Iraq:  Security Council Prepares for Sanctions Vote as U.S. Officials Debate Action Plans

The U.N. Security Council’s five permanent members agreed yesterday to revise U.N. sanctions against Iraq, a British diplomat said (see GSN, May 2).  The full council will probably vote on the revisions tomorrow, according to the diplomat.

The revised sanctions (see GSN, April 3) would include a new goods review list designed to prevent the export of potential military goods to Iraq while allowing imports of civilian goods without U.N. controls for the first time since the Gulf War (Agence France-Presse, May 6).

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed that the United Kingdom, China, France, Russia and the United States support the revisions.

“We expect the full Security Council to consider this resolution this week,” he said (U.S. State Department release, May 6).

Iraq Anticipates Attack

Meanwhile, a top Iraqi official yesterday questioned whether the United States and United Kingdom would attack Iraq even if the country allows U.N. weapons inspectors to return (see GSN, May 3).

Secretary General Kofi Annan has said that recent meetings to discuss the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq have been positive, but Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz yesterday expressed doubt that a return of inspectors would avoid a military confrontation (see GSN, May 6).

“Even if Mr. Annan reaches agreement with our foreign minister, he has to take it to the U.S.,” Aziz told British parliamentarians and journalists in Baghdad.

Aziz expressed concern that if inspectors return to Iraq they might say Iraq is not cooperating, and the United States could use Iraqi noncompliance as a justification for a military strike.  Aziz refused to say that Iraq would not allow inspectors to return, but he added, “We have the experience of a whole decade.”  Inspectors last left Iraq in 1998 before the United States and United Kingdom bombed sites around Baghdad.  The inspectors had said that Iraq was obstructing their efforts to monitor WMD disarmament.

Iraq is willing to reach a compromise with the United Nations but does not want an open-ended mandate for the inspectors, Aziz said.  He refused to say whether Iraq would allow inspectors to visit Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s presidential palaces — a major issue in previous inspections (see GSN, Dec. 20, 2001).  Aziz said only a fool would have thought the United Kingdom hid weapons under King George’s palace during World War II.

Aziz called on British Prime Minister Tony Blair to provide evidence that Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction and said a British inspections team could visit Iraq (see GSN, April 2).  Aziz also challenged Blair to a televised debate (Ewen MacAskill, London Guardian, May 7).

U.S. Policy on Hussein

Aziz’s remarks followed comments by two top U.S. officials Sunday emphasizing that U.S. policy is to end Hussein’s regime.

Asked whether the United States would try to overthrow Hussein even if Iraq allows weapons inspections, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell replied, “The U.S. policy is that regardless of what the inspectors do, the people of Iraq and the people of the region would be better off with a different regime in Baghdad” (see GSN, April 16).

“The United States policy that says the Iraqi people and the world will be better off with a different regime in Baghdad is separate and distinct and different from the U.N. resolutions and the sending in of the inspectors.  So the United States reserves its option to do whatever it believes might be appropriate to see if there can be a regime change,” Powell said on ABC’s This Week.

The United States would be interested in whatever information inspectors would discover, but Iraq is not allowing inspectors to return, Powell said.  Inspections would never result in “100 percent verification” because Iraq could “still hide things,” he said (U.S. State Department release, May 5).

The United States has no doubt that Hussein continues to develop weapons of mass destruction and has used them on his neighbors and Iraqi civilians in the past, U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said on Fox News Sunday.

“I don't see how anyone can doubt his intentions.  He didn't kick inspectors out because he needed the hotel rooms.  He kicked them out because he wanted to hide something,” Rice said.

U.S. President George W. Bush has not decided how to deal with Hussein, and the United States is discussing the matter with its allies, Rice said, but she added, “We have felt — the president has felt — that it's extremely important to make clear that the status quo is not acceptable with this regime” (Fox News Sunday, May 6).

Legal Basis and Public Support

Public opinion polls have shown up to 72 percent of the U.S. population supports action against Hussein, despite objections by some lawmakers and allies, Newhouse News Service reported yesterday.  Bush administration officials have said the United Nations and U.S. congressional resolutions provide a legal basis for military action against Iraq.

Administration officials “feel they have politics on their side and legally have the United Nations resolutions to back them up.  Intuitively, they want to finish his thing off,” said Michael Vickers of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Civilians vs. Military

Top civilian officials in the Pentagon have taken charge of planning for a military strike against Iraq rather than leaving the task primarily to military officers, according to Newhouse.

