Posted on 09/25/2001 4:30:40 PM PDT by vmatt
Fox news just reported evidence that at least one terrorist attempted to get a US government loan to buy a crop duster!
LOL!
I worked for a crusty, half-blind old crop duster for several years when I was a kid.
That was 30 some-odd years ago and I can still remember what that 24D, 24T and diesel tasted like.
The technology we had then wouldn't have been capable of delivering something as lethal as nerve gas without the use of ultra-robust MOPP suits by both loaders and pilot, and maybe not even with that.
Biological agents would be another matter, in that they would (presumably) not be instantaneously lethal, allowing a 'suicide crew' to do their work despite the fact that, by doing so, they were as doomed as their victims.
Where nerve gas is the agent involved I'd be a lot more concerned about some sort of automatic or remote controlled device flooding a confined space like a subway or enclosed stadium with gas than with a crop dusting plane.
LOL! One of these days...maybe I'll change it to "foundagoodscreenname". I told my teenage son the other day that he should start posting on FR (he's very opinionated about many things, so he'd fit right in) and he should use the name "sonofcantfindagoodscreenname".
LOL! Teenage son...opinionated?
What about flying into a tunnel? They do it in the movies.
At least we could fight that strategy...
Draft those damn graffiti artists from the inner cities and put them to work painting tunnel entrances on rock walls!
These diaper heads are trained by countries such as Iraq, who have used ABC weapons before. They are nuts, but not unsupported like tiny Japanese cults.
Not that movie. LOL!
Hubby is from the MS Delta so he's familiar with the 'crop-duster crowd'. We had a good laugh at the thought of a Middle Eastern guy trying to convince one of those guys to let him take the rig up for a spin!
That's Cary Grant in 'North by Northwest'. That's the one that ends up with a life and death struggle on Mt. Rushmore.
The Grant movie set in Rio that you remember is probably 'Notorious' with Ingrid Bergman. (1946)
Anthrax As Disinformation
A Biologist's Perspective
Propaganda on biological weapons including anthrax originates in the dark cellars of government for the purpose of swaying the public for increased police powers. A terrorist threat is hyped or contrived, while military research on contagious diseases is concealed.
Disinformation in Media. An example of the disinformation is an article in a news weekly which listed each of the supposed terrorist weapons and the cost of producing them. For $10-20,000, terrorists could supposedly kill hundreds of thousands of persons with botulism toxin, anthrax, nerve gas, etc. "60 Minutes" had an expert who said biological weapons could be produced in someone's back yard in a five gallon bucket. They said anthrax spores released from a boat on the Hudson River could kill four hundred thousand persons in New York City. Here's the truth of the matter. Anthrax will never be used successfully as a terrorist weapon, and probably never as a military weapon. It has to be converted to spores suspended in the air, which is technically very difficult; and the lethality is nowheres near the terror that it is made out to be. It is not 100% lethal as often claimed. Wool sorters inhale anthrax spores in small quantities continually (150-700 per hour), and only if they get a large dose does an infection get started.Only US and Russia can Weaponize it.
To use anthrax as a weapon, it must be converted to a powder which can be inhaled. Only the US and Russian militaries have succeeded in doing that. Even Iraq uses anthrax in liquid form, which is totally ineffective.
Anthrax is a livestock pathogen. There are anthrax spores in the ground in rural areas, because they survive for about twenty years. They normally have no effect upon humans, because a few anthrax spores cannot create an infection, and they do not come up from the ground in large quantities.
Anthrax is what's called a "gram positive" bacterium. This means it has the type of cell walls which are harmless, unlike the cell walls of "gram negative" bacteria, which attack tissue. Therefore, anthrax can only attack tissue by producing a special toxin which it excretes. One cell or spore does not produce enough toxin to start an infection.
