v1.1.4 / chapter 4 of 5 / 01 feb 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* Following the Second World War, both the West and the Soviet Union continued to build up their BW arsenals. In the late 1960s, the US abandoned its offensive BW program and in 1972 helped push through a bioweapons limitation treaty, the "Biological & Toxic Weapons Convention (BTWC)". The USSR signed the BTWC, and then continued to build up its BW arsenal to astounding levels. The truth didn't come out until the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
By that time, smaller states, particularly Iraq, had their own BW development programs. They were a major worry to the US during the Gulf War in 1991, but fortunately the Iraqis did not make use of them. Twelve years later, worries over Iraqi efforts to manufacture weapons of mass destruction would help convince the US to invade the country, with unexpected results.
* When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the Allies got a nasty surprise from Nazi nerve gases. There was no such shock from Nazi BW research. The Germans had never gone beyond preliminary investigations, though some brutal experiments had been performed on concentration camp prisoners.
The German disinterest in BW was partially due to the fact that Germany was situated in the middle of Europe, and the countries that would be logical targets for BW attacks were right on Germany's borders. Since pathogens are poor respecters of borders, the Germans had strong reasons to not develop biological weapons. England, separated from potential enemies by the English Channel, was in a better position to conduct BW, and the Americans were in an even safer position, with their enemies oceans away. Similarly, as an island nation, Japan had a degree of separation from China that made BW attractive to the Japanese.
General Ishii's BW research staff at Pingfan kept up their efforts until the very end of the war. In fact, the Japanese developed a technology that could have allowed them to conduct BW attacks on the United States, in the form of balloons that were released into the jet stream to float across the Pacific to North America. The "fusen bakudan (balloon bombs)" carried incendiary bombs that were dropped automatically when a timer ran out. Hundreds were launched beginning in the fall of 1944 and into early 1945, and a good number of them reached the US and Canada. They did no real damage, but there was the prospect that the Japanese could use them for BW attacks, which could have potentially made them more dangerous.
The Americans developed a weapon of mass destruction that outdid anything the Japanese had. The US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, and the USSR declared war on Japan at the same time and invaded Manchuria. Japan surrendered. The Pingfan complex was demolished ahead of the advancing Soviets, and Unit 731's most incriminating records were destroyed. Ishii and his men did make sure they saved a significant set of documents relating to observations made at Pingfan, and set them aside in a safe place.
Stories persist that the Unit 731 dissected prisoners without anesthesia; that Allied prisoners of war were among the test subjects; and that Japanese soldiers passed out anthrax-laced candy to Chinese children. The destruction of records makes these stories unproveable, and the full truth will never be known. In any case, the things Unit 731 researchers were actually known to have done were damning enough to make the more lurid accusations irrelevant, though at the same time they make such accusations more believable as well.
* The Americans, now Japan's masters, only knew vague rumors about the activities of Unit 731. They interrogated Ishii, who had returned to Japan, and he simply told them that he had conducted research on defensive BW. There was no evidence to dispute this claim until the Soviets began to sort out what they had captured at Pingfan and elsewhere in Manchuria. The Soviets then asked the Americans to turn Ishii and his officers over to them. The Americans were halfway inclined to go along with the request until Ishii, justifiably panicked by the idea of being handed over to Stalin's highly experienced interrogators, confessed that Unit 731 had in fact been involved in offensive BW research, and had conducted field trials against Chinese civilians.
There was some uncertainty among the Americans that even these confessions provided enough evidence to make a case against Ishii and his assistants that would stand up in court. In the meantime, American BW researchers from Camp Dietrich interviewed Ishii and his colleagues. The details of Unit 731's activities became more ghastly the more the Americans probed, but the interviewers also became more fascinated.
Unit 731 had performed experiments, documented with extensive data tables and detailed color drawings, that American BW researchers would never have been allowed to conduct. Ishii and his people promised to cooperate and provide the data they had carefully saved. The Camp Dietrich group produced a report recommending that charges against Ishii and his men be dropped, in recognition of the value of cooperation with the Japanese and learning from their wartime experience.