Various media sources have reported attack plans involving 200,000 or more troops, but Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army’s top officer, said top officials have not asked him to participate in planning for operations in Iraq (see GSN, April 29).

“I’m the guy who’s got to do (the planning), and I haven’t done it yet,” he said.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top Army leaders have been feuding, according to Newhouse.  Some Pentagon officials said military leaders are too unimaginative and bound by bureaucracy to take decisive action.  Those officials listed the inability of military leaders to dislodge the Taliban and al-Qaeda using traditional bombing in Afghanistan until top civilian defense officials demanded the Central Command deploy special forces teams.

“That experience reinforced the idea that ‘war is too important to leave to the generals,’” said an Army source, adding Rumsfeld and his top aides “don’t think the military’s plans are worth anything.”

“The military for the most part is a relatively conservative institution, and just as they weren’t about to hop on the peacekeeping bandwagon during the Clinton administration, they are not eager to jump on the bandwagon of ‘take over every country we don’t agree with,’” said Deborah Avant, an international relations specialist at George Washington University.

Civilian leaders taking over military operations is “not such a bad thing if you win,” but there is a decreasing number of top officials with military experience who have experienced the difficulty of implementing plans in combat, said Loren Thompson, a senior analyst at the Lexington Institute.

“What bothers me,” Thompson said, “is that the Bush national security team has an exaggerated idea of what the military is capable of doing” (David Wood, Newhouse News Service, May 6).

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U.S. Response:  Bill Would Prohibit Expanding CTR to Other Countries

A congressional committee has recommended legislation to prohibit expanding cooperative threat reduction programs to countries beyond the former Soviet Union, according to the Council for a Livable World (see GSN, March 20).

The House Armed Services Committee, which completed its markup last week of the fiscal 2003 National Defense Authorization Act, included a provision prohibiting expansion of U.S. programs to protect weapons of mass destruction and to counter WMD proliferation to countries outside the former Soviet Union (see related GSN story, today).

In addition, the committee’s version of the bill would place a new reporting requirement on the annual cooperative threat reduction report regarding how revenue generated by CTR activities in the former Soviet Union is used, according to the council.  The legislation would also prohibit spending of CTR funds until 30 days after authorities file reports required by previous year laws (Council for a Livable World release, May 6).

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Interview:  Richard Rhodes Talks on Nonproliferation and Virtual Deterrence

Nuclear historian Richard Rhodes spoke with Global Security Newswire’s Greg Webb on April 27 to discuss the threat of nuclear proliferation and the prospects for major nuclear weapons reductions.  Rhodes won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and his follow-up Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb was a Pulitzer finalist.

Global Security Newswire:  In The Making of the Atomic Bomb, you described how the United States used its massive industrial power to design and build the first atomic weapons more than 50 years ago.  Given what we know today about nuclear weapons and how to produce them, is it feasible for a terrorist organization or a developing nation to produce a weapon?  Would it be easy, for example, to fashion a “gun-barrel” type weapon in which two subcritical pieces of highly enriched uranium are shot together to make a critical mass?

Richard Rhodes:  Luis Alvarez, one of the physicists who worked on the bomb and later won the Nobel Prize, told me once you could make a high-grade nuclear explosion — by which he meant one yielding an explosion equivalent to at least one kiloton of TNT — by dropping one piece of highly enriched uranium onto another.  That’s a pretty terrifying prospect in terms of someone getting their hands on enough HEU.

But if we’re talking about people trying to build weapons, including processing nuclear material, the plausibility of any subnational group succeeding seems to me to be very, very low.  Not only because it is a technologically sophisticated business, but because it takes a huge industrial enterprise to separate or breed the nuclear material. 

So if we’re talking about any kind of potential terrorist bomb, we’re necessarily talking about the theft of HEU, which is very closely guarded.  How closely guarded in the former Soviet Union or in Russia?  I hear various estimates, but it strikes me as extremely implausible that a nuclear power, fully aware of the destructive force of a nuclear weapon, would be casual about its nuclear material.  And the people I’ve spoken with who have worked in Russia to help the Russians secure their nuclear materials always tell me that it’s not a question of Russia not guarding the materials — the stuff isn’t floating around in society or sitting in someone’s back room — it’s a question of a different philosophy of how you guard nuclear materials and of Russia learning different methods as a result of the fact that its borders are now open, as ours have always been.

The United States had to develop real-time accounting and other methods that Russia never had to develop because it had what our guys at Los Alamos were calling “guards, guns and gulags.”  So Russia distributed plutonium and HEU to research laboratories more freely than the United States, but that doesn’t mean that nobody is guarding the shop.

