Essentially, our role as specialty gas experts involved helping to protect our country from the unintentional health and environmental hazards of our industrialized society. Call us naive, but we never imagined we’d be asked to develop calibration gases to protect against deliberate attempts to destroy our society itself. Certainly we were familiar with a growing list of known TICs (toxic industrial chemicals) and the need to accurately monitor them. They are the unhappy byproducts of industrialization. After 9/11 however, a new acronym crept into our everyday vocabulary: CWAs (chemical warfare agents).
New Homeland Security Products
Today we are asked with increasing frequency to develop calibration gases for a new type of application. The U.S. military and numerous instrument manufacturers now ask us to develop calibration gases for instruments that are currently used or under development for detection and defense against various CWAs that enemy forces might use against us. Hence, Scott is developing a growing line of Homeland Security Products. Some of these are “standard” mixtures such as cyanogen chloride, phosgene and hydrogen cyanide. Other times our R&D and Technical Services groups work with customers to develop custom products to meet highly specialized application requirements.
Frankly speaking, considering their application, Homeland Security gas mixtures are products we’d just as soon not make. But the need for them is very real and so in addition to the markets we’ve traditionally served, we now also focus our technology on creating dependable products to help defend and protect our country. Let’s all hope for a time when we can retire these products as being no longer needed.