The recommendation was accepted. Ishii and his colleagues went free, and the activities of Unit 731 were kept quiet. At the time the Americans had the Bomb and the Soviets did not. Many American officials believed the USSR would never be able to build the Bomb, and so would likely seek equalizers in the form of chemical and biological weapons, which it appears was the case. The Americans needed to counter such a move.
Shirou Ishii died of cancer at his home in 1959. He was never arraigned for any war crimes. The data provided by Ishii and his men proved to be sloppy and of little value, despite the suffering that had gone into its creation. The Japanese had neither mastered the efficient production of BW agents nor devised effective delivery systems. Ishii had got the better part of his deal with the Americans.
* As the Cold War intensified, American research into BW accelerated. In 1948, the US built a huge sealed spherical test chamber at Fort Dietrich, Maryland, to test the aerosol dispersal of pathogens. This test chamber was known as the "Eight Ball". In 1953, Camp Dietrich became Fort Dietrich, and would continue to be a center of BW development into the late 1960s. Tests of BW technologies were performed through the 1950s at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Somewhat startling mock BW attacks were also performed by BW researchers in several US cities, using harmless bacteria.
Initial American BW production in the postwar period focused on the plant pathogens investigated during the war: smuts, blights, blasts, rusts, and rots. Feathers were found to be an excellent storage medium for plant pathogens, and cluster munitions were built that were packed full of turkey feathers dusted with pathogens. When the dispenser burst open at altitude, the feathers scattered in the wind over a wide area. Anti-crop biological munitions were put into production for the US Air Force in 1951. It was the first recorded instance of peacetime production of bioweapons.
The Americans also borrowed the fusen bakudan idea from the Japanese, and invented a balloon that could float over enemy territory to release canisters of bioagents after a preset period of time. The balloons were tested under the FLYING CLOUD program in 1954, but the program was judged a failure due to the inaccuracy of the balloons as a delivery system, and cancelled. That didn't mean that the Americans had given up on BW, and eventually, the US produced what is estimated at about 30 tonnes (33 tons) of wheat rusts, which would have been sufficient to destroy the entire Earth's wheat crop. The spores of the rust used, Puccina graminus triciti, could remain effective after being stored in cool places for two years, and the rust would propagate rapidly after dispersal. The main intended target was the wheat region of the Ukraine. The US also stockpiled roughly a tonne (1.1 tons) of rice blast disease, intended to attack the ricefields of China.
* American BW developers were not ignoring human pathogens. Anthrax remained the choice for a lethal bioagent. Many studies were performed with it, and anthrax weapons were produced.
It was not trivial to build such weapons. Anthrax strains had to be selected for effectiveness, and determining the lethal dose was a problem. No human experiments were performed, but tests done on 3,000 monkeys showed that 3,000 spores each could kill half of them. However, as with many pathogens, the action of anthrax is highly species-specific, and the monkey trials were not certain to be valid for humans. Guinea pigs, for instance, required 50,000 spores each, while mice would only take a hundred. Somehow unsurprisingly, rats seemed largely indifferent to anthrax. The conclusion was to use several times the maximum conceivable lethal dose.
Then there were the manufacturing issues. Anthrax had to be cultured in bulk, refined from cultures, dried, and converted into a form that could be loaded into weapons. It had to be "milled" down to a fine powder that could be dispersed as an aerosol and inhaled by victims, then treated to eliminate static that might cause the spores to clump up and defeat the milling.
Finally, there was the issue of delivery systems and military procedures. Simply putting anthrax in a bomb was ineffective, since the explosion killed most of the spores. Cluster munitions and aerosol sprayers were developed.
Since anthrax was such a drastic weapon, research also continued into less-lethal pathogens. Brucellosis remained an interesting bioagent, along with tularemia and Q fever. The Americans also considered "psittacosis" and "Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE)" as BW agents. Psittacosis is a nasty bacterial disease that primarily infects birds and is sometimes known as "parrot fever". In humans, psittacosis causes a high fever and can lead to pneumonia; about one in five human victims dies. VEE is a virus, one of the few evaluated by the US, that is normally transmitted by mosquitoes. It causes brain inflammation, with headaches and fever, as well as vomiting and diarrhea in some cases. Its mortality rate is very low.
