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Somebody who is serious about an attack using biowarfare drugs could, and probably will, engineer resistance to our major antibiotics.
—David Perry, chief executive officer of Anacor, a Pentagon contractor developing new drug treatments for potential biological attacks.
By David McGlinchey
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — As the threat of biological terrorism has become more immediate and concern about new strains of pathogens has increased, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has responded by accelerating efforts to find new medicines that will reduce — and perhaps eliminate — the threat of anthrax and many other dangerous agents, scientists and U.S. officials said recently (see GSN, July 16)...Full Story 
The United States has evidence that North Korea could begin producing nuclear weapons by 2004, U.S. and Japanese sources said Tuesday, according to a Kyodo News Service account reported by Dow Jones Business News (see GSN, Nov. 20)...Full Story
A U.S. Aegis cruiser will attempt to destroy a ballistic missile during its boost phase today in a test to be held off the coast of Hawaii, U.S. Defense Department officials said yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 7). ...Full Story
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Thursday, November 21, 2002 |  | | |  |
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By David McGlinchey
Global Security Newswire
The United States will face serious difficulties funding and coordinating any improvement in port security, congressional researchers said in a Tuesday release (see GSN, Nov. 20).
Establishing security standards will also be problematic for U.S. officials as they try to prevent terrorists from smuggling nuclear material through the country’s harbors, said JayEtta Hecker, director of physical infrastructure issues for the General Accounting Office, in the document, which details testimony to the U.S. House Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management, and International Relations.
The United States has attempted to add another line of security to the vulnerable shipping industry by launching the Container Security Initiative, which stations U.S. Customs agents at non-U.S. ports to screen suspicious or high-risk containers before they depart for the United States. The same problems, however, will probably surface overseas as well, the document says (see GSN, Nov. 6).
The document repeats GAO criticism, initially raised in October, of U.S. radiation detection equipment (see GSN, Oct. 21). Details as small as the difference in the radio frequency used by port authorities and local officials can cause disturbances, the document says.
Furthermore, coordinating efforts internationally requires “a wide array of stakeholders” to work together and will prove to be “challenging,” according to the document. “Effective cooperation is essential — and not ensured — even at the domestic level,” the document says.
Establishing a set of security standards is important, but will prove difficult internationally as well, according to the GAO. Developing standards for ports worldwide is “essential to protecting the integrity of the international supply chain,” the document says. “Because of the number and diversity of nations and stakeholders involved in the international supply chain, achieving consensus … could be difficult and time consuming,” it adds.
Funding
The cost of upgrading security will be $10 million to $50 million for each U.S. port, according to a study that the Interagency Commission on Crime and Security in U.S. Seaports conducted before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the GAO said.
“The federal government has already stepped in with additional funding for port security, but demand far outstripped the additional amounts made available,” the document says.
New port security measures could strain resources in some countries, U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said recently, according to the document.
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Canadian officials are pressing the country’s Security Intelligence Service to focus on preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the Ottawa Citizen reported today (see GSN, July 25).
A Sept. 3 letter from Canada’s solicitor general to Ward Elock, the director of the intelligence service, says that addressing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, biological or radiological weapons is “an even more urgent priority” in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The letter directs the service’s efforts for the coming year, according to the Citizen.
Almost every terrorist organization in the world uses Canada to raise money, recruit members, forge documents or plan attacks, the Citizen reported (Jim Bronskill, Ottawa Citizen, Nov. 21).
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The United States has evidence that North Korea could begin producing nuclear weapons by 2004, U.S. and Japanese sources said Tuesday, according to a Kyodo News Service account reported by Dow Jones Business News (see GSN, Nov. 20).
The U.S. estimate is based on the number of centrifuges — used to enrich uranium — that North Korea is suspected of receiving from Pakistan, the sources said (see GSN, Nov. 15). Pyongyang has imported at least 2,000 centrifuges, double the number previously believed, sources close to U.S. intelligence said. Analysts suspect that North Korea began a uranium enrichment program in 1997 and acquired the centrifuges a year later, the U.S. and Japanese sources said (Dow Jones Business News/Yahoo.com, Nov. 19).