Of course, if nuclear materials were stolen, the risk to Russia in fact would be higher than the risk to us, because it has many more political complexities around its borders than we do, even forgetting for a moment the Osama bin Laden factor.

As for the prospects of al-Qaeda producing bomb materials, it’s just not plausible.  It’s really ludicrous what al-Qaeda documents have turned up in Afghanistan that related to nuclear weapons that some have suggested indicate a capability to produce weapons.  There were things like articles out of Popular Mechanics magazine.

I used to say that I find it incomprehensible that any nation-state would allow a subnational group to develop a nuclear weapon on its territory knowing that the subnational group could use that weapon against the nation-state.   Maybe that argument is not quite so ironclad after Sept. 11, but it still has validity in terms of the politics of nuclear weapons.

I just don’t see a scenario.  Furthermore, the attacks of Sept. 11 were not designed to kill a massive number of people.  They were designed to play well on international television. 

I call bin Laden the Steven Spielberg of terrorism:  these large productions that are visible.  It’s like this absurd notion that someone could crash a plane into a nuclear power plant and that the plane would somehow manage to penetrate six feet of reinforced concrete.  It sounds terrifying, but it has no physical reality at all.

Unfortunately, the discussion of proliferation, and in particular subnational proliferation, has centered around the question of plutonium, that is, worrying about the shipment of reprocessed plutonium — say, to Japan — when in fact we need to be looking more seriously at highly enriched uranium.

GSN:  How would you assess the role of simple patriotism and loyalty in protecting nuclear materials?  Particularly in Russia, where scientists may not receive a significant salary on a regular basis and may be receiving offers for their services?

RR:  I think we can assume that they probably have received offers.

First of all, anyone can see from looking at the historical past that the Soviet atomic scientists were as loyal and as concerned as our scientists.  So we have that evidence, but of course with the collapse of the economy, certainly there are obvious concerns.

But the truth is the knowledge base is pretty international, at least for first generation atomic weapons.  I don’t think there’s much question that anybody could find the exact measurements of the Little Boy device [the design used in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima].  I’ve seen them in published documents.  They have been slightly speculative but basically based on the blueprints.

So it isn’t so much the technology of building a weapon as it is the much more difficult problem of acquiring the material.

Virtual Deterrence

GSN:  Could you comment on the prospects of abolishing nuclear weapons and the need for transparency?  Is there a possibility for a world with only “virtual” nuclear weapons?

RR:  I understand that’s basically the way Pakistan has solved the problem of security; that it physically separated the various bomb parts under different security systems to make the government comfortable that nobody could quickly steal a bomb.  So that’s one model in use today.

Then there’s another model, which is the fact that we’re dismantling many nuclear weapons every year from our large arsenal, as are the Russians.  And the nuclear cores, the physics packages, are being stored.

So we already have a lot of what we might call “virtual,” or disassembled, nuclear weapons today. 

Then there is the Bush administration’s decision, or at least discussion, to take the ICBMs that we withdraw from our arsenal and, instead of break them up and throw them away, dismantle them and put them on the shelf.  The Russians have understandably debated with us because their idea is that if you say you don’t have such weapons then you really do have to destroy them entirely.

So there’s already a certain momentum in the direction of what could eventually be the next stage of evolution, which would be to have an arsenal, but to have it physically separated into the component parts so that it would take 48 hours or three days to assemble; something like where we were in 1946 and 1947 when we had a few bombs but they weren’t together.

I’m thinking of things that make people comfortable with the idea of getting away from 30 minutes or 15 minutes delivery time.  We’ve already taken that step literally when the United States agreed to untarget our ICBMs, to unprogram the guidance systems so that they were not aimed at Leningrad or Moscow.  That added perhaps five minutes more to the delivery time.

Clearly that’s the way people think about how to de-escalate the hot, direct confrontation.  If we keep moving in that direction and perhaps think more deliberately about that direction, then it’s plausible to imagine a time when all the nuclear weapons in the world that are left, some minimal number, exist as dismantled weapons in a warehouse.

From there the next logical step, which would fall to discussion and treaties and so forth, is to take those components apart, dilute the nuclear material and reach a point where you only have to maintain the knowledge base, the technological skill set and perhaps the factories, the reactors and so forth.

Then how long is the delivery time?  Perhaps it’s three to six months. 