Brucellosis and tularemia pathogens were actually put into production. Work was also conducted on botulism toxin, as well as "staphylococcus enterotoxin B (SEB)". SEB is produced by the staph bacteria Staphylococcus aureus and causes what is now known as "toxic shock syndrome". It can make a victim very ill for several weeks and is lethal in large doses. Other options were investigated, such as mass breeding of mosquitoes to carry yellow fever. Activity remained high at Fort Dietrich into the 1960s. Defensive measures, including the development and production of vaccines, were pursued as well.
* The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also studied a wide range of sometimes bizarre drugs and toxins for use in clandestine activities. For example, extremely lethal and fast-acting "saxitoxins" were used as an alternative to the relatively slow and painful cyanide pills carried by agents to allow them to commit suicide if captured. Saxitoxins are produced by marine microorganisms named "dinoflagellates" associated with toxic "red tides", and some species of shellfish that feed on dinoflagellates accumulate the toxins for use in deadly stingers.
When a CIA Lockheed U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia on 1 May 1960, the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, carried a silver dollar bored with a hole containing a needle coated with a saxitoxin. Powers did not use the needle and warned his captors to be careful in handling the silver dollar. The Russians pricked a dog with the needle and the dog died in ten seconds. The CIA also developed an electric dart gun that could fire a poison-tipped dart up to about 100 meters. The dart was so small that the victim might not even notice that he had been shot by it, and would then die quickly and mysteriously.
Although the CIA is now officially out of the poisons business, and given the political liability of such work probably out of it unofficially as well, investigations into new and better poisons have continued. New poisons include a neurostransmitter named "substance P" that is lethal in extremely small quantities, and "RNA" genetic material custom-designed to jam or activate specific genes in a victim. One of the dreams of those interested in poisons is a toxin that will only kill a specific target and is harmless to everyone else, but for the moment such an idea remains science fiction.
In any case, such toxins are in general not appropriate for battleground or strategic use, and so amount to little more than a James Bond story in the history of the development of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
* While the Americans stockpiled bioweapons, the British were winding down BW development efforts at Porton Down. By the 1960s, their BW research efforts were strictly defensive. In 1968, British delegates attending an international disarmament forum in Geneva suggested that proposals to limit chemical and biological weapons might be more effective if the two subjects were discussed separately. After all, chemical weapons had been used extensively in warfare while bioweapons had not. The British introduced a draft of a "Biological & Toxic Weapons Convention (BTWC)", sometimes referred to as the "BWC", that would require signatories to renounce BW. The Soviets objected heavily at first and the Americans were unenthusiastic.
However, US public opinion was strongly against BW, and even disregarding ethical concerns there was a practical reason to abandon biological weapons. America had the Bomb, the most powerful deterrent available, and only the most advanced countries were capable of building nuclear weapons. As noted previously in the context of chemical weapons, anyone could build bioweapons, even in principle terrorist groups, and it was not in the advantage of the US to do anything to encourage BW.
Even the US military had no enthusiasm for BW. Bioweapons were imprecise in their targeting, as well as delayed and unpredictable in their effects, making them clumsy weapons for fighting battles. They were also difficult and dangerous to produce, store, handle, and use. In the early 1960s contingency plans were drawn up by Fort Dietrich for use of nonlethal bioagents in Cuba and Southeast Asia, but the military brass rejected these plans after very little consideration. In fact, the US military had such a low opinion of BW that they had a somewhat short-sighted tendency to believe that their military counterparts on the "other side" had much the same viewpoint. This turned out to be dead wrong.
