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Report of Sarin in Iraq - What does this mean?
News outlets this morning are reporting the discovery of a bomb containing the nerve agent "sarin" in Iraq. While Rumsfeld remains cautious, noting that the field test conducted so far is not conclusive, some are claiming this is evidence of Iraq having had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the Iraq war.
To evaluate this claim, we need to look at what Sarin is. The Council on Foreign Relations has a good write-up. It's a nerve agent that can be produced with publicly available chemicals, and was used by the Aum Shrinrikyo terrorist cult in Japan. While the CFR's write-up states that "a sophisticated lab is needed to make sarin that is pure and long lasting", this implies that you don't need the same sophistication to make sarin that is of low purity and short lifetime.
While early reports of events such as this are always unreliable, the bomb is reported to be one designed to make the sarin at or soon before detonation, and that it wasn't a particularly effective bomb. Although high quality sarin can be used as a WMD, according to the description given, this device would not merit the title "weapon of mass destruction". Its maximum destructive capacity would be well within the battlefield weapons range.
Now where did the weapon come from, and when was it made? Former weapons inspectors suggest it may have been a "misplaced" device left over from when Iraq had publicly acknowledged WMD programs. Certainly one device does not make a stockpile. However there are numerous possible sources. Given that the chemicals to make sarin are publicly available, the device could have been made since the Iraq war. Alternatively it may have come from a neighbouring country - at least one is suspected to have stockpiles of sarin.
So the answer to the question posed in the title of this story is "not much". At this stage, we don't even know for sure it was a sarin bomb. Even if that much is confirmed, the device could have come from almost anywhere, or may be a misplaced device as the weapons inspectors suggest. It is clearly not the smoking gun that some are suggesting.