I think of a comparable experience I had several years ago when I visited Japan and New York Times correspondent David Sanger interviewed me about whether the reactor-grade plutonium stored in Japan constituted a latent nuclear arsenal.  I said it probably would take the Japanese maybe six months to build a bomb given the reactor materials.  It would be a less reliable but still functional bomb.

Sanger then went to someone in the Japanese government and posed the same question.  Their comment was “well maybe it would take us six months.” 

At some level, if you have relatively pure plutonium around, you have a virtual nuclear arsenal.  I know the Japanese don’t like to think of themselves that way and they’re not, but as [Former CIA Director] John Deutch wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1994, there have been at least 25 nations around the world that have built essentially paper bombs.  They have gone through the exercise of seeing how they would do that, and then have decided for various reasons that they didn’t want to do that.  There already is a regime in the world of a number of nations that are at this stage, approaching the ultimate level of abolition.

GSN:  How do you envision transparency enabling such efforts to move toward more dismantled weapons?

RR:  Given the increased transparency of the whole world by satellite, by commercial satellite, by global positioning systems and so on, within 50 years, the only privacy that will be left to any of us will the privacy that we have negotiated by mutual agreement.  There will be nothing private.  There are too many emanations from human natural activity that are readable by clever scientific detection systems.

Therefore, abolition becomes conceivable, even perhaps practical, within another 40 or 50 years.  We would all breathe much easier and nuclear deterrence — at the level of knowledge and know-how — would still be in place.

Military Asymmetry

GSN:  Does the success of U.S. conventional forces in the last 10 years suggest that nuclear weapons are needed less?

RR:  The present asymmetry of massive U.S. conventional superiority, similar to what the Soviet Union once enjoyed in Europe, asks the smaller powers to develop a nuclear defense against our conventional force, just as we did against the Soviet Union in Europe after World War II.

Further and more fundamentally, consider [former U.N. Special Commission on Iraq Executive Chairman] Richard Butler’s point that there is a fundamental inequity — in the legal sense of the word and the moral sense of the word — in our saying “we need nuclear weapons for our security, but the rest of you don’t.”  We are obviously the world’s best living example of why a given country should become a nuclear power. 

Dirty Bombs

GSN: Could you assess the effects of radiological weapons are they weapons of mass destruction or weapons of mass disruption?

RR:  The United States worked very hard to build radiological weapons after World War II, and we actually got as far as testing such weapons at Dugway Proving Ground.  I remember seeing a memorandum written by one of the observers that said “that was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”  These really are nasty, nasty weapons.

But the United States never built any, and the main reason was they’re just not practical weapons.  If you have something that’s highly radioactive — and it would have to be very intensely radioactive to have any serious effect dispersed across an acre or two of ground — it’s dangerous to the people who are handling the device.  Or it’s covered with so much lead that it’s essentially deliverable only by truck or railroad car.  Plus, since there is an inverse correlation between radioactive intensity and half-life, it’s only good for a couple of weeks.  So it’s simply not something you can put on a shelf.  You have to make it in a reactor and extract it from the reactor materials and then put it in a lead box and rush it to the target.

Well, none of those things is plausible for a terrorist.  So we come back to sort of a “fake” dirty bomb.  That wouldn’t be very difficult to do, to steal a cobalt source from a hospital and attach it to some plastique and you could presumably contaminate an area with basically nondangerous, relatively low levels of radiation that would scare people.

If you were to do something like that in the middle of Manhattan, obviously a lot of people would be terrified.  So that sort of dirty bomb is plausible, but it wouldn’t really be very dangerous.

All the public and press comment about these possibilities of blowing up nuclear power reactors, or building dirty bombs, reflect a sad lack of public discussion, particularly on the part of technical experts and government leaders who should know better and should be saying so, so that people aren’t unnecessarily frightened.

Nuclear Power

And don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

Nuclear power does not pollute the environment.  By law.  That’s why it has containment domes, why its waste is kept so carefully. 

Coal burning does pollute.  Even natural gas pollutes.  To reach a point where we no longer feel safe with nuclear power would be a great tragedy. 

Nuclear power has advantages in terms of public health.  There was a paper in Science just a couple weeks ago pointing out that particulate pollution in the atmosphere in most major cities is the equivalent of living with someone who smokes.  That’s just more evidence that the by-products of fossil fuel burning are unhealthful.

The by-products of burning nuclear energy are not unhealthy because they are not released into the environment. 

GSN:  Isn’t the issue of nuclear waste a legitimate concern?

