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We do not produce biological weapons, but in order to produce safeguards against them we need substances in small amounts, and no convention stops us from doing that.
—R.V. Swamy, chief controller of India’s Defense Research and Development Organization, describing Indian measures to defend against biological attacks.
Senior Bush administration officials have decided that Iraq would need to commit a major act of provocation, such as invading a neighbor or deploying a nuclear weapon, to justify a U.S. military invasion, USA Today reported today (see GSN, July 8)...Full Story 
U.S. officials have said that five to six al-Qaeda cells are actively seeking radioactive materials in the United States, NBC News reported yesterday (see GSN, June 17)...Full Story
A U.S. Congressional Budget Office study released yesterday estimated it would cost more than $3 billion to implement the Bush administration’s proposed homeland security department, CongressDaily reported today (see GSN, June 26)...Full Story
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A U.S. Congressional Budget Office study released yesterday estimated it would cost more than $3 billion to implement the Bush administration’s proposed homeland security department, CongressDaily reported today (see GSN, June 26).
The cost from fiscal 2003 to fiscal 2007 would include $150 million to set up and administer the department in fiscal 2003, with costs rising to $225 million annually after that, the study says. Several other homeland defense programs will cost $450 million annually, according to the study. The estimate does not include the costs of federal programs expected to be transferred to the new department, according to CongressDaily. Such programs are expected to cost $20 billion in fiscal 2002 and rise to $31 billion in fiscal 2007, the study says.
U.S. President George W. Bush has said that any costs incurred in creating the proposed homeland security department would be balanced by savings created by moving all homeland security programs to the control of one department. The high cost estimates for creating the new department, however, could make it difficult for Congress to approve the department before the August recess, CongressDaily reported (CongressDaily, July 11).
A joint U.S. House-Senate intelligence committee said that after a six-month investigation, they found no single piece of information to indicate the Sept. 11 attacks could have been prevented, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, June 5).
“As far as I know, there is no smoking gun,” said Senator Evan Bayh (D-Ind.).
The panel probably will not attempt to hold any member of the Bush administration or any U.S. intelligence official responsible for failing to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the Post. The committee now plans to begin to examine ways to correct flaws within the U.S. intelligence system, members said.
“We’ve spent the first couple weeks on where we’ve been,” Bayh said. “Now we need to pivot and focus on where we need to go. I hope we’re in the process of shifting from a place where people were looking to assign blame and instead focusing on systemic problems and improvements.”
Other committee members, however, have said the investigation is still ongoing and might still find incriminating information.
“It would be nice to find a smoking gun,” said Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). “But absent that, we’re looking for problems that need to be solved.”
Some members of the committee have questioned whether there will be time to finish the investigation before the end of the current Congress, when many members of Congress’ terms on the House and Senate intelligence committees come to an end, the Post reported. The joint committee has already decided not to recommend changes to the U.S. intelligence system until after the proposed homeland security department has been created (Priest/Eilperin, Washington Post, July 11).
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Senior Bush administration officials have decided that Iraq would need to commit a major act of provocation, such as invading a neighbor or deploying a nuclear weapon, to justify a U.S. military invasion, USA Today reported today (see GSN, July 8).
A massive military invasion of Iraq would be difficult politically both in the United States and abroad without justification beyond the current accusations that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction, according to senior officials at the U.S. State and Defense departments and other agencies.
Publicly, top Bush administration officials such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz have said the United States has all the justification needed to invade Iraq. This view has been used to argue for supporting smaller-scale options against Hussein’s regime, such as covert activity, according to USA Today.
Although opponents of a U.S. invasion have said that only an internationally recognized offense by Iraq would justify any military response under the U.N. charter, hardline supporters of an invasion have said the charter allows for pre-emptive action when states feel they are imminently threatened.
Invasion supporters agree, however, that for political reasons any military action against Iraq would need more justification, according to State and Defense officials. That is why some administration officials, including Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, have attempted to connect Hussein to al-Qaeda, according to officials.
“The key problem right now is a lack of a spark, an offense” by Iraq, said a Pentagon intelligence official. The Bush administration has decided that “there has to be a defining moment of some form, a defining event,” the official said (John Diamond, USA Today, July 11).