On 25 November 1969, President Nixon formally announced that the US would abandon offensive BW. The Eight Ball was shut down and hundreds of researchers taken off the program. Fort Dietrich would remain in business, but only for research into biowarfare defenses. In hindsight, Mr. Nixon's decision, though largely forgotten, was one of the most significant and positive actions of his administration. The unilateral American decision broke the ice for other countries to give up BW as well. On 4 April 1972, the US and the USSR signed the BTWC, and eventually a total of over 141 countries signed up. The BTWC was a significant step forward in principle, though it suffered from weak verification and enforcement provisions. It would take almost two decades to find out just how weak it was in practice.
* The Soviets found the information on BW captured from the Japanese much more useful than had the Americans. The Soviets used Japanese plans to build a new and sophisticated BW plant in Sverdlosk in 1946. In the mid-1950s, responsibility for BW research and development was transferred from the KGB to the Red Army, and the program expanded dramatically. BW research facilities were built inside cities to help conceal their purpose. Even the Ministry of Agriculture was brought into the task, setting up a branch to develop bioagents to attack crops and livestock.
After signing the BTWC in 1972, the Soviets did not abandon their offensive BW effort. In fact, in 1973 Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed a decree ordering a comprehensive update and expansion of the entire Soviet BW apparatus, which had finally managed to shake the debilitating influence of Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko died in 1976. His authority had declined after the death of Stalin in 1953, but he had done much to damage Soviet biology, and the damage took a long time to correct.
The Soviets justified their secret BW effort, when they bothered to, with the belief that the Americans were also cheating on the BTWC. In fact, as noted, this was simply untrue: the US had no particular need or liking for BW and had judged it more trouble than it was worth. The suspicious belief in American secret BW research also reflected the inability of Soviet leadership to understand that the US military is firmly under the control of their civilian masters, the politicians, and that American politicians may not be honest to a fault but still have a direct and vested interest in being sensitive to the wishes of the people who voted them into office.
* Ken Alibek reported that after the USSR signed the BTWC, the country continued to produce and stockpile bioagents, such as anthrax and pneumonic plague with a vengeance. The Soviets ended up with production facilities able to produce thousands of tonnes of anthrax a year.
They produced tonnes of "weaponized" smallpox virus, which was felt to be a good BW agent because it was extinct in the wild and so defenses against it were poor, and experimented with the "Marburg" hemorrhagic fever virus, which causes massive hemorrhaging and has about 90% lethality. Weaponizing viruses is difficult and technically an impressive feat. Ironically, the USSR was also a major backer of the UN worldwide immunization program that would eventually eliminate smallpox in the wild.
The Soviets also weaponized incapacitating BW agents such as tularemia, Q fever, and VEE, and became very skilled at delivery systems. Missiles with BW warheads were tested and fielded. Apparently they developed their skills at aerosols to the point where they figured out how to used them to administer vaccines. Personnel to be vaccinated were simply put inside a closed room full of a vaccine in aerosol form and left there for a while.
* Like the US, the Soviets performed various field tests, using aircraft to disperse harmless bacteria over civilian populations, as well as dispersal tests of harmless bacteria in the Moscow Metro.
Not all the releases were so harmless. There are suspicions, unconfirmed and hotly debated, that a smallpox epidemic that occurred during August 1971 in the city of Aralsk, Kazakhstan, on the north short of the Aral Sea, may have been due to the unintentional infection of an ecological survey ship that strayed too close to Rebirth Island. Ten people came down with the disease and three of them died. The smallpox strain appeared to be unusually virulent, since several of those infected had been vaccinated against smallpox, and the symptoms were unusually severe.
In November 1979, a magazine published by Soviet emigres in West Germany printed an article based on reports by other Soviet emigres of a mass outbreak of anthrax in April 1979 in the city of Sverdlosk that killed at least a hundred people. The articles suggested the outbreak was due to a containment failure at a bioweapons research facility outside the city, operating in clear violation of the USSR's commitment to the BTWC.