RR:  It is a complete political red herring. 

First of all, the volume of waste is very small.  That’s why it’s possible to contain it.  Second, there’s no question that the technology exists to exclude the waste from the environment for at least the next 10,000 years.  Third, does anyone imagine that we won’t have cured cancer within 10,000 years, if indeed we still exist on this Earth as carbon-based life forms? 

Finally, consider the damage to public health today.  Estimates range from 15,000 to 30,000 deaths per year in the United States alone from coal burning and all the particulates and noxious gasses and heavy metals that are released into the environment by coal burning.  Compare that to the theoretically small risk of illness or death from nuclear waste leaking into the water supply 10,000 years down the road.  The difference between those two levels of risk — real deaths today versus theoretical deaths later — is so great that I don’t understand why all the public health doctors in this world haven’t insisted that we go to nuclear power.

GSN:  What are the prospects for creating energy through nuclear fusion?

RR:  I was just at an international conference in San Diego of people who are working on fusion.  They’re optimistic that they’ll have a working system within another 20 years.  But if you look at the historic pattern of substituting one energy source for another over the last 200 years, it takes anywhere from 40 to 100 years before a new energy source can contribute a significant portion of the total energy output.  So even if fusion were suddenly made a practical system tomorrow, it still wouldn’t have an impact until around the 22^nd century.

The two great sources of energy in the 21^st century — because of the way they are increasing their share of the world fraction — are going to be natural gas and nuclear power.  Coal is already declining as a fraction of the world total.  Oil started declining even earlier, and wood disappeared a long time ago.

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Russia-Iran:  Official Proposes Working Group to Ease U.S. Worries

Russia is proposing to create a working group with the United States to resolve U.S. concerns over Russian nuclear cooperation with Iran, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said yesterday (see GSN, May 6).

Russia is providing nuclear technology assistance to Iran, but “exclusively for peaceful purposes,” such as the Bushehr nuclear power plant project, Ivanov said in a speech at Stanford University in California.  To address U.S. concerns on issues such as nuclear and ballistic missile technology, Russia would like to establish working groups similar to the U.S.-Russian working group for Afghanistan, he said (RIA, BBC Worldwide Monitoring, May 7).

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Cuba:  Havana Developing Weapons, Aiding Rogue States, Bolton Says

Cuba has developed a biological weapons program and could be sharing biological warfare research with other rogue states, a top U.S. State Department official said yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 11).

“The United States believes that Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort,” Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation John Bolton said in a speech to the Heritage Foundation.

During the past 40 years, Cuba has developed a sophisticated biomedical industry, aided until 1990 by the former Soviet Union, that is one of the most advanced in Latin America, Bolton said.  Cuban defectors and experts, however, have cast suspicion on what other research efforts Cuban biomedical facilities have conducted, he said (U.S. State Department release, May 6).

Cuba is now believed to have experimented with anthrax and a few other deadly microbes, Bush administration officials said.

Ken Alibek, who was once a senior scientist for the former Soviet Union’s biological weapons program, told a congressional committee last fall that he believed Cuba is capable of making genetically modified biological weapons, weapons that could not be defeated by U.S. vaccines and antibiotics (Judith Miller, New York Times, May 7).

Cuba has also provided other rogue states with dual-use biotechnology, which could be used to help develop biological weapons programs in those countries, Bolton said.  He quoted a speech made by Cuban leader Fidel Castro last year at Tehran University, which said, “Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees.  The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up” (U.S. State Department release, May 6).

Several Cuban defectors have previously raised concerns about Cuban aid to other rogue states, said Stephen Johnson, a Latin American affairs expert at the Heritage Foundation.  One example Johnson gave was Jose de la Fuente, a former scientist at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana, who reported that Cuba has sold Iran equipment to produce the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine (see GSN, Oct. 12, 2001).  Such equipment, however, could also be used to produce biological weapons agents, according to Johnson.

While Cuba has spent millions on advanced biomedical equipment, there are still often shortages of basic medical goods, which has also increased U.S. suspicions, Johnson said.

“That’s one of the things that has John Bolton worried,” Johnson said (Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, May 7).

“We know that Cuba is collaborating with other state sponsors of terror,” Bolton said.  “We call on Cuba to cease all BW [biological weapons]-applicable cooperation with rogue states and to fully comply with all of its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention” (U.S. State Department release, May 6).

“A Downright Lie”

The Cuban Interest Office in Washington denied Cuba was producing biological weapons.  Bolton’s claims are “ridiculous, absurd and a downright lie,” said spokesman Luis Mariano Fernandez.