Washington Violated Framework First, Pyongyang Says
Meanwhile, North Korea said today that the United States has violated the 1994 Agreed Framework by ending future heavy fuel oil shipments (see GSN, Nov. 14). The shipments were a provision in the framework, which calls for North Korea to freeze any suspected nuclear weapons efforts in exchange for energy assistance.
“We believe that the time has come to clearly draw the line on responsibilities that led to the break of this agreement,” a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said, according to a report by the South Korean Yonhap news agency. The U.S. decision “clearly violates the clause on providing heavy oil for producing heat and energy. While announcing this decision, the United States accused our side as violating the Agreed Framework,” the spokesman said (Associated Press, Nov. 21).
For further information, see:
Agreed Framework Text
KEDO
Reversing earlier plans, the U.S. Energy Department recently decided to keep World War II-era uranium enrichment equipment until the United States could set up a reliable alternative supply of isotopes for industrial, medical, research and security purposes, according to a department audit report released last week. One isotope, for example, is used in bomb detection devices that officials plan to distribute throughout the country to enhance homeland security.
During World War II, the United States built electromagnetic isotope separators, also called calutrons, in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to separate weapon-grade uranium for use in atomic bombs (see GSN, March 28). While designed for military purposes, the calutrons are capable of separating isotopes from most elements from the periodic table, according to the DOE audit report.
Although the calutrons have been idle for years, the department audit recommended against plans to dismantle them “until a reliable and fully demonstrated alternative source of stable isotopes is obtained.”
If the calutrons were dismantled, “the United States would lose the capability to produce 110 stable isotopes and become dependent on Russia to provide essential isotopes to meet our domestic needs,” the report said.
Currently, U.S. users receive isotope supplies from existing stocks or from Russian production facilities. The Russian supply, however, has proven unreliable at times, according to the audit report, and sometimes has delivered poor quality materials.
Therefore, the department auditors recommended that “maintaining the existing calutrons in standby mode seems to be the best course of action” (Calutron Isotope Production Capabilities, Nov. 14).
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By David McGlinchey
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — As the threat of biological terrorism has become more immediate and concern about new strains of pathogens has increased, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has responded by accelerating efforts to find new medicines that will reduce — and perhaps eliminate — the threat of anthrax and many other dangerous agents, scientists and U.S. officials said recently (see GSN, July 16).
An array of five DARPA-supported initiatives have the potential “to take anthrax off the table as a weapon because we can treat it and prevent it,” said John Carney, program manager for DARPA Unconventional Pathogen Countermeasures, which oversees the initiatives.
Although the program is intended to develop medicines that would primarily protect soldiers, the general U.S. population could face the same pathogens and benefit from the same initiatives, officials said.
“Somebody who is serious about an attack using biowarfare drugs could, and probably will, engineer resistance to our major antibiotics,” said David Perry, chief executive officer of Anacor — one of the five companies involved in the DARPA program. “It’s not that hard, frankly. The bacteria they use will be resistant to the antibiotics we have on hand. The government’s emergency policy is to have a basket of antibiotics stockpiled.”
Agency officials have told Congress that they hope to submit several investigational new drugs for Food and Drug Administration approval within two years, Carney said. The agency is also closely considering the possibility of developing a single antibiotic to defeat several pathogens.
“One drug for all bugs,” Carney said.
For example, one antibiotic Anacor is developing might be a “triple-header,” said Lucy Shapiro, director of Stanford University’s Beckman Center for biomedical research and an Anacor cofounder. The drug has shown promise for use against the plague, tularemia and anthrax, she said.
Initiatives and Goals
While the pathogen countermeasures project began before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, officials are now trying to speed the process.
“Timelines are difficult to predict in pharmaceutical work,” Carney said. He noted, however, that “the urgency is greater now” and that the agency is “being aggressive.”
Another participant echoed Carney’s assessment.
“I think certainly DARPA feels a sense of urgency that is reflected down to the scientific level,” said Stephen Benkovic, the other Anacor cofounder and a Pennsylvania State University professor.
Anacor is building on the work of Shapiro and Benkovic, whose research has led to a new class of drugs that inhibit certain pathogenic enzymes, including those found in anthrax and tularemia. The two scientists, who also sit on the company’s scientific advisory board, believe that the recently founded company is making good progress toward developing a single drug that could defeat several dangerous agents.
