Iraq:  “Missile Man” Surrenders, “Dr. Germ” Still Free

A former Iraqi general, known to U.N. inspectors as the “Missile Man,” turned himself in to U.S. custody yesterday, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, April 28).

Amer Rashid, ranked 47th on the U.S. Defense Department list of the 55 most wanted Iraqis, was formerly in charge of Iraqi missile programs and recently served as the country’s oil minister.  He is married to Rihab Taha, an Iraqi microbiologist known as “Dr. Germ.”

The U.S. military is also looking for Taha, but her whereabouts remain unknown, according to AP.

Rashid was a member of the Military Industrialization Organization, which oversaw the production of Iraq’s most powerful weapons.  Lt. Gen. Hossam Amin, the chief Iraqi liaison with weapons inspectors, and Amir al-Saadi, Saddam Hussein’s top weapons adviser, were both in that organization and are now in U.S. custody.

Top U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said in March that Rashid and Taha would be some of “the most interesting persons” to interrogate about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (Niko Price, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, April 29).

Meanwhile, captured former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz has told U.S. officials that Iraq destroyed WMD stockpiles as military forces arrived in the Middle East to prepare for invading Iraq.

U.S. officials said they do not know if Aziz is being truthful, or if he would even be in a position to know such information (CNN.com, April 29).

Another Suspicious Find

U.S. forces have seized a truck near Mosul and specialists are testing equipment from the truck for traces of biological agents, the Los Angeles Times reported today.

U.S. intelligence officials believe the truck might be a mobile biological weapons laboratory, according to the Times (Miller/Drogin, Los Angeles Times, April 29).

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North Korea:  Details Emerge of North Korean Proposal

In last week’s talks in Beijing, North Korea offered to suspend missile tests and exports and to dismantle its nuclear development program, but only after the United States meets a long list of demands, according to a briefing given by Chinese officials to Western diplomats in Beijing yesterday (see GSN, April 28).

“The Chinese seemed to think this was a significant offer,” said one diplomat who agreed with Beijing.  “The briefing certainly gave us the impression that North Korea came to the table with a pretty significant proposal,” the diplomat added.

Pyongyang’s list of demands included the completion of light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea and full diplomatic relations with Washington and Tokyo.  After the United States completed its end of the deal, North Korea would announce its willingness to abandon its nuclear programs.

“It basically listed everything they have ever asked for,” said a senior U.S. State Department official.

China may have provided yesterday’s briefing to counter U.S. reports that last week’s meetings with U.S, North Korean and Chinese officials had been a failure, the Washington Post reported (Pomfret/Kessler, Washington Post, April 29).

North Korea also demand economic aid, in part through the United States permitting Pyongyang to participate in international financial institutions and to receive foreign investment, the Baltimore Sun reported (Mark Matthews, Baltimore Sun, April 29).

In what might be a significant concession, Pyongyang announced that it would consider multilateral talks with its regional neighbors, according to a European diplomat.  North Korea has previously insisted on face-to-face talks with the United States.  As part of the overall deal, North Korean officials reportedly offered to allow nuclear inspectors into the country, the Guardian reported (Borger/Watts, London Guardian, April 29).

U.S. officials said that North Korea’s request had also included oil shipments, food aid, security guarantees, energy assistance and economic concessions.

While administration officials also said that North Korea offered to dismantle its nuclear systems only after its demands are met, it was not clear if that included both its established plutonium weapons effort and the recently revealed uranium project.

U.S. Considers Proposal a “Nonstarter”

Both moderate and hawkish U.S. officials have rejected the North Korean proposal, the New York Times reported, but the two factions also favor continuing talks with Pyongyang, according to one hard-line official.  According to hard-line view, more talks would demonstrate North Korea’s impossible negotiating position, thereby reinforcing the idea that aggressive U.S. policies are necessary, the official said.

“There are some people in this administration who argue that there’s little point in talking to the North Koreans because they are always going to cheat,” another official said.  North Korea’s current proposal, however, is such a “nonstarter” that it behooves hard-liners to pursue negotiations and demonstrate Pyongyang’s intransigence, the official added  (Steven Weisman, New York Times, April 29).

While the overall package was considered unworkable, some officials said it could be a start and it was significant that North Korea put its nuclear program on the bargaining table, albeit at an exorbitant price.

“It’s not an airplane that’s going to fly, but it may have interesting parts,” said a State Department official (Matthews, Baltimore Sun).