“They’re not just lies, but big lies,” Fernandez said.

The Bush administration stance that Cuba is involved in biological weapons is only political pandering to Cuban exiles in the United States, said Wayne Smith, former top U.S. diplomat in Cuba under the Carter administration.

“There is simply no hard, convincing evidence,” Smith said.  “There is no real evidence other than hearsay” (Eaton/Corchado, Dallas Morning-News, May 7).

Cuban Threat Underestimated, Bolton Says

The Cuban threat to U.S. security has been underplayed, Bolton said, citing a 1998 U.S. report that said Cuba did not pose a significant military threat to the United States or the region.  Then-Defense Secretary William Cohen, however, had prefaced the report with concerns over Cuba’s ability to produce biological weapons, Bolton said.

A major reason why the report played down the threat posed by Cuba was because of Cuba’s intensive intelligence operations within the United States, Bolton said, giving the example of Ana Belen Montes, a senior Cuba analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who helped prepare the report.  Montes was later found to have been recruited to spy for Cuba, he said (U.S. State Department release, May 6).

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Anthrax:  Spores Became More Potent as Attacks Progressed, Officials Say

Investigators believe that the anthrax spores mailed in last fall’s attacks progressively became more potent and sophisticated, with the spores in the letter mailed to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) being the most lethal, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, May 1).

It was previously believed that the spores included in the tainted letter sent to Leahy were identical to those in a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), according to the Times (see GSN, Oct. 16, 2001).  Investigators later discovered, however, that the Leahy spores were finer and smaller than those sent to Daschle.

“It could be that the final steps of the processing were done in steps,” said a senior U.S. official familiar with the investigation.  “You take it so far, and take off a bunch.  You go further, and take off another bunch.”

The anthrax spores sent in letters to NBC News and the New York Post, the first recovered from the scene of an attack, were relatively crude, said officials (see GSN, Oct. 15, 2001).  The powder was contaminated with “vegetative cells,” anthrax bacteria that had not been turned into spores, officials said.  Vegetative cells are generally dead and harmless, according to experts.

Investigators found that the powder recovered from the tainted letter mailed to Daschle, after the New York media attacks, consisted almost entirely of anthrax spores, the Times reported.  The FBI described the Daschle anthrax as being more refined, more potent and more easily dispersed than the spores included in the letters sent to New York media organizations.  The letters included in the tainted envelopes to NBC News and the Post warned the recipients to take penicillin, while the text in the Daschle letter said, “You die now,” according to the Times.

Experts who examined the powder recovered from the Daschle letter found that the concentration of spores was high — almost a trillion per gram, the same level achieved by the former U.S. biological weapons program.  The spores, however, in some cases were too large to be effective, the Times reported.  Although experts did discover single spores in the Daschle sample, there were also clusters that were as big as 40 microns, making them too large to penetrate lungs.

An analysis of the sample recovered from the Leahy letter conducted last week found that its spores were finer and more refined than those in the Daschle letter, officials said (see GSN, Nov. 19, 2001).

“You can characterize the Leahy [spores] as having a smaller particle range,” an official said.

The increasing strength and sophistication of the anthrax used in the attacks as they progressed could mean the person responsible was a thief who stole several samples, said a biologist involved in the investigation.

“Maybe he didn’t pocket one vial but two or three, if we’re assuming this was an opportunist,” the biologist said.

The FBI also must examine the possibility that the mail-sorting machines that processed the tainted letters might have had an effect on the powder within, said Ken Alibek, a senior scientist for the former Soviet biological weapons program.

“It could have been an additional process of milling,” Alibek said.  “Like a mortar and pestle” (Broad/Johnston, New York Times, May 7).

What Can Be Learned From Survivors?

Experts are examining the cases of lingering symptoms among the six survivors of anthrax infections caused by last fall’s attacks to learn more about anthrax recovery, the New York Times reported today.

“There are more questions than there are answers,” said Arthur Friedlander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md.  “We know only about this disease historically, for the most part, up until the recent tragic events.  So this represents an opportunity to learn.”

CDC experts have collected blood samples from the six survivors and have planned to conduct more intensive research, the Times reported. 

“We are sort of at the cusp,” said the CDC’s top anthrax expert Bradley Perkins.  “As we get further out from the original infection and these individuals do not return to their normal activities, that is going to be of great concern to us.  It will be a clear indication that we need to pursue all avenues to find out what’s going on.”

