CNN News:奥巴马称叙利亚化学武器已改变游戏规则

A conservation clean up project and an accidental scholarship offer.

That's coming up this Thursday on CNN STUDENT NEWS.

But our first story involves the civil war in Syria.

U.S. officials say they have evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria,

but they don't know how they were used,

when they were used or which side used them.

President Obama said those details need to be sorted out.

The use of chemical weapons would be a game changer.

 

Not simply for the United States, but for the international community.

 

We've got to do everything we can to investigate and establish with some certainty what exactly has happened in Syria, what is happening in Syria.

When I'm making decisions about America's national security and the potential for taking additional action in response to chemical weapon use,

I've got to make sure I've got the facts.

Chemical weapons can be deployed any number of ways:

they can be introduced intro food or water.

They can be sprayed from airplanes, they can even be launched as artillery shells.

For example, this liquid poison would be blasted off,

it would hit the ground as the liquid spread out it will turn into a gas that would simply affect everything in the region.

That's what they believe happened in several towns here in Syria.

But here's the insidious thing:

if we're really talking about sarin gas, it is colorless, it is odorless, and it has no taste,

so that people who are under attack would not even know it was happening to them.

But they might now the symptoms, because they could come on almost immediately.

Remember, this was developed as a pesticide.

And this is what it does to humans:

it causes blurred vision, rapid breathing, heavy sweating, confusion, headaches, nausea and at the very worst cases, convulsions, paralysis and death.

What it's doing is attacking the nervous system.

It's essentially shutting your body down.

That's what kills people, and why this is considered such a bad thing.

But there is a trick to all of this:

the trick is even if you had a massive rocket barrage of sarin gas, you wouldn't necessarily know that that's what happened,

because even though it is lethal, it's not long lasting, it disperses very quickly.

So while investigators now think - think they have some evidence that the Assad regime used sarin gas on people there, they would have to work very hard to establish concrete proof.