Some analysts agreed that the steep price of nuclear dismantlement might be overshadowing the fact that an offer was made at all.

“The initial reports from the talks focused on the negative,” said Eric Heginbotham, the director of the Korea task force at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.  “This news at least indicates the North may still be interested in an agreement.  Of course it’s hard to tell if they are serious or not,” he added (Borger/Watts, London Guardian).

Denial

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday denied reports that North Korea had told the State Department March 31 that it was reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods but that State had withheld the information from the rest of the Bush administration.

“What we were told on the 31st was shared within the administration.  I’m not sure if everybody in the administration got it, but it isn’t relevant because it didn’t seem to be anything that was terribly new or different from what we had been told on a regular basis over the last several months.  It was not, in our judgment, anything that was particularly new or newsworthy,” Powell said (Nicholas Kralev, Washington Times, April 29).

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South Asia:  Telephone Call May Break Ice Between India, Pakistan

Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan appear to be making diplomatic headway after a conversation yesterday between their two prime ministers, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, April 25).

Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali telephoned Indian Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee “to resolve outstanding issues through dialogue,” according to Pakistan Television.

Jamali said that Pakistani officials are willing to visit India and he asked Indian officials to visit Pakistan “in the cause of peace,” according to the television report.

Vajpayee last week proposed talks between the rivals (see GSN, April 21).

Jamali “welcomed Prime Minister Vajpayee’s offer of talks with Pakistan and reiterated Pakistan’s readiness for a dialogue with India at any level,” according to a statement from Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry (Associated Press/Yahoo!News, April 28).

The two men spoke for 10 minutes in their first ever conversation, according to an Indian official.

“The prime minister of Pakistan called our prime minister.  The talks lasted for 10 minutes during which the Pakistani prime minister thanked and conveyed his appreciation for the statements made by our prime minister in Srinagar and later in both houses of parliament,” an Indian spokesman said.

The leaders discussed resuming economic and cultural ties, as well as aviation links and sporting matches, according to another Indian official.

The move to resume dialogue is taking shortly before the planned visit of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Agence France-Presse reported (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, April 29).

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U.S.-Russia:  United States, Russia Exchange Submarine Inspections

The United States and Russia recently inspected some of each other’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles, according to ITAR-Tass.  The inspections were conducted to check compliance with START, the 1991 strategic arms treaty that restricts each side to deploying no more than 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads (see GSN, Jan. 29)

In Russia, U.S. experts inspected Typhoon submarines at Nerpichya Bay, northeast of the Kola Peninsula on April 24-27.  The found no violations, according to ITAR-Tass (Vladislav Kuznetsov, ITAR-Tass, April 28).

In the United States, Russian specialists recently visited the U.S. submarine base at Kings Bay, Ga.  In a four-day visit, they found no treaty violations, ITAR-Tass reported (Vladislav Kuznetsov, ITAR-Tass, April 29).

Both the United States and Russia reduced their strategic weapons to below treaty limits by the treaty deadline in 2001, and Russia has slowly continued to make reductions (see GSN, Dec. 7, 2001). 

Strategic Holdings

In a treaty-mandated information exchange made public this month, Russia declared that in January it was deploying missiles and bombers capable of carrying 5,436 nuclear warheads, as counted under somewhat complicated treaty rules.  That figure is less than the 5,483 warheads Russia declared in July 2002 and the 5,518 it declared in January 2002, reflecting attrition to Russian missile forces.  Treaty rules require the parties to exchange information on their strategic holdings every six months and the United States releases the information about three months later.

As for its forces, the United States declared it had 5,974 treaty-accountable nuclear warheads as of January.  In July 2002, the United States declared 5, 927 and in January 2002 it declared 5,948 warheads.

The recent increase of 47 warheads reflects the completion of another submarine conversion in a program to replace Trident 1 missiles, on which the United States loads as many as six warheads, with Trident 2 missiles, which are armed with as many as eight warheads.  Each U.S. ballistic missile submarine can carry 24 missiles, so each conversion allows the upgraded boats to carry 48 more warheads, or a total of 192.

The recent U.S. data also reflects the loss of B-1 bomber to a crash in the Indian Ocean (see GSN, Dec. 13, 2001).  The B-1 bomber no longer has a nuclear role in the U.S. Air Force, but it remains accountable under the treaty (Greg Webb, GSN, April 29).

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Anthrax:  Dead Crewman Might Have Been Smuggling Anthrax

A Egyptian man who died on a ship bound for Canada might have been poisoned by anthrax in a suitcase he was carrying, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported today (see GSN, April 28).