CDC researchers have already learned from blood tests that inhalational anthrax caused a stronger immune reaction in patients than in those who contracted cutaneous, or skin, anthrax, according to the Times.

“The cutaneous form of anthrax is a very substantial skin infection, and we would have expected a similar immune response,” Perkins said.

There are several possible reasons why the survivors still have some symptoms, Perkins said.  The anthrax toxin could have damaged cells and tissues in ways not yet understood.  Antibiotic side effects also could have an effect, he said.  The recovery time for anthrax might just be longer than previously believed, according to Perkins.

Another factor that could account for the lingering symptoms in the anthrax survivors is the stress caused by being involved in a terrorist attack, according to experts.

“The whole issue of having been attacked cannot be underestimated,” said Jonathan Rosenthal, an infectious disease specialist for the Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group.  “These patients were very much aware that someone tried to assassinate them, and there is an enormous amount of anxiety and fear about that” (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times, May 7).

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South Korean Response:  New Detection Vehicle to Guard World Cup

South Korea is planning to roll out a new vehicle tomorrow that can detect and identify biological weapons, the Korea Herald reported today (see GSN, Feb. 1).

The vehicle, which uses DNA analyzer to identify agents, can detect a wide range of biological weapons, according to the Herald.  It can detect and identify a biological attack almost immediately after it occurs, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry, which developed the vehicle in a partnership with Korean businesses Daewoo Heavy Industries and Machinery Ltd.

The ministry is expected to deploy 30 of the vehicles as part of the security effort for the World Cup games next month.  The vehicles will be operated a by the recently created biochemical command unit, according to the ministry (Hwang Jang-jin, Korea Herald, May 7).

Meanwhile, the United States and South Korea last month signed an agreement to cooperate on security for the World Cup games, according to the Korea Times.  U.S. support includes the Airborne Warning and Control System and the U.S. Army’s Biological Integrated Detection System, which can detect biological agents.

“Both the United States and South Korea agreed to strengthen cooperation and conduct these joint measures to ensure the success of the World Cup,” said Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, U.S. Forces Korea assistant chief of staff for operations (Korea Times, May 3).

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Smallpox:  Mass Vaccination Would Save More Lives, Studies Say

Mass vaccinating people younger than 30 against smallpox could save more lives than the current U.S. plan to conduct limited vaccinations in the event of an outbreak, according to two reports to be released today (see GSN, April 19).

“There are risks with the vaccine, but there are even greater risks with smallpox,” according to Matthew Davis of the University of Michigan, expected to present one of the studies to the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in Baltimore this week.

Davis determined that if half of U.S. residents younger than 30 were vaccinated against smallpox — about 58 million people — the project would cost $286 million.  A project to vaccinate 75 percent of U.S. residents younger than 30 would cost $430 million, Davis said.  Most people over the age of 30 still have some immunity to smallpox because of previous vaccination programs, according to Newsday.

A separate study conducted by Alex Kemper of the University of Michigan indicated that if 82.5 million people younger than 30 were vaccinated against smallpox, up to 190 could die of vaccine-related complications.  Currently, the U.S. smallpox vaccine causes one death out of every 1 million people inoculated.  A smallpox infection, however, is fatal in one out of three cases, according to Newsday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Committee on Immunization Practices has proposed a “ring vaccination” strategy in the event of a smallpox outbreak, such as one launched as a biological weapons attack.  The ring vaccination strategy calls only for emergency workers who would respond to an outbreak to be vaccinated, according to Newsday. 

“I do think the government has already examined the mass vaccination option and has at this point decided not to pursue it,” Davis said.  “We’re hoping that with our work, the government will reconsider the mass vaccination option” (Delthia Ricks, Newsday, May 7).

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Russia:  House Committee Cuts CW Destruction Funds

By Kerry Boyd
Global Security Newswire

A congressional committee has recommended cutting $83.6 million from U.S. President George W. Bush’s request for chemical weapons destruction in Russia (see GSN, April 3).

The House Armed Services Committee, which reported the fiscal 2003 National Defense Authorization Act out of committee Friday, included only $50 million for chemical weapons destruction in Russia, matching the current funding level, according to the committee’s executive summary.

The committee recommended redistributing the funds to eliminate strategic offensive arms in the former Soviet Union and transport and secure nuclear weapons in Russia.

The authorization bill is scheduled to go to the House floor Thursday, according to a committee spokeswoman.  The Senate version is scheduled to begin markup tomorrow, according to a Senate Armed Services Committee spokeswoman.