Studies have apparently determined that, typically, ten thousand anthrax spores must be inhaled to start an infection. That number might be someone's guess, but it is in line with the biology of the disease. It is the number which the military uses, and only the military has significantly researched such questions. It uses gass chambers for animal tests.
Anthrax normally attacks the lungs, because it must lodge in vulnerable tissue. It can invade through other routes such as cuts or undercooked meat, but it only does so under third world conditions, and those routes are not relevant to biowarfare.
Livestock eat from the ground, so they have their faces in the ground where the spores are, and they can inhale ten thousand spores. How does anyone get ten thousand spores into the lungs of humans?
Technical Obstacles to Weaponizing.
The first requirement would be to aerosolize the spores. The spores would have to be converted to a dry powder, because a liquid would create globs which would fall to the ground rather than staying suspended in the air.
To create a powder, the spores would first have to be washed several times in an array of very large and expensive centrifuges. Then a drying apparatus would have to be used; and it would require spraying a mist into a vacuum, which is how powders are created from liquids. Otherwise, everything globs up into hard rocks.
How do workers clean the equipment without getting spores everywhere? A likely procedure would be to enclose the equipment in a pressure chamber and steam sterilize it for several days. Such an operation costs hundreds of millions of dollars, considering related facilities and development. Only countries do that, not radical groups, and not in five gallon buckets.
Even in powder form, the spores would fall to the ground rapidly in the absence of wind. Anthrax is not adapted for airborne dissemination. It needs to stay on the ground until inhaled by livestock. So it would not stay in the air like mold spores but would fall out easily, about like flour. In the presence of wind, the spores would be carried away rapidly and would not stay in one place long enough for anyone to get more than a few inhaled.
Once the spores were on the ground, they would not affect humans significantly, because they would not come up from the ground in large enough quantities.
There is some talk about using liquids with fogging devices for dispersion of biological agents such as anthrax. It's not realistic. First, there is no mention of the purity that would be required to prevent globbing and plugging of nozzles. At least, a lot of expensive centrifuging would be required to remove debris.
Then agricultural spraying demonstrates that a mist drops rapidly to the ground. It does that because air can only hold a small amount of water, which causes sprays to precipitate.
Another problem is that spores would rapidly settle to the bottom of a liquid and form a gum due to sticky cell debris and their tendency to clump.
A chemical mist is different, because chemicals vaporize, while cells do not. Cells in a mist would clump together as the liquid vaporizes. To create free spores would require very clean material, high dilution, ultra fine mist and a vacuum for rapid evaporation. Foggers can't do the same thing.
For these reasons, anthrax would be difficult to use; and it could hardly kill more than a few hundred persons under the most ideal conditions, not the hundreds of thousands which are claimed. On top of that, antibiotics are effective for it during the early stage of the illness. It is not contagious for humans.
Glib Journalism is Unrealistic.
Innumerable journalists have been insisting that anthrax can be produced in a simple laboratory with little expertise. To the contrary, no countries but the U.S. and Russia can convert anthrax to a usable weapon. Iraq cannot.
Consider what the journalists fail to recognize. Growing a large quantity of anthrax would result in a fermenter full of slop which is extremely slimy and viscous with large amounts of debris and metabolic products mixed with the nutrient medium. That slop has to be washed and converted to a medium which will induce spores to form. Much research and knowledge would be required to get a reasonable yield of spores. Then the cells would have to be fragmented with something like a blender to get the spores out of the cells. Then much differential centrifugation would be required to separate the spores from the debris. Then spray drying of spores in a vacuum would be required.
Accomplishing all of that would require several Ph.Ds. and much developmental type research in addition to expensive equipment and a very large building. It isn't a matter of growing something in a kettle and pouring it into a rocket, as journalists and weapons inspectors seem to be assuming.
Grinding is Another Absurdity.
The latest contrivance is that terrorists might weaponize anthrax by drying a slurry and grinding it to particles 1-5 microns in size. (The bacteria are 1 by 3 microns.)
