What would a WMD look like?

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.

Well, IIRC handgrenades qualify as WMDs.

Recently a south African fellow smuggled some smaples of engineered bio-weapoons into the US inside of a toothpaste tube. He was trying to work out a deal to sell th eleftover stocks to the FBI. THe FBI said that the stuff wasn’t worth making a deal for. I suppose he took his business elsewhere.

Such small amounts still need to be grown to quantities sufficient to use as a weapon. At one point, the FBI said that someone with a few thousand dollars and some know-how could make anthrax in his garage. Still, he’s not making tons. Just a few pounds. However much is covered by first class postage anyway.

What the SoAf gentleman had were assassination type bugs. They weren’t designed to kill many people, just an individual or two at a time.

SimonX:

I would love to read more about that. You wouldn’t be able to point me to a good link, would you?

It’s not a WMD until it’s weaponized. Even if you want to broaden your definition to include unweaponized stores of smallpox (possibly as a preemptive attempt to avoid having to partake of a certain species of fowl known as Corvus brachyrynchos this upcoming Thanksgiving), you would still actually have to find such a thing.

Anecdotes and speculations by Richard Preston do not count as WMDs.

I’ll bet Dubya and pals are wondering the same thing!

I think, even for Richard Preston, the Iraq stuff seems to be based on outdated intelligence, just like administration has just now (?) found out:

http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059480179332

“Enrichment of intelligence”!?!?! So, the intelligence committee does not find that “enrichment”, what the heck is this administration talking about? BTW enrichment can be read as “enhancement”, “fortification”, or as I found out, also “improvement” so I guess Condy was telling the truth! :rolleyes:

I am afraid that, as much as many on the right thought that the Office of Special Plans was not important, it looks like the administration was “manipulated” to cherry pick only the info that they wanted to see regarding Iraq.

As for what would a WMD look like?..

Whoops, we are now concentrated on how a PROGRAM of WMD looks like, get with the program Scylla!

Are bullets weapons, or do you also need a gun ? There are lots of nasty “scabs” in freezers all over the world. Unless you are willing to shut down microbiology labs worldwide, it’d be sensible to include two things in the definition of a biological weapon: the biological agent itself, and a delivery system for the agent.

Do you have any single malt whisky in the house? If so, you could be harbouring a potential weapon of mass destruction…

Whisky of Mass Destruction

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=1070422003

Just to make it clear what we’re talking about here, the last Iraqi smallpox outbreak was in 1972. The last natural case in the world was reported in 1977; the disease was declared officially eradicated in 1979. This isn’t quite as sinister as the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, which likely really was connected to the Soviet biological warfare program.

Here’s one to get you started. It’s not what I originally read. I’m not familiar w/ The Age. But, there’s enough info to point you in the right directions to find more.

South African scientist offers to sell FBI deadly bacteria