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U.S. Plans:  Legislators Seek to Boost Israeli Arrow System

Several U.S. legislators are working to provide more funds for the U.S.-Israeli Arrow missile program as fiscal 2003 missile defense legislation moves through Congress, according to reports yesterday (see GSN, March 8).

The House Armed Services Committee, which reported the fiscal 2003 National Defense Authorization Act out of committee Friday (see GSN, May 6), rejected a proposal to shift funds to the Arrow system during the bill’s markup.

Representative John Spratt (D-S.C.) had proposed an amendment to shift $135 million from three missile defense programs into other areas of the Missile Defense Agency budget, including moving $70 million from other missile defense programs to buy Arrow missiles.  The committee’s version of the bill would provide $21 million for research and development for the Arrow system but not for procuring missiles, Spratt said.

Despite defeat in committee, Spratt is considering offering the amendment when the bill goes to the House floor tomorrow, according to Defense Daily.

“These missiles are needed by the Israeli government,” Spratt said.  “Israel lives under constant threat of attack, and not only are these missiles needed, but funding them sends a clear signal to Israel’s enemies that we stand by her and will help her protect herself against missile attack” (Kerry Gildea, Defense Daily, May 6).

Senate Republicans Ready to Add $70 Million for Arrow

Meanwhile in the Senate, Republicans are also preparing to push for an additional $70 million to purchase Arrow missiles if the Senate Armed Services Committee does not add the funds to the $60 million that the MDA has requested for the system, Defense Daily reported.  The money would allow an increase in Arrow missile production by Boeing and Israel Aircraft Industries.

The Senate committee is expected to mark up the Senate version of the fiscal 2003 Defense Authorization Bill this week.  If the committee does not include the extra $70 million in the markup, some Senate Republicans plan to offer an amendment when the bill goes to the Senate floor.

Future U.S. Use?

The Arrow system is currently only designed for use in Israel, but some U.S. and Israeli officials have suggested the system could contribute to U.S. missile defenses (see GSN, March 15).

Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, MDA director, said in March that the Arrow might be incorporated into the U.S. defense system in the future.  Senator John Warner also said he would encourage the Pentagon to consider using the Arrow system, and Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer proposed expanding U.S.-Israel cooperative efforts on the Arrow program during meetings with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in February (Kerry Gildea, Defense Daily II, May 6).

Spratt Would Shift Funds to PAC-3

Spratt’s proposal would cut $54 million from the space-based boost program, $25 million from the Space Based Laser program and $56 million from the sea-based boost phase program to provide the extra Arrow funds and $65 million more for the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missile program.

“The administration requested a total of $7.8 billion for missile defense programs for 2003, both those programs in MDA and those elsewhere,” Spratt said.  “This amendment does not reduce the top line one dime.”

The extra money for the PAC-3 program would buy 24 additional PAC-3 missiles.  PAC-3 is the only system the United States will probably be able to deploy in the next five years to protect U.S. troops abroad, Spratt said (see GSN, May 6).

Spratt’s amendment would cut all funding for the space-based boost program, which he said has failed twice.  The program suffers from technical obstacles, is vulnerable to enemy anti-satellite capabilities and costs too much, he said.

The amendment would also cut $24.8 million from the space-based laser program but would provide $10 million for “concept definition work.”

“Once MDA has a game plan, they can come to Congress next year and seek funding for it,” Spratt said.  “The amendment cuts $24.8 million from the request to make sure they just do concept definition work before they being doing R&D work without a game plan Congress has reviewed and approved.”

Spratt said he recommends cutting $55.8 million from the requested $89.6 million for the sea-based boost phase program because the Navy has failed to show it can succeed in simpler ballistic missile defense programs (see GSN, March 28).

“Let’s see if the problems endemic to all Navy BMD programs can be overcome before we start making a big investment in a much more challenging program,” Spratt said (Gildea, Defense Daily).

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United States:  Missile Defenses Guard Against China, Carter Says

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter yesterday criticized the Bush administration’s use of the potential threat posed by North Korea as rationale for a national missile defense system (see GSN, March 12).

Instead of protecting the United States from a North Korean attack, a U.S. missile defense system is more likely to damage relations with China, Carter said in a speech at Stanford University.

“The nuclear missile defense is not designed as a defense against North Korea, which doesn’t have a nuclear capability,” Carter said.  “It’s against China, and the Chinese know that” (Karl Schoenberger, San Jose Mercury News, May 7).

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