“We began to accelerate as the situation darkened,” Benkovic said, referring to the terrorist attacks and the U.S. war on terrorism. “We would like to take it as far as we can, as quickly as possible,” he added.
Anacor announced a $21.6 million contract Oct. 29 — from DARPA and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command — to develop antibiotics for use against anthrax, tularemia and other infectious diseases. After initial success with test-tube experiments, the company’s researchers are currently taking their enzymes into animal testing.
Vince Fischetti, a professor who specializes in bacterial pathogenesis and immunology at New York’s Rockefeller University, is in the second year of another leg of the DARPA-sponsored effort to develop an enzyme that will target anthrax without causing side effects in other systems in the human body. He has worked with the agency before and has sat on its scientific advisory board for four years.
DARPA is funding a clinical trial to test the new enzyme in animals, Fischetti said. Researchers plan to finish animal testing within a year, and if it is successful, human testing could be complete in two years, he said.
If all goes well, the government could have this medicine stockpiled in under five years, and Fischetti said he imagines that it could happen “in three to four.”
DARPA is also working with Genesoft in the San Francisco Bay area and PharmAthene and Critical Therapeutics in the Boston area.
Though the five initiatives work toward similar goals, they are not in a competition, Carney said. Each has sufficient funding and its own milestones to reach, he added.
“At the end of the day, they will either succeed or fail on their own characteristics,” Carney said.
Academia Meets the Military
The pathogen countermeasures contracts represent a significant infusion of top scientific minds into the world of national security, according to Shapiro.
“DARPA was very instrumental in taking this out of academia and into a real corporate setting … neither Steve [Benkovic] or I had the ability or desire to run a company,” she said.
Shapiro applauded the risks that the program has taken to support fledgling scientific efforts. Anacor, which grew from the research of Shapiro and Benkovic, is now well poised to produce important new medicines, Carney said. The antibiotics being developed in Anacor’s Palo Alto facility in California might become the first new class of antibiotics since 1978, according to Perry.
While Anacor officials said they anticipate that a commercial application will emerge from their work — the compound has also proven effective against common bugs such as streptococcus and staphylococcus — Shapiro said they hope to develop a drug that is “much more effective” than Cipro in treating anthrax.
“If you want to break barriers and develop the new penicillin, you have to take chances,” Shapiro said. “I’m not telling you we have penicillin — we don’t — but we might,” she added.
Keeping in Touch
Mixing scientists and national security experts is not always a completely smooth process, Carney said. It is important to not merely fund the projects and walk away, he said.
Each week, agency officials conduct either a phone conference call or a face-to-face meeting with representatives from each project. The agency also hosts annual meetings to bring efforts together and share ideas and research.
The annual meetings “bring all of the projects together as a forum — it creates a community,” Carney said. The meeting of the different scientists creates a useful “social network” and offers participants “different vantage points on how to attack a problem,” he added. Representatives from the Pentagon and the FDA as well as alumni from former DARPA projects have attended the meetings in the past. The most recent meeting was held in February, and the next is scheduled for April 2003.
During the meetings, academics are given a slot of time to present their work, and Carney asks them to pay attention to practical applications as well as general scientific progress. Because some scientists are unaccustomed to displaying the practical facets of their work, Carney has mandated that the first five slides of every presentation focus on real world application and business matters.
Although DARPA’s efforts are not conventional, they are needed to provide new solutions to urgent concerns, Carney said. The agency’s mandate is to “disruptively” change the way technology is used and to look “far forward into the future,” he added.
The scientists involved in the project agreed that novel treatments must be found for chemical and biological agents.
“If the next attack is a resistant organism, we would have no way to kill that organism,” Fischetti said. “It’s a capability we don’t have right now,” he added.
NATO yesterday showed off its new weapons of mass destruction response initiatives during an anthrax response exercise in Prague (see GSN, Nov. 19).
The alliance has begun several WMD defense initiatives, including creating rapid response teams and disease surveillance teams and stocking vaccines in NATO member countries. Alliance officials said they plan to determine how to integrate the WMD rapid response teams, which will consist of up to 15 members, into the NATO military structure after a year-long series of exercises.
