Nerve agents schedule numbers

Table 2 illustrates that the majority of Schedule numbers allow deriving only one or a few different possible chemicals. One Schedule number however, Schedule 2.B.4, describes millions of possibilities ( Chemicals, except for those listed in Schedule 1, containing a phosphorous atom to which is bonded one methyl, ethyl or propyl (normal or iso) group but no further carbon atoms ) and more importantly, the theoretical possibilities for the nerve agents... 

Related to the Schedule 1 family of alkyl/cyclo-alkyl alkylphosphonofluoridates, are three important classes of compounds. These are the dialkyl/dicyclo-alkyl alkylphosphonates, the alkyl/cycloalkyl alkylphosphonates and the methyl alkyl/cycloalkyl alkylphosphonates, all belonging to the Schedule 2.B.4 chemicals. Per definition, Schedule 2.B.4 represents the largest number of chemicals of CWC interest. The first class consists of known impurities of nerve agents, the second class consists of the primarily formed hydrolysis products of nerve agents, and the third class, the corresponding methyl esters-DMMP (dimethyl methylphosphonate) and DIMP (diisopropyl methylphosphonate) (see Table 1) are... 

Schedule 1 includes the following toxic chemicals - the chemical classes for nerve agents which include GB (sarin), GD (soman), G A (tabun) and VX, a number of sulfur mustards, three lewisites, three nitrogen mustards, saxitoxin, ricin and a number of precursors. 

Because of the low concentration of the biomarkers, the analyses are target-directed because a full scan would be at the cost of sensitivity, which means that low-level exposures cannot be detected. However, this is a serious problem in the case when the identity of the nerve agent is not known beforehand. Some progress has been achieved to solve this problem. The number of different OPs exceeds several ousand, but the number of different masses is only 170. Because the OPCW Schedule 1 nerve agents consist only of saturated alkyl groups with mass increments of 14 units, the number of mass possibilities can be further reduced to 36 masses, which means that only 36 multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) transitions have to be recorded (van der Schans... 

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