Iraq’s Threat - What we know about their biological and chemical weapons.
Hi Sylvester. Don't you remember? Accidents...a dead White House staffer here...a dead Commerce Secretary there...these were in the last administration. No, IMHO, what we have here is an EX-Marine gone bad. Unfortunately he may have decided to follow the money and is now in the employ of Iraq. ( I can't wait to read the Clancy novel.) Please read this and tell me if you still think we are overreacting to the Saddam threat....jj
nationalreview.com
Iraq’s Threat - What we know about their biological and chemical weapons.
By Stephen Bryen. Mr. Bryen previously headed the Department of Defense's technology-security program and is currently a managing director for Aurora Defense.
January 3, 2002 9:20 a.m.
When U.S. forces overpowered the Iraqi Army in the Gulf War in 1991 they found many valuable documents about Iraqi chemical and
biological weapons. These captured documents, plus interviews with POWs, made it clear that Iraqi forces were well trained in the use of chemical
agents such as Sarin, a nerve gas. But they had almost no guidance on how to handle or use biological weapons, although the documents support
that such weapons were available.
According to declassified Gulf War intelligence reports, Iraq had trained teams of chemical-weapons NCOs (non commissioned officers) on how
to manage a chemical-warfare operation and how to decontaminate their own troops and equipment after their use against allied forces. But Iraqi
Army NCOs were not given concrete guidance on biological-weapons use or safety precautions. Unlike U.S. troops in the Gulf, Iraqi troops were
never vaccinated against biological agents like anthrax. Yet, had Iraq used its chemical weapons it may have found its own troops affected by
biological agents which, no doubt, would have killed as many Iraqi soldiers as alliance forces.
After being hit by Iraqi chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, Iran learned the dirty secret of Iraqi weapons: they tend to mix together various
types of chemical agents with biological-warfare agents. An early choice was a Soviet-developed form of mycotoxins (sometimes called "yellow
rain"). Mycotoxins were used by the Soviet Union in Laos against Hmong tribesmen and, later in Afghanistan. Intelligence sources believe there
was considerable cooperation, particularly in the 1980s and perhaps since, between Iraq and Russia's biological-warfare units. Some reports single
out the Russian organization Biopreparat as being linked to Iraq.
One of the "fingerprints" of Russian weapons is to mix many substances together. Adding mycotoxins to a chemical-weapons "cocktail" is a
trademark of the Soviet/Russian-weapons program which Iraq copied. Iraq's use of mycotoxins combined with chemical agents was confirmed by
Belgian scientists working on behalf of the United Nations.
While Iraqi soldiers did not know what was in their bombs, NCO war prisoners told allied interviewers that they feared that if they used such
weapons many of them would die just from contamination. Indeed, the fact that the Iranians found it very hard to get rid of the persistent CBW
agents used by Iraq against them is a harbinger of what we are now experiencing trying to clean up a relatively small anthrax attack.
The truth is nobody knows how to use biological weapons, or even the best way to protect themselves from them.
Russia, the U.S., and Britain have worked on vaccines to protect soldiers exposed to biological agents. During the Gulf War over 150,000
American soldiers were inoculated against anthrax. In the U.S., with the failure to adequately decontaminate post offices, America's
homeland-defense agency has offered anthrax vaccine to U.S. Senate workers and U.S. Postal Service employees for post-anthrax exposure
protection. It is not known if it really works — the offer is strictly an experiment and the vast majority of postal workers have turned down
inoculation.
It is far from clear that anthrax inoculation works reliably, even to protect against initial infection. The success of the inoculation depends on the
type of anthrax and how the anthrax was "engineered." The anthrax manufactured in the Soviet Union, for instance, was no simple germ agent. The
stuff that leaked into the air at Sverdlovsk in 1979 contained at least four, and perhaps five, different strains of anthrax mixed together (including the
Ames strain, the strain that was used by terrorists in the United States). At least one of the Russians killed by the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak,
probably an employee of the Soviet weapons lab there, had received anthrax vaccine before exposure.
Recently, the Russians have said they have made progress on new vaccines and have offered them to the United States to combat the anthrax
attack.
Dr. Philip Brachman, a pioneer in anthrax research, told the Los Angeles Times that the anthrax spores found in the U.S. were so small that they
could get in someone's lungs and, perhaps years later, fester into the anthrax disease. U.S. Government officials concur with this assessment.
During the Gulf War there was concern about so-called "dusty agents." Dusty agents are very fine types of chemical or biological dust that can
penetrate protective clothing and gas masks. In the Gulf War U.S. intelligence was sure that Iraq had dusty chemical agents and may have had
dusty biological agents.
Dusty agents remain a major problem, as the recent U.S. terrorist attacks make clear. The U.S. Army is searching for better gas-mask seals and
improved protective clothing to protect troops against chem-bio attacks. (During the Gulf War troops were advised to put rain gear over their
chem-bio protective suits to try and block dusty agents.)
Engineered anthrax in dusty form is an indiscriminate terror weapon. It has no sensible military use, and how it operates on a complex society is not well understood. When the Sverdlovsk leak occurred, the Soviet government ordered surface soil removed, buildings decontaminated on the outside as well as the inside, roads paved over, and dead bodies buried in coffins filled with caustic chemicals to kill remaining anthrax spores. That is how they dealt with a dusty agent.
Over the next few years the United States will be searching for ways to handle the anthrax threat, and threats from other biological weapons. But is
that enough?
Countries that build biological weapons whose effects can't be controlled or even predicted are engaged in global terrorism. That is one reason why the U.S. ended its offensive biological-warfare program years ago.
Countries with a demonstrated capability and willingness to use chem-bio weapons, and who continue to develop nastier forms of biological-terror weapons, are a potential threat to global survival. Iraq, from all the evidence available including recent defectors, is the world's leading threat. |