“These are people who have been trained for years to do their jobs,” a NATO official said. “What’s new is that they are being pulled together to act in a coordinated way” (John Chalmers, Reuters, Nov. 20).
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The U.S. Defense Department has decided to neutralize — rather than burn — 523 tons of chemical weapons agents stored at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky (see GSN, Sept. 30). Undersecretary of Defense Pete Aldridge yesterday signed a recommendation that neutralization should be the “preferred alternative technology” for disposing of the agents. The plan is expected to be finalized after a 30-day comment period, according to the Associated Press.
Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who had opposed incineration, praised the Pentagon’s move.
“This is a victory for Kentucky won by Kentuckians,” McConnell said. “The grassroots effort to ensure safe destruction of these terrible weapons has won the day,” he added (Associated Press, Nov. 21).
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has said that a lack of needed funding has hindered the group’s efforts to verify that countries are destroying their chemical weapons stockpiles, Inter Press Service reported today (see GSN, Oct. 28).
“The OPCW has been underfunded for several years now,” said the organization’s Executive Council Chairman Lionel Fernando, ambassador from Sri Lanka. “The underfunding has had an impact on OPCW inspections, he said.
To date, the OPCW, which oversees the Chemical Weapons Convention, has verified the destruction of about 7,050 tons of chemical weapons agents — 10 percent of the total arsenal declared by more than 10 countries. The shortage of funds has also forced the organization to conduct fewer chemical industry inspections than planned, Fernando said.
Contributions from OPCW members have helped the organization restore cuts in activities that were made after a financial crisis in 2000, according to Inter Press Service. Even with the voluntary contributions, however, “there is clearly a need to address the issue of funding with a view to making sure that future budgets are adequate for verification and other programs,” Fernando said (Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service/TerraViva, Nov. 21).
For further information, see:
CWC Text
OPCW Main Page
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A U.S. Aegis cruiser will attempt to destroy a ballistic missile during its boost phase today in a test to be held off the coast of Hawaii, U.S. Defense Department officials said yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 7).
The USS Lake Erie plans to fire a Standard Missile 3 to intercept a modified, single-stage Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile launched from the island of Kauai, the Missile Defense Agency said.
The test is the first in a series of six designed to accelerate the development of a sea-based missile defense system, an agency official said. Agency Director Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish has said he hopes to have a rudimentary sea-based missile defense system ready by 2006, the official said (Agence France-Presse, Nov. 21).
For further information, see:
MDA Basics of Missile Defense
MDA Missile Defense System
Sea-Based Midcourse
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A new book by Washington Post Managing Editor Bob Woodward says that U.S. President George W. Bush suspected that al-Qaeda was planning to use radioactive materials from Pakistan to attack Washington soon after the Sept. 11 attacks last year, the Times of India reported today (see GSN, Nov. 18).
“We began to get serious indications that nuclear plans, material and know-how were being moved out of Pakistan,” Bush said, according to Woodward’s book, Bush at War. “It was the vibrations coming out of everybody reviewing the evidence.”
Bush received information on the suspected radiological attack during an intelligence briefing Oct. 29, 2001. Some of the information concerned intercepted discussions about a dirty bomb, while others mentioned “making lots of people sick.” Despite the threat, Bush refused to leave Washington, Woodward said.
“Those b******* are going to find me exactly here,” Bush is quoted as saying. “And if they get me, they are going to get me right here.”
Instead, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney decided to move to a secure undisclosed location to prevent a terrorist attacking from killing both leaders, according to Woodward.
“This isn’t about you,” Cheney told Bush. “This is about our Constitution.”
“Had the president decided he too is going, you would have had the vice president going one direction and the president going another, people are going to say, ‘What about me?’” Bush said. “I wasn’t going to leave. I guess I could have, but I wasn’t,” he added (Chidanand Rajghatta, Times of India, Nov. 21).
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2002 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by National Journal Group, Inc. Any reproduction or retransmission, in whole or in part, is a violation of federal law and is strictly prohibited without the consent of the National Journal Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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