The post on InnoCentive struck me funny right away. 1,500 tons of chem, it had to be destroyed in situ, and the solution had to come by C-17s.
If our government is trying to figure out how to get rid of Assad's chem stockpile, it's easy to know what won't work: airstrikes. Like the ones NATO carried out in Libya that only created a giant mess, and continue to kill civilians with damaged UXO spread about. Bombing chem rounds from the air will just create a plume that'll kill lots of people.
With the post ruling out incineration and chemical neutralization as options, I thought about the only other one I knew. And that's C4.
But how many 1.25-lb M112 blocks would it take? Figuring that out was the fun part. Running the numbers, you realize it would take tens of millions of pounds of bang and it would completely tie up the US Air Force's fleet of C-17s and C-5s just to haul it all in. (taking for granted permissive air space.)
Somewhere in the Pentagon a friend of mine probably had to do the same calculations as the token EOD guy on a staff, and hand the bad news to a flag officer. It's basic pre-mission planning.
Thanks to Noah Shachtman for running The Sarin Sweepstakes on FP's blog.