The CIA recently warned Turkey about a possible biological or chemical attack, a Turkish official said yesterday. All Turkish provincial police departments have been put on alert since the CIA reported that terrorists might use biological or chemical agents against the U.S. and Russian embassies or the Turkish public, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported yesterday, according to the Associated Press.
The official said, however, that police have been on alert frequently since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. The U.S. Embassy said it has no information about the report (Suzan Fraser, Associated Press/Yahoo.com, July 10).
The CIA learned that a Georgian man named Abu Atiya sent a poisonous substance disguised as an ointment to a man in Turkey called Musab. The CIA message to the Turkish Security General Directorate said Musab or another suspect called Abu Tasiir would probably use the substance in the next 20 days, the Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the Anatolian News Agency. Abu Atiya also might have sent the poisonous substance, which can penetrate skin, to Georgia, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia (Xinhua News Agency, July 11).
The Indian military has taken several measures to help detect and respond to a nuclear, biological or chemical attack without violating any international arms control conventions, military scientists said today.
“We have tested some biological and chemical agents,” said R.V. Swamy, chief controller of India’s Defense Research and Development Organization. “We do not produce biological weapons, but in order to produce safeguards against them we need substances in small amounts, and no convention stops us from doing that,” he said.
One of the items the organization has developed is a mobile nuclear shelter that could protect 30 people for up to four days following a nuclear attack (see GSN, June 7). Organization officials have already provided technology to the private sector to mass-produce the shelters for the military, Swamy said.
“Many of these items are under production and have been already introduced in the army, which is doing training in nuclear warfare now,” he said.
The organization has also developed sensors that could pick up signals of a nuclear strike within seconds, providing ground forces with time to respond, Swamy and his colleague M.P. Chachirkar said.
“The sensors work within seconds because in two minutes after a (nuclear) blast everything is lost,” Chachirkar said (Pratap Chakravarty, Agence France-Presse, July 11).
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has called for more international aid to help Russia dispose of chemical weapons and nuclear materials left over from the Cold War, BBC News reported yesterday (see GSN, June 18).
“Our project is aimed at eliminating the environmental consequences of the Cold War and the arms race,” Gorbachev said at a press conference in London. “It is a terrible legacy we are trying to deal with.”
Gorbachev asked for billions of dollars in aid to help Russia dispose of more than 40,000 metric tons of chemical weapons agents. There are also 200 obsolete Russian submarines with nuclear reactors that still must be decommissioned, he said.
Both the Soviet Union and the United States spent the equivalent of $10 trillion during the Cold War to develop WMD stockpiles, Gorbachev said.
“Now tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions, of dollars will be needed to destroy these weapons,” he said (BBC News, July 10).
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U.S. officials have renewed requests for Pakistan to turn over two Pakistani nuclear scientists to the United States, the Islamabad newspaper Khabrain reported Tuesday. Pakistan, however, has refused to hand over the scientists — Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid, both of whom formerly worked for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission — citing the secrecy of Pakistan’s nuclear program (see GSN, March 4).
Pakistan first detained Mehmood and Majid on Oct. 23, 2001, because the United States had requested that authorities investigate them, according to Khabrain (see GSN, Oct. 26, 2001). U.S. authorities were concerned that the scientists, who had also worked in Afghanistan through their nongovernmental organization called Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, had contacts with al-Qaeda, Khabrain reported.
Pakistani and FBI officials investigated the scientists in Pakistan, and Pakistani officials later released them after a month-long detention. Pakistani authorities have established security measures at the scientists’ residences in Islamabad, sources told Khabrain (Aizaz Hussain Syed, Islamabad Khabrain, July 9 in FBIS-NES, July 10).
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The U.S. Army has requested permission from Alabama authorities to destroy some chemical weapons at a faster pace than ever before, but the state’s governor and other critics oppose the plan, the Associated Press reported today.
The Army plans to destroy many of the 28,000 rockets containing sarin gas using a standard method of draining the nerve agent from the shells and incinerating the agent in a high-temperature furnace.