The first problem is that the gunk would dry like glue; and after grinding, it would still be glue. Even if it were washed first, the bacteria would be sticky and would dry like glue.
The second problem is that bacteria do not tolerate grinding. They are as fragile as egg shells. Grinding is how they are broken apart for biochemical tests. Even if only 1% were broken, the result would be a sticky gum, not a powder; and more like 99% would be broken before getting 5 micron particles.
Journalists keep mentioning how many anthrax spores can be gotten onto the head of a pin. It's not a question of how many can be gotten onto the head of a pin but how many can be gotten into someone's lungs.
Planes cannot Dust a City.
A scenario which is often mentioned is that someone might use a plane to dust a large city with anthrax during the night. It's unrealistic. First, no one in buildings would be harmed by anthrax. The few spores that entered buildings would settle on surfaces, and few would enter the air, and even fewer would be inhaled. At most, someone might inhale a few dozen spores per hour. That's not the ten thousand that are needed.
Secondly, anthrax spores would not diffuse uniformly through the air like a gas. They will either drop too fast or blow away. A few dozen persons might be killed, but that's not the terror that is being hyped in the media. And more than anything, nobody is producing the spores in powder form but the U.S. and Russia.
Journalists seem to assume that an anthrax cell anywhere will kill someone someplace. Putting words alongside each other on a page is not the same thing as getting cells into humans on the ground. There are millions of square miles of space on the ground which do not show up with the words.
Iraq did not Weaponize Anthrax.
Saddam Hussein is said to have produced anthrax. If so, the reason is because it is stable and easy to handle, not because it is effective when used. Iraq is unsophisticated to a point of ineptness in its approach to biological weapons.
It is said that Iraq uses anthrax in liquid form and puts it in missiles in liquid form. In liquid form, anthrax is almost as safe as cotton candy. Therefore, Iraq poses no anthrax threat.
In fact, military and UN inspectors only found two Iraqi warheads with anthrax in them (in liquid form). If Iraq had anthrax in an effective form, it would have had it in hundreds of warheads, as they did with nerve gas. So Iraq knew its anthrax was useless.
For about a billion dollars, Iraq could probably get enough experts together to develop anthrax as a weapon. But the reason why it doesn't is that researchers already know that anthrax would be next to worthless after it was developed.
Biological warfare is a flawed concept. The only route usually considered is airborne, because bombs and missiles create the delivery system. There is no disease in existence which is propagated in that manner. Even the airborne diseases require close contact with the source. The reason is because wind disperses the agents too thinly, and gravity brings them down too rapidly. Increasing the quantities massively will get a few persons, but only a few.
And then, very few of the diseases which are mentioned as biowarfare agents are suitable for airborne dissemination. Brucellosis is not. It is disseminated through body fluids. Plague is not. It is carried by insects from the blood of one animal to another. The insects do not pick it up from the ground.
Motives Tailor the Truth at every Level.
Biowarfare is promoted through a combination of ignorance and propaganda. The researchers, who should know better and often do, are getting paid to produce the agents, so they do not want to admit the futility of it. The nonresearchers cannot realistically evaluate the claims, and they have propaganda motives. They want to militarize society, and scare tactics go a long ways in that direction.
The only way biological warfare agents can be used in a significant manner to create disease is to inject them into the victims. If they are then contagious, they go a lot farther. The U.S. military has been focusing on contagious diseases. Since the water runs downhill in that direction, the agents are or will be used in that manner. With the motives for population control which the military has acquired, it can be expected to use its bio agents in that manner.
The point here is not that large countries cannot make a lot of persons miserable with biological weapons. It's that the small countries and terrorists cannot do so on their own; and it cannot be done on a large scale and in some magical way as described in the media.
That'd be Cary Grant in North by Northwest. A true classic.
Unlikely, but a lot more feasable than biological or chemical weapons attacks. The latter takes a little more technical expertise, and a lot more factors to kill a lot of people.
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