The question I would like to discuss, is what exactly is it that we’re looking for in Iraq in terms of WMDs. What would they look like when we found them.
Clearly, a nuke is a nuke, and canisters of sarin and VX would also be unmistakeable.
The scariest and most difficult WMD would be a biological weapon.
I’ve just finished reading The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston.
Preston puts a couple of interesting facts together as regards Smallpox as a biological weapon.
There is a gentleman by the name of Dr. Richard Spertzel. Spertzel was the head of the United Nations Biological Weapons inspection team in the mid-90s.
In a nutshell, the Iraquis had formally acknowledged that they had a biological weapons program in 1974.
In 1995 Spetzel met with Dr. Hazem Ali in Baghdad as part of the inspection process. Ali is a Western educated PHD virologist and at this meeting he stated that a level 3 containment facility at Al Manal was being used to create a weaponized version of Camelpox.
He was being monitored by Iraqi authorities who had cameras rolling at the time.
Now according to Spetzel and Preston this was a glaringly obvious lie. Camelpox simply could not be weaponized. It will not infect humans.
“you could run your hands over the wet, crusted muzzle of pustulated camel, then lick your hands and rub them on your face, and you would probably not catch camelpox.”
Spetzel was certain that “camelpox” was their cover story for smallpox and Ali might have been trying to tell him something.
The inspectors rendered Al Manal’s labs useless by filling the ventilation system with a mix of foam and concrete.
This didn’t give Spetzel much confidence though. A biocontainment facility is just a couple of rooms. They are cheap to build and they could be literally anywhere (in fact Preston points out that any reasonably well-to-do westerner could build one in his home.)
Spetzel was particularly disturbed because at the time that Iraq formally announced it had a bioweapons program Iraq suffered an outbreak of smallpox.
Smallpox is the perfect candidate for a bioweapon because of its virulence and high mortality rate. Low resistance in today’s populations make it geometrically infective.
Then Preston describes what a smallpox bioweapon would be like.
You can make a virus more dangerous by exposing it to treatments so that it becomes immune to them.
Peter Jharling of the CDC stood in front of a poster at a convention and his blood ran cold.
The poster described some Australian scientists trying to deal with the mouse problem in Australia using mousepox and genetic engineering.
What they did was insert the mouse IL-4 gene into mousepox. Then they exposed a bunch of mice to the mousepox including a whole group that had just been immunized against mousepox.
The engineered virus crashed through the immunity and produced a 100% mortality rate.
What Jharling realized as he stared at this poster was that here was a blueprint for creating a catastrophic weapon out of human smallpox.
Worse, it was and is available on the internet.
Worse still, just about anybody can do it.
Anybody can order a genetic engineering kit and Il-4 gene economically online from a variety of sources.
At the time of the interview with Preston Spetzel states flat out that Iraq’s bioweapons program continues and believes it is highly likely that Iraq was weaponizing smallpox.
Such a weapon might simply be a bit of a scab in a tube in a freezer.
Nothing special or that Iraq didn’t already have would have been necessary to create it.