.
Read more about this topic: Binary Chemical Weapon
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“The man of large and conspicuous public service in civil life must be content without the Presidency. Still more, the availability of a popular man in a doubtful State will secure him the prize in a close contest against the first statesman of the country whose State is safe.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)