Experts Question Merit of Recent Smallpox Exercise

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Some biological weapons experts have criticized a highly publicized smallpox attack exercise conducted last month that involved prominent current and former officials from the United States and Europe (see GSN, Jan. 18).

The tabletop simulation used unrealistic assumptions to project massive casualties and scare the public and Western governments into thinking there is a strong potential for an attack that is actually unlikely to occur, the experts said. The exercise, called Atlantic Storm, was run by the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

A terrorist organization, the experts said, is not likely to be able to conduct the smallpox attack as portrayed in the exercise, according to the experts.

Nor would Islamic terrorists be expected to want to conduct such an attack, as the highly infectious disease could devastate the developing world, including Islamic countries, more than prominent Western targets that have significant vaccine stores, said Martin Furmanski, a physician who studies the medical aspects of chemical and biological weapons.

“It really is a political set piece. They sent everybody home on Jan. 14 with this idea of a big smallpox outbreak,” Furmanski said. “There’s nothing about the scenario that’s impossible. It’s just that their particular twist is highly unlikely.”

By overstating the threat, the exercise’s organizers may have promoted terrorist interest in smallpox, he said. “They really did a disservice.”

The exercise employs “thoroughly implausible assumptions,” according to Milton Leitenberg, a senior research scholar at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

The organizers of the exercise defended the scenario, disputing some of the facts and conclusions presented by critics and arguing that the scenario’s assumptions are within the realm of possibility.

“We made every effort to be scientifically credible, and I think our assumptions speak for themselves and we are quite prepared to defend the assumptions that were necessary to create a plausible story,” said the center’s director, Tara O’Toole.

“Each issue within the exercise was discussed in detail over months with a large group of individuals from various communities,” said retired Air Force Col. Randall Larsen, who was the war-gaming expert for the exercise.

According to Atlantic Storm’s script, scientists of a fictional al-Qaeda splinter group acquired smallpox seed cultures from a biological weapons facility in the former Soviet Union. With the help of a former Soviet weapons scientist using open-market dual-use equipment, the group developed a “high-quality” dry powder weapon in a laboratory disguised as an Austrian brewery. 

The agent then was sprayed in seven heavily trafficked sites in Europe and the United States using, a “commercially available dry powder dispenser the size of a small fire extinguisher hidden in a backpack.” By the end of the one-day, real-time exercise on Jan. 14, more than 600,000 people were projected to become infected and 25 percent to die.

While Atlantic Storm literature published on the Center for Biosecurity’s Web site said the exercise was conducted in part to “generate political momentum and support for improving national and international biosecurity preparedness,” it also was meant to help leaders understand tough decisions they might face with a real attack. 

“We wanted people to understand that we think this is a really real threat we’re not prepared for and that we need to really take seriously,” O’Toole said.

The exercise apparently conveyed a sense of plausibility to the media, driving stories in major newspapers and play-by-play coverage of the game by ABC News’ Nightline and National Public Radio.

The critics questioned the plausibility of the scenario on a number of counts, including that a terror group could develop a dry powder smallpox weapon, which they said would be expected to require a massive program more within the capabilities of a government.

The U.S. offensive biological weapons program did not succeed in producing a dry powder weapon before it was ended in 1969 and the British program did not even attempt to, Leitenberg wrote in a critique of the exercise he privately circulated.

That technical challenge was also never solved by the massive Soviet program, according to Furmanski, citing a book by defector Ken Alibek, and so would likely be well beyond the capabilities of an al-Qaeda splinter group.

Why would “al-Qaeda guys with a textbook of food processing and a commercial freeze-dryer that’s supposed to make powdered milk succeed where the huge Soviet biological weapons program failed?” he said.

“In the real world, there are no known well-trained al-Qaeda scientists,” Leitenberg said in an interview.

Prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, al-Qaeda had been aided by a microbiologist with a doctorate who supplied literature on biological weapons, though not smallpox, Leitenberg said. That person, however, “was unwilling to himself do any laboratory work for them,” has since been arrested, he said.