In 1980, the Soviets admitted that there had been an outbreak of anthrax as reported, but stated that it was due to tainted meat. This was plausible, since anthrax actually was a problem in parts of the Soviet Union. However, in 1993, after the fall of the USSR, the Russians admitted that the outbreak was in fact due to an accident at the major BW facility in Sverdlosk. Somebody had removed a clogged filter from an air-purification system, and other workers reactivated the system without noticing that the filter was gone. The cover-up effort had involved destruction of evidence and records, and even the arrest and conviction of a few black-market meat dealers for selling tainted meat.
The party boss in Sverdlosk, the volatile Boris Yeltsin, had stormed over to the BW complex and demanded admission, but was refused. He was ordered to go along with the cover-up. The cover-up was so thorough that a group of American medical researchers who came to the USSR in the late 1980s left generally convinced that the anthrax outbreak had in fact been a natural occurrence. The cover-up was successful because at the time Americans saw no good reason to believe that the Soviets had an active offensive BW program. As mentioned, the US military had no use for BW, while scientists are trained to believe hard evidence and to be skeptical of the hearsay and rumors. The Soviets were spending a large amount of money and effort to conceal the truth from snoops from the West, and were extremely skilled in general at secrecy and deception. They did a good job of covering their tracks.
The American intelligence community was still suspicious. Unlike scientists, out of necessity intelligence analysts try to put together whatever leads they can find to see what sort of consistent picture they suggest, and the CIA was making out the vague shape of a very active Soviet offensive BW program. The 1989 defection of Vladimir Pasechnik, a senior Biopreparat official, did much to lend form to these vague suspicions, which were substantially reinforced later when Alibek came to the US, and confirmed in 1995 when a US diplomat got a chance to inspect a mostly derelict bioagent production plant in Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan. The scale of the plant was astounding, and Western experts were shocked to learn of the quantities of pathogens produced, which were far greater than could have been put to any conceivable rational use. The diplomat also got the opportunity to inspect the now-abandoned test facility on Rebirth Island.
After Yeltsin became the first Russian president after the fall of the USSR, he ordered the complete destruction of all remaining bioweapons and shutdown of BW research and manufacturing facilities. In 1992, Russia signed an agreement with the US and Britain to obtain cooperation in converting or dismantling the offensive BW apparatus. Some concrete measures were taken, such as the dismantling of the Stepnogorsk plant using American funding, and many Russian researchers who had worked on the BW program opened up and spoke freely to Western investigators. They were guilty about their work, while simultaneously proud of their technical accomplishments.
Yeltsin offered to permit open inspection of Biopreparat facilities, but a separate set of BW facilities, run directly by the Ministry of Defense (MOD) in principle for developing vaccines and other countermeasures, remained off limits. Much to everyone's surprise, in June 1994 Russian officials offered to allow free inspections of these facilities as well, but due to various squabblings and hangups the West didn't take them up on the offer, and it was withdrawn a few months later. Suspicions remain that a few facilities may be producing pathogens and working on improved bioagents, very possibly without the central government's knowledge.
* The Soviets also tinkered with biotoxins for clandestine actions, using them in a number of occasions against defectors living in the West. The most significant of these incidents was the murder of a Bulgarian dissident living in London named Georgi Markov. On 7 September 1978, Markov was on the streets of London when he felt a sudden slight sting and turned around to see a man fumbling with an umbrella. Markov mentioned the incident to his wife. He then fell increasingly ill over the next few days, and finally died. Examination of his body uncovered a tiny pellet, the size of a pinhead and with four holes in it. The pellet had most likely contained a poison, but there wasn't enough trace of it to determine what kind of poison.
Another Bulgarian exile living in Paris named Vladimir Kostov read about Markov's death in the newspapers, and reported that about ten days before reading about the incident, somebody had stuck him in the back with something sharp, and he'd been ill for days. French doctors gave him a very thorough examination and found another pellet like that recovered from Markov. They forwarded the pellet to Scotland Yard, and British forensic pathologists found that the pellet contained traces of a poison named "ricin". Ricin is derived from the castor oil plant and is highly lethal.
Markov's murderer was never caught, but the killer was believed to have been an agent of the Bulgarian secret police. A Soviet emigre was also murdered with a ricin pellet in the US in 1980, apparently by KGB agents. As with the CIA experiments, such "cloak and dagger" activities were a sideline relative to the development of bioweapons of mass destruction by the USSR and its allies.