In 3,600 M55 rockets, however, sarin liquid has gelled into rock-hard crystal and is impossible to drain, according to the Associated Press. The Army has proposed to destroy those munitions using a “chop and drop” method — chopping up the rockets with the gelled agent inside and dropping them into a furnace at the Anniston incinerator, the Mobile Register reported, according to AP. The furnace was not designed to destroy rockets filled with chemical agent, according to tAP.
The Army also plans to destroy the weapons at a rate of 34 rockets per hour, AP reported. The fastest previous rate has been one per hour, according to Ted Ryba, deputy project manager for the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Utah.
Under the Army’s plan, the destruction of the gelled rockets would begin this winter, before official trial burns to determine whether the incinerator is safe, according to AP (see GSN, June 15). The Alabama Environmental Management Department is reviewing the Army’s request to use the “chop and drop” method and will make a decision following a 60-day comment period that begins this week.
Alabama Governor Don Siegelman opposes the Army’s proposals and has sued to prevent the incinerator from becoming operational. The Chemical Weapons Working Group, a coalition of citizens living near chemical weapons storage sites, also objects to the Army plan.
“The method of disposal is flawed in the first place. Then you have the fact that they’re running this test of chop and drop at this unheard-of rate before they’ve even done the trial burn, which doesn’t make any sense from any kind of engineering or public safety perspective,” the group’s head Craig Williams said.
The Army would start the process slowly and gradually increase the destruction speed, incinerator spokesman Mike Abrams said.
“We’re not running into this helter-skelter. The Army will do everything it can to ensure the safety of its workers and the public,” he said (Associated Press, July 11).
For further information, see:
CDC List of Chemical Agents
Federation of American Scientists Information on Chemical Weapons
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A top U.S. Army missile defense official concurred yesterday with recent recommendations that the Army and other U.S. military branches should devote more resources to defending against cruise missiles (see GSN, July 10).
While three-fourths of the world’s cruise missiles are used in anti-ship roles, there has been a recent shift to land-attack cruise missiles, said U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano, head of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command.
Speaking at a missile defense forum in Washington, Cosumano said potential enemies of the United States have learned from U.S. successes with land-attack cruise missiles and are building their own arsenals, he said.
“As we look at our programs, we ought to balance our capabilities to defeat both ballistic missiles ... and the increasing threat of cruise missiles,” Cosumano said.
The technology needed to build effective cruise missile defenses is “readily available,” Cosumano said, citing Army programs such as the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensors program. The Army is also working to build more advanced defenses such as high-altitude aircraft with sensors to detect cruise missiles, he said.
Cosumano called on the U.S. Defense Department to centralize research activities for cruise missile defenses into a single organization similar to the Missile Defense Agency, which conducts ballistic missile defense research.
“You need a focal point to pull it all together, like we’ve done for [ballistic] missile defense,” he said (Sharon Weinberger, Aerospace Daily, July 11).
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U.S. officials have said that five to six al-Qaeda cells are actively seeking radioactive materials in the United States, NBC News reported yesterday (see GSN, June 17). Such materials could be used to create a “dirty bomb” — a conventional explosive laced with radioactive materials.
When the United States arrested Jose Padilla in May on suspicions he was working with al-Qaeda to produce a dirty bomb, al-Qaeda plans for a radiological attack were apparently well under way, NBC reported. The cells possibly had been seeking radioactive materials even before the Sept. 11 attacks.
U.S. officials, who obtained the information from top al-Qaeda members in custody such as Abu Zubaydah, said there is no evidence to indicate that al-Qaeda has been successful in its attempts or that an attack is imminent. There have been increasing threat warnings from al-Qaeda, but they do not mention specific targets, officials said (see GSN, July 10).
Emergency teams trained to respond to radiological or nuclear disasters, however, have been on high alert for major events such as the Olympics (see GSN, July 3). Additionally, U.S. agencies have been checking facilities that store radiological and medical wastes to ensure that materials are not missing (see GSN, June 27).
Padilla apparently told Abu Zubaydah that acquiring radioactive materials in the United States would be an easy task, NBC reported (Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News, July 10).
