TrebleRebel and Ed,
Consider the anthrax simulant used Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, to determine ECASOL’s effectiveness in summer 2001.
On December 4, 2001, a representative from the United States Marine Corps testified before the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, confirming that the decontamination technology developed by Nevada-based Electro-Chemical Technologies Ltd., produces a highly effective biocidal agent which is not only a highly effective anthrax killer, but also harmless to human beings.
Mike Grosser, technical director and program manager for the U.S. Marine Corps’ Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Systems in Quantico, Va., explained that the decontaminant known as ECASOL is produced by the electro-chemical activation technology developed by ELCH.
The ECASOL generator (delivery device) designed jointly by Electro-Chemical Technologies and Battelle Memorial Institute for the Marine Corps can produce up to 600 gallons of ECASOL per hour.
What anthrax simulant did it use? What Ed calls the “horse and buggy” simulant used in the aerosol experiments done under Ken’s supervision in 1998 and 1999 when he was Battelle Program Manager? Or something different.
I prefer not to use Ed’s fabricated jargon - the onlt reaosn he invented that phrase was to distract from the fact that he now has to admit that weaponized spores are indeed coated with silica.
But to answer your question. The Sverdlovsk anthrax was coated was silica - but after Sverdlovsk Alibek developed the “Alibeov Anthrax”. It contained 2 key additives - and could float 4 times more efficiently than the Sverdlovsk anthrax.
Preston describes it thus:
http://cryptome.org/bioweap.htm
The Alibekov anthrax became fully operational in 1989. It is an amber-gray powder, finer than bath talc, with smooth, creamy particles that tend to fly apart and vanish in the air, becoming invisible and drifting for miles. The Alibekov anthrax is four times more efficient than the standard product.
So I would imagine that Alibek transferred this technology to Battelle. This technology would be different than the Dugway simulant above. Note there are TWO additives.
Link to Soviet Weaponization Technology
In 1998 Ken Alibek was interviewed by Richard Preston for an article titled “The Bioweaponeers” published in the New Yorker[2]. In this interview Alibek disclosed details of a new advancement in Soviet dry powder anthrax technology. Preston wrote “The Alibekov anthrax became fully operational in 1989. It is an amber-gray powder, finer than bath talc, with smooth, creamy particles that tend to fly apart and vanish in the air, becoming invisible and drifting for miles. The Alibekov anthrax is four times more efficient than the standard product.”
Alibek also disclosed to Preston that the Alibekov anthrax contained two additives. Preston wrote “The Alibekov anthrax is simple, and the formula is somewhat surprising, not quite what you’d expect. Two unrelated materials are mixed with pure powdered anthrax spores. It took a lot of research and testing to get the trick right, and Alibek must have driven his research group hard and skillfully to arrive at it.”
Although Alibek revealed to Preston the identities of the two materials, Preston did not publish them. However, in the same year, Alibek was also interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a documentary titled “Red Lies” [3]. This documentary outlined the Soviet’s continued development of advanced anthrax dry powder technology even after the Sverdlovsk accident killed up to one hundred people. The “Red Lies” documentary did provide details of the additives, stating “In the years since the Sverdlovsk accident, Alibek and a research team had taken the Soviet military’s anthrax and made it even more deadly. He developed a process to take ground up anthrax spores and coat each particle in plastic and resin. It kept the anthrax aloft four times longer, increasing its ability to infect people.”
These details have to be compared to descriptions of the 2001 senate anthrax that were leaked to the media in the period 2002-2003. The first set of leaks were made to Newsweek [4] , CNN [5] and the Washigton Post[6]in April 2002. Newsweek wrote “The Leahy anthrax — mailed in an envelope that was recovered unopened from a Washington post office last November — also was coated with a chemical compound unknown to experts who have worked in the field for years; the coating matches no known anthrax samples ever recovered from biological-weapons producers anywhere in the world, including Iraq and the former Soviet Union. The combination of the intense milling of the bacteria and the unusual coating produced an anthrax powder so fine and fluffy that individually coated anthrax spores were found in the Leahy envelope, something that U.S. bioweapons experts had never seen.”
The second set of leaks were made to the Washington Post [7] in November 2002 who wrote “Investigators and experts have said the spores in the Daschle and Leahy letters were uniformly between 1 and 3 microns in size, and were coated with fine particles of frothy silica glass.” In November 2003 Science Magazine [8] reported that in addition to silica the senate anthrax contained “polymerized glass” and its purpose was to chemically bind the silica to the surface of the spores. Some speculate that the similarities between the descriptions of the Alibekov anthrax and the senate anthrax demonstrate a link to technology secretly developed in the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s and possibly transferred to the US after Alibek’s defection in the 90’s.