Ibrahim Saved Soliman Ibrahim boarded a bauxite carrier in Brazil April 11.  He told shipmates that he was to deliver a suitcase to someone in Canada, but that he had opened the suitcase.  He said he felt sick, and he died that night while vomiting blood, according to the Inquirer.

Authorities are waiting for blood tests to determine the cause of Ibrahim’s death, but an aide to Brazilian Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos yesterday said there was a “strong suspicion” Ibrahim was carrying anthrax.

An autopsy in Brazil discovered that bacteria destroyed Ibrahim’s internal organs.

“The bacteria colonies were similar to anthrax,” said Luiz Malcher, head of the Renato Chavez Forensic Sciences Center in Belem, Brazil.  “If it isn’t anthrax, it is an extremely virulent bacteria,” he added (McCaffrey/Hall, Philadelphia Inquirer, April 29).

A Canadian official, however, cautioned against jumping to any conclusions before test results are known.

“I can assure you we’ve discovered no threat to Canada, criminally or terrorism-wise,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Inspector Dan Tanner said yesterday.  “Right now, it’s just a story,” he said.

The ship, the Wadi al-Arab, remained in quarantine eight kilometers offshore of Halifax (Barry Dorey, Halifax Herald, April 29).

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CWC:  Review Conference Unlikely to Address Incapacitating Chemicals

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

THE HAGUE — The first review conference of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention will probably avoid seriously addressing emerging international concerns about the development and use of incapacitating chemicals and riot control agents, delegates said (see GSN, Nov. 6, 2002).

“It’s being discussed, but it’s not being actively pursued,” said a Western diplomat today, on the second day of public statements from the treaty parties.

Publicly and privately, some governments here have voiced concerns regarding the treaty’s legal boundaries for the development and military use of chemical incapacitants and riot control agents, together known as “nonlethal” or “less-than-lethal” weapons.

The treaty allows using such toxic chemical agents for law enforcement purposes, but explicitly bans using them as a “method of warfare,” because such use effectively makes them chemical weapons, experts say.  The United States has asserted that riot control agents can be used in military theaters of operation for certain purposes such as controlling rioting prisoners and hostage rescue.

Nongovernmental experts have argued the Russian use of an incapacitating agent to rescue hostages last October demonstrates that such weapons can be lethal (see GSN, Oct. 30, 2002).  Some critics have also raised concerns about the purposes and implications of U.S. military-sponsored research on incapacitants, which is considered legal by experts.

The International Committee of the Red Cross in a statement circulated here criticized parties for paying insufficient attention to the issue.  It expressed “alarm at the increasing interest among police, security and armed forces in the use of incapacitating chemicals and the lack of expressions of concern about the implications of such developments by states parties to this convention.”

The Red Cross asserted that when the treaty was negotiated, states intended to “only permit use of domestic riot control agents and the use of lethal chemicals for executions, where permitted by national law.”

It warned that developing chemical incapacitants for law enforcement could lead to their proliferation, and an “‘arms race’ of measures and countermeasures among security forces, criminals and those who commit acts of terror.”

At least two treaty parties so far, Switzerland and New Zealand, separately voiced concern about the issue in statements yesterday.

“I would ask that we pay some attention to … where is the line, if any, between chemical weapons and nonlethal law enforcement tools.  I believe there needs to be some clarification,” said the head of New Zealand’s delegation.

The head of the Swiss delegation said, “In light of recent experiences, it is appropriate to reiterate that chemical weapons are totally prohibited whether they are lethal or nonlethal and whether their precursors or components are listed in the schedules of the convention or not.”

The Swiss delegate proposed requiring treaty parties to “declare not only chemical products they hold for riot control purposes but for law enforcement purposes in general.”

“Certain chemical agents prohibited in war may be justified for domestic use, but that being the case, it is all the more important to assure other states parties that the production of these products poses no threat to their security,” she said.

No Action Expected

Despite these concerns, diplomats and experts here said they do not expect any significant action on the issue here in part because of U.S. resistance.

There is a concern that raising the issue could antagonize the U.S. delegation and risk the success of conference, according to one Western delegate who said the issue would better be addressed in consultations between experts from among a smaller number of states.

“It’s not really the right forum.  It’s too big,” the Western delegate said.

A senior U.S. official here said the United States does not believe the issue needs to be discussed by the conference.

“We do not think that there is much ambiguity in the convention” regarding nonlethal chemicals, the official said.  “The issue is not ripe for multilateral discussions,” the official added.