In addition, “few pieces of standard equipment obtained by the group in Afghanistan were rudimentary in the extreme,” Leitenberg said. Declassified documents, obtained by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan in November 2001, suggest no al-Qaeda capability for culturing viruses, he wrote. 

Obtaining smallpox seed from a Soviet facility also would not be as easy as the exercise suggests, he wrote. “When the Iranian government made overtures to [the Russian laboratory] Vector scientists offering very generous payment to come and work and/or teach in Iran in the years around 1994, they failed to convince a single member of the institute to come to Iran,” he wrote. 

“These facilities are in better shape now than they were 10 years ago, both in their financial circumstances and in their biosecurity arrangements.  At a first approximation, it therefore seems very highly unlikely that an al-Qaeda-affiliated group would be able to obtain a smallpox sample from Vector.” 

Regarding the attack’s dispersion method, the fire extinguisher-size device described in the scenario would not be expected to effectively spray the biological agent, Furmanski said. “The kinds of aerosol generators that do are laboratory instruments, are stationary and have to be level, they’re just not a backpack kind of thing.”

Furmanski questioned whether Islamic terrorists would even want to use smallpox, given the potential for it to spread more rapidly in the developing world than in Western nations that hold significant vaccine stockpiles. He noted that the terrorists in the scenario also possessed anthrax, yet they chose to use smallpox which is potentially “the most dangerous one for blowback.”

“What [the organizers] don’t touch on is what this would do to the Islamic world, to the putative homeland of these terrorists who have no vaccine, crowded conditions, not very good public health. They would be wiped out.  It would be a catastrophe,” he said.

O’Toole and others from the Center for Biosecurity defended the scenario in e-mailed rebuttals to Leitenberg and Furmanski’s critiques. O’Toole argued that technological progress has made the challenge of producing dry smallpox easier.

“What the U.S. could not do in 1970 is now very routine — e.g. make dry powdered virus. The [recipe] for doing this for measles vaccine, is published and technique for drying [smallpox] was in [an] open U.S. patent before 9/11,” she wrote.

Center Deputy Director Thomas Inglesby added that the battery-powered sprayer assumed in the exercise was possible, writing that the Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo had one in the early 1990s. 

“The technologies of bio-aerosol production (for entirely beneficent purposes) have advanced dramatically since 1969. There are now international biotech and agricultural industries solely dedicated to continued improvement in aerosol delivery technologies, as is evidenced in the continued advances in aerosol drug delivery and large-scale agricultural biopesticide delivery,” he wrote.

Center officials in their comments did not directly address the plausibility of an al-Qaeda splinter group wanting or acquiring the smallpox virus, other than to say such occurrences are possible. “Is Dr. Leitenberg saying that he believes it is not possible for al-Q[aeda] members to have obtained smallpox samples from [former Soviet smallpox] facilities or former scientists there or via middlemen? On what grounds would he make such an assertion?” wrote Inglesby.

It would be a mistake to rule out the possibility, he said. “No one knew that al-Qaeda operatives could fly commercial airliners before 9/11,” Inglesby wrote, adding, “Al-Qaeda has stated its clear interest in and intent to develop and use biological weapons.”

Furmanski and Leitenberg said they did not dispute the center’s contention that the details of the scenario were within the realm of possibility. They argued, however, that what was presented as plausible was an improbable, worst-case scenario.

“The idea that this is something that could pop up tomorrow, they make it seem much more likely than it is. It’s a worst-case scenario.  It could happen. Somebody could make dried smallpox. Nothing is impossible. But it’s much more likely to come from a national military biological weapons program,” Furmanski said.

By overstating the risk and Western vulnerabilities while failing to stress Islamic vulnerabilities, he said, Atlantic Storm may have increased terrorist interest in bioterrorism.

“Here they’ve banged the drums and possibly gotten everyone interested in doing this. They should have banged the drums and said this could be a catastrophe for the Islamic world,” he said. 

The exercise included such prominent figures as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Erika Mann, a member of the European Parliament; former Canadian Foreign Minister Barbara McDougall; and former French Health Minister Bernard Kouchner.

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