* At about the same time US intelligence was beginning to get wind of the Soviet BW program, information was starting to come to light that Saddam Hussein was also working to develop a BW capability. His use of gas during the Iran-Iraq war made the idea very plausible.
The Iraqis had been obtaining deadly pathogens from the American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit organization that supplied such items to medical researchers. The Iraqis had claimed they were obtaining the pathogens for medical research, but in 1988 the word went out to stop supplying the pathogens. The admitted fact that the Iraqis had acquired the pathogens from the US would later become part of the web of conspiracy theories about US involvement with Iraq, but in reality the controls were so slack at the time that almost anybody could have got their hands on the nastiest pathogens with few probing questions asked.
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 made the US military painfully aware of how vulnerable US forces were to a BW attack. Troops needed to be vaccinated against anthrax and botulism toxin, but obtaining adequate supplies of vaccines was impossible.
One of the difficulties of dealing with BW agents is that they may be diseases, with anthrax as the prime example, that are rare under normal circumstances. Since few people are threatened by them, there is no need to produce large quantities of vaccine against them and no sensible reason to build major manufacturing facilities to produce such vaccines.
The military brass proposed a cost-is-no-object crash program to build up vaccines against anthrax and botulism toxin, only to be told by the experts that there was no way to ramp up vaccine production quickly no matter how much money was thrown at the problem. One of the big obstacles was that a vaccine production facility would have to go through a lengthy approval process by the US Food & Drug Administration.
Some vaccinations were performed, but all the military could really do was stockpile antibiotics. The problem with that approach was detecting a BW attack quickly enough to begin administering the antibiotics. It is only really possible to treat anthrax in the initial "mild" phase of an infection; once the victim moves on to the second violent phase, death is certain. A clumsy detection system was improvised, but nobody had much faith in it. All everyone could do was hold their breath. When the Gulf War ended without Saddam Hussein making use of his CB weapons, everyone exhaled with a sigh of relief.
* That the fears had plenty of basis in fact was demonstrated by the discoveries of UN officials of the "United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM)", responsible for disarming Iraq after that country's 1991 defeat in the Gulf War. UNSCOM inspectors gradually discovered an Iraqi BW development and production effort of surprising scale.
For four years after the end of the war, the Iraqis denied that they had developed and manufactured bioweapons. UNSCOM was skeptical, to put it mildly. The Iraqis had purchased a spray dryer, useful for drying out bacteria so it could be stored, and four filling machines that could be used to pack bioagents into shells, bombs, and warheads. These items had other uses, but the Iraqis never gave any convincing explanation of what they were purchased to do. Even more ominously, the Iraqis had purchased some 39 tonnes (43 tons) of biological growth medium, in containers ranging in size from 25 to 100 kilograms (55 to 220 pounds), when it normally is shipped in 1 kilogram (2.2 pound) packages. There was no conceivable reason for ordering biological growth medium in such quantities or in such large containers except for very-large-scale cultivation of microbial agents. UNSCOM found 22 tonnes (24 tons) of the medium in storage, but the rest was not accounted for.
Some of the inspectors were suspicious of a plant at Al Hakam, southwest of Baghdad, that included large fermentation facilities. The Iraqis claimed the plant was used to produce animal feed, but the site featured an unusual degree of security and isolation, and the equipment there seemed to be a bit on the high-budget side for producing animal feed. The plant lacked safety precautions that would have been regarded as absolutely necessary for producing dangerous pathogens in the West, but Saddam Hussein was not noted for his deep concern over the safety of those who worked for him.
UNSCOM inspectors finally managed to push the Iraqis into a corner. In July 1995, the Iraqis admitted they had a BW program and that the Al Hakam plant had been used for producing bioagents, and provided what they called a "full, final, and complete" disclosure.