Trevor Findlay, executive director of the Verification Research, Training
and Information Center, agreed that the conference should not take up the subject, saying many delegations were not aware of the issue and it would be better dealt with by a body of technical experts.

The Red Cross urged the conference to begin to involve treaty parties and specialist bodies in discussions to clarify the treaty’s restrictions on nonlethal chemicals.

For further information, see:

CWC Text

OPCW Main Page

CWC States Parties

Pentagon Executive Summary of CWC

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United States I:  Pentagon Reorganization Follows GAO Criticism

The United States reorganized its chemical and biological defense efforts in response to repeated criticism from the General Accounting Office, Aerospace Daily reported today (see GSN, April 25).

The GAO has warned that the Defense Department has a “diffuse” management structure for its chemical and biological defense resources.

Since 1996, auditors have warned of a “serious gap between the priority given to chemical and biological defense and the actual implementation of the program,” according to a GAO report from last year.

Auditors’ reports also criticized inventory management for protective suits, Aerospace Daily reported.

GAO has faulted the existing structure for allowing senior leadership little visibility of the overall effort.  Under the new plan a clear line of authority will be established, according to Aerospace Daily (Stephen Trimble, Aerospace Daily, April 29).

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United States II:  Utah Incinerator Fires Up After Delays

The U.S. Army’s chemical weapons incinerator in Tooele County, Utah, began destroying VX nerve gas Friday after several delays in the past month (see GSN, Sept. 6, 2002).

Shortly after beginning to burn VX, the incinerator was halted March 28 because of a reaction inside a collection tank, the Associated Press reported.  The incinerator began operating again April 11, but was stopped April 20 because of problems with the storage of decontamination solution, according to facility spokesman Chris Sprague.

Operations resumed Friday at noon, Sprague said (Associated Press, April 28).

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India:  Army Tests Medium-Range Missile

India launched a medium-range, nuclear-capable, ballistic missile today, according to a Defense Ministry spokesman (see GSN, March 26).

The Indian army’s version of the missile has a range of 90 miles, while the navy and air force’s version can travel 150 miles.

“It was successful.  The army version of the missile was test-fired,” the spokesman said (Agence France-Presse, April 29).

The missile test comes a day after a telephone conversation between Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali and Indian Prime Minister Atal Vajapayee (see related GSN story, today; Associated Press/Globe and Mail, April 29).

Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Khan said that Pakistani officials were happy India notified them of the test.

“This came as a pleasant surprise since only about a month ago when India conducted a similar test it did not notify Pakistan,” Khan said.

He said that officials did not view the test as an intimidating act.

“This is simply a reconfirmation that missiles are now a reality in South Asia,” Khan added (Agence France-Presse/The Australian, April 29).

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U.S. Plans:  Orbital Will Test Booster First for Missile Defense Contract

In the competition to provide the kill vehicle booster for the U.S. national missile defense system, Orbital Sciences has developed their rocket faster than Lockheed Martin and will be the first to test launch its complete system this autumn, according to a Missile Defense Agency spokesman (see GSN, Feb. 10).

Lockheed Martin had initially been scheduled to test their offering first.

“Orbital’s booster stack is going to be ready to go sooner than Lockheed’s,” but that does not mean Lockheed Martin is having problems with their development, according to Missile Defense Agency spokesman Richard Lehner.

Boeing is the Ground-based Missile Defense system’s prime contractor and will choose to buy boosters from either one or both of the companies (see GSN, April 18; Ann Roosevelt, Defense Week, April 28).

Further Environmental Review Unnecessary

The United States has the option of add missile interceptors to its Ft. Greely, Alaska site in future years without environmental review, according to documents signed last week by the top U.S. missile defense official (see GSN, May 15, 2002).

Missile defense chief Ronald Kadish approved a future expansion of the Alaskan portion of the national missile defense shield without another environmental review, which can take up to two years, Aerospace Daily reported.  The Missile Defense Agency currently plans to deploy 16 interceptors in Alaska by 2005.  After Kadish’s decision, the agency may now build up to 40 interceptor silos there.

There is currently “no requirement” and “no funding” for more than 16 interceptors in Alaska, according to agency spokesman Rick Lehner.

“At least we’d have that flexibility in the future,” he added.

The agency is currently working on an environmental review of Vandenberg Air Force base in California, where it intends to place four interceptors by 2005 (Marc Selinger, Aerospace Daily, April 28).

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