Possibly 5,000 Al-Qaeda in United States
FBI officials are investigating Padilla and looking for other supporters in the Chicago area who might be connected to the dirty bomb plot, the Washington Times reported today.
The FBI and other intelligence agencies are watching small groups of men in Seattle, Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta who are suspected of having ties to al-Qaeda, intelligence officials said.
“One (intelligence) estimate is that there are up to 5,000 people in the United States connected to al-Qaeda,” a U.S. intelligence official said.
Earlier this year, U.S. officials estimated that there were more than 100 active al-Qaeda members in the United Sates plus hundreds of sympathizers, according to the Times. Another U.S. official said that determining the exact number of al-Qaeda members in the United States is difficult due to the organization’s secrecy.
“It depends on how you define an al-Qaeda member,” the official said. “There are hardened members and Muslims with sympathies to [Osama] bin Laden.”
“The number of people that are really key to this organization is probably much smaller than the number in the hundreds of people who have some loose affiliation,” U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said, adding that the top al-Qaeda leadership consists of “dozens of key people, not in the hundreds.”
Some al-Qaeda members who had been based in Afghanistan have fled to the United States and other countries, particularly Pakistan and Iran, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last month (Bill Gertz, Washington Times, July 11).
Now that the U.S. Congress has given its final approval to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the state’s fight against the plan resides in the legal system, where the state has filed several suits to stop the project, the Chicago Tribune reported today (see GSN, July 10).
“We think we have some excellent legal cases,” said Marta Adams, Nevada’s senior deputy attorney general. “We’re hopeful that in arguing our case before an unbiased tribunal we’ll prevail.”
Nevada has filed five lawsuits against the Yucca Mountain repository project, according to the Tribune. The lawsuits claim, in part, that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency radiation standards are insufficient to protect Nevada residents near the site and that the final environmental impact statement on the project contains several flaws (see GSN, July 7).
The state’s lawsuits also claim that the repository plans would violate the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which requires that geological features of the repository site be primarily responsible for isolating the nuclear waste (see GSN, April 12). Nevada has claimed that the federal government plans to rely on manufactured waste storage canisters to provide the bulk of protection, the Tribune reported.
“Almost any of the lawsuits has the potential to kill the project,” said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. “The federal government has to win all the cases to go forward” (V. Dion Haynes, Chicago Tribune, July 11).
Nevada will have a better opportunity in court to have its arguments against the Yucca Mountain project more fairly evaluated, Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn said in a press statement released Tuesday after the Senate’s vote.
“Now the process moves to the federal courts, where the playing field is level and Nevada’s factual, scientific arguments will be heard by impartial judges,” Guinn said (see GSN, June 7). “The Department of Energy and the nuclear industry will no longer be able to hide behind the political process and wield their influence to move the Yucca Mountain agenda. Now, for perhaps the first time in this process, the DOE will finally be held accountable for its many imprudent and unsound decisions, and we are highly confident that Nevada will prevail” (Guinn press release, July 9).
Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, however, said he does not believe Nevada will be successful in the courts (see GSN, March 14).
“Everybody is talking optimistically about the court fight. I’m a lawyer. I don’t trust the legal system to come up with a right decision,” he said, adding that he was considering filing a lawsuit against the project under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Nevada’s lawsuits against the Yucca Mountain repository project will add more delays to what will be a lengthy process before any work can begin, according to the Tribune. The Energy Department is expected to submit its license application for the repository to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission by 2004. The NRC then is expected to take at least three years to review the application, the Tribune reported.
“We still have several steps to go,” said Gayle Fisher, spokeswoman for Energy’s Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office (V. Dion Haynes, Chicago Tribune).
House Subcommittee Funds Project
Meanwhile, the House Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee yesterday approved $26 billion in discretionary spending for fiscal 2003, including $524.7 million for the Nuclear Waste Fund to determine the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a site for the nuclear waste repository.
“We have fully funded Yucca Mountain as a result of action in the Senate yesterday,” subcommittee Chairman Sonny Callahan (R-Ala.) said (CongressDaily, July 11).
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2002 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by the 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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