Bin Laden may have shipped nuclear bomb to US
Osama bin Laden may have already shipped weapons of mass destruction to the US.
Pakistan's Frontier Post says the Al-Qaida network has transported nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons there.
It claims at least two briefcases containing nuclear weapons may have reached US shores.
The report says Pakistani and US investigators have been able to identify that at least one such weapon has been acquired by Al Qaida from Central Asian groups.
The device of Russian origin, can be activated through a timer or cell phone command.
It is an 8kg device that contains around 2kg of fissionable plutonium and uranium.
Besides nuclear devices, a chemical and a biological weapon have also been identified to be in the hands of Al Qaida activists.
They are said to be in possession of at least 70 capsules, also of Russian origin, containing a very lethal biological agent.
Story filed: 11:22 Saturday 10th November 2001
Also: could one anthrax spore have infected Kathy Nyugen? From NY Times:
THE SPORES
Hospital Worker's Infection Poses Troubling Possibilities
By NICHOLAS WADE
nvestigators assigned to the case of Kathy T. Nguyen, the Manhattan hospital
worker who died of inhalation anthrax last week, are confronting some
disquieting possibilities as to how she might have become infected.
One, which has aroused keen interest among investigators, is that at some
point in her well-ordered, fairly restricted life, she crossed paths with a
perpetrator of the attacks and his product.
If that is the case, reconstructing Ms. Nguyen's movements, as investigators
are trying to do, could lead to the source of the spores.
Another possibility, more threatening to the public, is that Ms. Nguyen was
somehow infected by spores from a tainted envelope, but with a dose far
smaller than the minimum generally thought to be needed for infection.
Except for Ms. Nguyen, those who have contracted anthrax have had some
obvious point of contact with the spore-laden letters and can reasonably be
assumed to have inhaled a significant amount of spores.
But this is not the case with Ms. Nguyen. Nothing in her home or mail or
place of work at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital contained any
trace of anthrax spores, investigators say.
Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, said yesterday, "It would take a lot more than a few spores to
cause exposure anthrax." And New York City investigators have previously said
that they were looking for opportunities Ms. Nguyen might have had to come in
contact with a large quantity of spores.
But some experts contend that just a few spores, maybe even a single spore,
could infect a susceptible person in rare circumstances.
Could Ms. Nguyen have breathed in a stray puff of spores wafting through
Manhattan's canyons? The lethal dose for anthrax is often said to be 8,000 to
10,000 spores. But that is in fact the amount needed to kill 50 percent of a
population of monkeys. No one knows the smallest number of spores it would
take to kill just 1 percent of a population — the experiment would require
hundreds of monkeys — but it could be just a couple of hundred spores.
Human lungs hold 500 million miniature compartments where the blood exchanges
gases with the air. Each of the 200 spores is likely to be inhaled into a
different compartment and would have an independent chance of infecting the
body, said Dr. Matthew Meselson, a biologist at Harvard University. In his
view, a single spore has a chance, however small, of infecting someone.
The Army's chief infectious disease specialist during the war in the Persian
Gulf, Dr. Craig E. Smith, who is now at the Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital
in Albany, Ga., agreed.
The idea that one spore can be enough for infection is somewhat at odds with
the view often expressed by officials at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention that there is a threshold, or cutoff number of spores, below which
no infection can occur. But the one-spore theory would make more
understandable a case like Ms. Nguyen's in which no obvious route of exposure
has yet come to light.
"Should we be alarmed that she's an outlier for whom no obvious connection
exists?" Dr. Smith asked. "I do find that alarming because it implies she had
a very small inoculum."
Another possible explanation for Ms. Nguyen's case is that she passed near
some unidentified source of anthrax, like a house, office or laboratory where
the anthrax spores used in the two attacks were being prepared.
If the anthrax was home-grown, the responsible person is presumably well
trained in medicine or microbiology or pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Dr. Smith said that one way of finding such a person would be to test
suspects' blood for antibodies to anthrax. People brewing anthrax spores are
likely either to have vaccinated themselves beforehand, or to have become
sufficiently exposed to have raised antibodies even if they were taking
antibiotics as protection, another expert said.
"If I'd taken 100 people into custody as potential terrorists, I would have
taken a blood sample from every single one," Dr. Smith said. "If anyone came
out positive, that would mean they had had a natural exposure to anthrax or
had been vaccinated, which I think would be evidence they had a premeditated
plan to disseminate anthrax."
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases, said that testing suspects, like those being detained by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks,
"is certainly something that is quite reasonable to consider. The presence of
antibodies to anthrax might indicate if these individuals had been vaccinated
to protect them."
A court order is needed to compel suspects to give blood samples for
laboratory tests.
There is no sign so far that the F.B.I. has considered screening suspect
populations for the presence of antianthrax antibodies in their blood. An
F.B.I. spokesman dismissed the issue as "a medical question."
Federal investigators apparently did not use the precise methods of
serological testing, but instead relied on a far more subjective approach,
handwriting analysis, to explore the possible connection of a man from
Hamilton Township, N.J., to the three anthrax letters.
Many of the people being detained by the F.B.I. are being held on alleged
violations of immigration law, but legal experts said they had not heard of
blood samples being requested from the detainees.
"I am not aware of that," said Lucas Gutentag, director of the immigrants'
rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union. But he said that given
the secrecy surrounding the investigation, "Even seeking a court order to
seek a blood sample would not necessarily be disclosed and could be conducted
in a closed judicial proceeding."
Mass screening of suspect populations, like the detainees, or people on the
mail-collection route of a Trenton postal worker who contracted anthrax, or
any group that Ms. Nguyen might have met, would raise legal issues, and even
a voluntary request for blood might be seen as coercive. Mass screening with
DNA fingerprinting has been used occasionally in Britain.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, a bioterrorism expert at the University of Minnesota,
said it was important for investigators to keep their minds open to all
possibilities. Ms. Nguyen's case was "an epidemiologist's nightmare," Dr.
Osterholm said, because she lived alone with few close contacts and died
before she could be interviewed. This landscape without clues was made even
harder to read by the long incubation period of anthrax spores, he said. |
