Posted on 04/12/2002 8:54:10 PM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
Edited on 04/29/2004 2:00:24 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- The U.S. Army will drop hundreds of pounds of clay dust and egg whites off the Florida coast next week, part of a four-day mock aerial terrorist attack.
The exercise aims to determine how well existing U.S. radar systems can detect weapons of mass destruction that might be dispersed from the sky using crop dusters and other aircraft.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
The US government keeps a list of nations and groups that it suspects either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or seem to be trying to buy or steal the virus. The list is classified, but it is said to include Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Serbia, terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden and, possibly, the Aum Shinrikyo sect of Japan.
Ken Alibek, who was once Kanatjan Alibekov, a leading Soviet bioweaponeer and the inventor of the world's most powerful anthrax, defected, in 1992, and revealed how far the Soviet Union had gone with bioweapons. Alibek says that there were twenty tons of liquid smallpox kept on hand at Soviet military bases.
In 1989, a Soviet biologist named Vladimir Pasechnik defected to Britain. British intelligence spent a year debriefing him. By the end, the British agents felt they had confirmed that the U.S.S.R. had biological missiles aimed at the US. This information reached President George Bush and the British PM Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher then apparently confronted the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. She was furious, and so was Bush. Gorbachev responded by allowing a small, secret team of American and British bioweapons inspectors to tour Soviet biowarfare facilities. In January of 1991, the inspectors travelled across the U.S.S.R., getting whirlwind looks at some of the major clandestine bases of the Soviet biowarfare program, which was called Biopreparat. The inspectors were frightened by what they discovered. ("I would describe it as scary, and I feel a responsibility to tell the world medical community about what I saw, because doctors could face these diseases," said one inspector, Frank Malinoski, M.D., Ph.D.) On January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the main virology complex, in Siberia, and the next day, they were shown into a laboratory called Building 6, where one of the inspectors, David Kelly, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they had been working with. The technician said that they had been working with smallpox. Kelly repeated the question three times. Three times, he asked the technician, "You mean you were working with Variola major?" and he emphasized to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically that it was Variola major [the killer strain]. Kelly says that his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter the British government has. "There was no ambiguity," Kelly says. The inspectors were stunned. Vector was not supposed to have any smallpox at all, much less be working with it -- a supreme violation of rules set down by the W.H.O.
Per Malinoski: "There were tons of smallpox virus made in the Soviet Union. The Russians admitted that to us. One of the Vector leaders when he said to us, 'Listen, we didn't account for every ampule of the virus. We had large quantities of it on hand. There were plenty of opportunities for staff members to walk away with an ampule. Although we think we know where our formerly employed scientists are, we can't account for all of them-we don't know where all of them are.' " Today, smallpox and its protocols could be anywhere in the world.
Sitting with D. A. Henderson [widely credited with the eradication of smallpox ] in his house, I mentioned what seemed to be the great and tragic paradox of his life's work. The eradication caused the human species to lose its immunity to smallpox, and that was what made it possible for the Soviets to turn smallpox into a weapon rivalling the hydrogen bomb.
Henderson responded with silence, and then said thoughtfully, "I feel very sad about this. The eradication never would have succeeded without the Russians. Viktor Zhdanov [who first raised the idea] started it, and they did so much. They were extremely proud of what they had done. I felt the virus was in good hands with the Russians. I never would have suspected. They made twenty tons -- twenty tons -- of smallpox. For us to have come so far with the disease, and now to have to deal with this human creation, when there are so many other problems in the world . . ." He was quiet again. "It's a great letdown," he said.
Immune people are like control rods in a nuclear reactor. The American population has little immunity [the vaccination begins wears off after 10 years], so it's a reactor with no control rods. We could have an uncontrolled smallpox chain reaction." This would be something that terrorism experts refer to as a "soft kill" of the United States of America.
Protecting the NY subway system is irrelevant against a determined, widely disseminated, smallpox attack.
First, travel nationwide would have to be halted while we tried to identify and isolate the outbreak sites.
Second, we would vaccinate as many medical and other key personal in the affected areas as we could.
Third, we would vaccinate as many ordinary citizens as time and our limited supply of vaccine permits.
If the initial attack is widespread, expect millions of casualties.
The threat is very real. All the recent talk about using our nukes is for a reason.
ONE pound, properly distributed, would be enough
to kill everyone in the USA>
The idea of a genetically altered smallpox virus being unleashed on the world is more troubling. Would a vaccine even work?
One can hope the mad-men of the world realize this particular monster could devour them too, and will act on that knowledge. I do hope...
If Diogenes were here now with his lantern
he would not be looking for an honest man
he would be looking for a sane man.
The same way they protect it from ICBM's: through the certainty of massive retaliation. That's the only way.
Massive retaliation against whom? Saddam?
What if Saddam has terminal cancer?
Would massive retaliation have deterred Hitler?
(Worst case scenario).
This is why anthrax is more of a worry than smallpox, in my opinion. Smallpox, once released, would spread throughout the entire world, and the worst places hit would be the impoverished places with inadequate medical facilities. It would be terrible everywhere, but, once things get under control again, the U.S. would be hurt much less than the Muslim world; for that reason, it would leave the U.S. in an even stronger relative world position than it enjoys now.
For that reason, I suspect that smallpox will not be released (although I have to say that one could imagine one last act of revenge on the world by a doomed Saddam Hussein).
Anthrax is different, because it's not contagious. Our enemies could release anthrax spores in large quantities in the U.S. without affecting the rest of the world. Anthrax is the biological weapon we need to be most concerned about. [And it's not just theory -- anthrax is what we've been threatened with.]
But there's no way to distribute it that effectively. (I'm not trying to minimize the consequences -- tens of thousands of deaths maybe? -- but that's not the same thing as killing everyone in the U.S.)
I shall refrain from posting it.
I don't doubt that it's possible. Deterrence (the threat of certain retaliation) is the defense against this. [In addition, I would guess that maximum lethality would not be obtained in practice.]
Deterrence has been remarkably effective in preventing the use of nuclear weapons, from the end of World War II through now. This is in spite of the fact that some very unbalanced people have held power at times in some states with nuclear weapons.
Not posting such a thing may be wise. However, if the terrorists have already thought of an idea for an attack, we might actually be better off being aware of it and therefore being able to protect against it to some degree. (This is the same as the question of "security through obscurity" which arises in computer security circles.)
They were using some random sensors, and I imagine they still are. I expect other cities are looking into sensors for public places, too.
For now, yes. I've no doubt effective systems of delivery have been designed. Weaponized anthrax is the bio-terrorist's choice for now, but bio-engineered organisms are on the way. If some of these Frankensteins are released in the near future, our bout with anthrax will look pretty much like nothing. IMHO.
But, we put one foot in front of the other and take steps. One of those steps should be toward discovering treatments, and not only developing vaccines that may not work on genetically engineered organisms. Alibek is right about that.
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