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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jill who wrote (6263)	10/19/2001 1:05:43 PM
From: RocketMan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I thot they'd decided it was a questionable if not useless way to disperse it on a warhead (maybe spores would be destroyed in explosion or scattered on wind & destroyed in sunlight?) ... The Soviets solved that problem early on, they developed bomblets that scattered from the warhead, and protected the spores. The wind is actually a benefit, but you have to know its direction relative to weapons release. Sunlight is a problem for certain spores, which is why the prefered delivery time is at night. Iraq was almost certainly aware of all of this, though I doubt if they had developed much sophistication in weaponizing their biological weapons. They would have relied on simple things, and would have avoided obvious problems such as deploying the bio materials on explosive scud warheads. There is no need to explode a warhead, one can just have it disperse its contents as it is falling back to earth, and at the low altitudes of a scud atmospheric heating is not that much of a problem. And the scuds were not even their prefered delivery method, they had many light aircraft that could have done the job even better (though after we achieved air superiority, it is doubtful if they could have flown close enough to spray). What kept the Iraqis from using bio weapons against US troops and Israel, according to most experts, was not that they couldn't do it, but that they feared U.S. and Israeli nuclear retaliation (lesson to be learned in today's environment). There was also some luck involved, in that when the Republican Guard was being overrun, the wind fortunately was blowing from the south, so even if a local commander used chem/bio weapons, it would have blown back on their troops.