UNSCOM found plenty of holes in the story, however, and a month later Hussein Kamel Hassan, who had been in charge of military production and was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, defected to Jordan after a family dispute. Iraqi authorities immediately tipped off UNSCOM inspectors to a shed on a chicken farm that had been under Hussein Kamel Hassan's control, where they found a stash of documents that provided a detailed description of the Iraqi biowarfare program. Why the Iraqis seemed so quick to provide information was a puzzle at the time, though a decade later possible motivations would become apparent. Hussein Kamel Hassan would return to Iraq in an unbelievable lapse of judgement and die in a gun battle between his guards and Saddam Hussein's personal troops.
The Iraqis declared the previous "full, final, and complete" disclosure to be "incomplete and invalid" and released a new one. It revealed that the Iraqis had begun the program in 1985, obtained their first pathogens in 1986, and by the eve of the Gulf War had extensive stockpiles of bioweapons. The Iraqis admitted to working on a wide range of pathogens and biotoxins:
The bioweapons were not used in the Gulf War since the Iraqi army did not have the proper supplies of vaccines needed to protect their own troops, and were not fired in Scud missiles at Israel and other remote targets because of the likelihood of massive retaliation.
After this revelation, UNSCOM continued to probe into Iraqi efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqis continued to stall the inspection effort and UNSCOM was finally told to leave the country in 1998. Few had any doubt that the Iraqis were continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction in secret, and the stage was set for another military confrontation.
* The experience with Iraq suggested that secret BW efforts were very likely going on in other countries. Suspects included states regarded by the US as suspicious at the very least, such as North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Syria, but inconveniently included American allies such as Egypt and possibly Israel. South Africa did have a BW effort during the last years of the apartheid order, but it was disbanded after the fall of the old regime. However, there were worries that South African BW experts hired out to other countries.
With the widespread introduction of "genetic modification" technologies, even relatively poor countries can develop bioagents undreamed of by Shirou Ishii and his contemporaries. For example, influenza might be genetically modified with Marburg or Ebola components to produce a new pathogen that combines great lethality and contagiousness. Another nightmare idea would be to modify a pathogen to produce, say, saxitoxins, which are structurally simple. Such "Satan bugs" would be too dangerous and indiscriminate to be actually used in combat as such, but would be useful as terror weapons.
Despite the clear and present danger, the US military, in a degree of confusion due to defense cutbacks and the emergence of a dizzying range of new threats in the wake of the Cold War, found it difficult to coordinate an effective response. Efforts to ramp up vaccine production proved slow and frustrating. The US Army finally instituted a mandatory anthrax immunization program in 1997, but it proved controversial, with critics claiming that the anthrax vaccine was ineffective and possibly dangerous, and a number of soldiers refusing its administration.
The Army replied that animal models had demonstrated the vaccine was effective, and performing more persuasive trials on human test subjects was not merely illegal but absolutely unthinkable. The Army also pointed out that the criticisms would be vastly louder if an Army force was hit with anthrax, resulting in high casualties. The soldiers who refused the vaccinations were disciplined for disobeying orders. Another universal military vaccination campaign, this time against smallpox, was begun in late 2002.
The problem of detecting BW attacks had also been at least partly addressed by that time. Pocket devices had been developed that use antibodies matched to anthrax, or in principle other pathogens, to examine samples. A test takes about 15 minutes, which is plenty of time to respond to an attack. The device is not very sensitive and has a high rate of false alarms, but it's vastly better than nothing. New technologies are under development, such as "DNA chips" that consist of a slide with patterns of DNA that match the DNA of particular pathogens, that may offer greater sensitivity and a lower rate of false alarms.
* After the expulsion of the UNSCOM team from Iraq in 1998, intelligence reports indicated that the Iraqis were trying very hard to build up their stocks of CB agents. Some of the reports described mobile BW production facilities based on fleets of tractor-trailer rigs that could be moved if they were detected.
During 2002, the US presidential administration of George W. Bush ("Bush II") began to press for military intervention against Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein, arguing that he had violated the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire agreement and was building up stockpiles of WMDs. The British government under Tony Blair backed up the argument. The case against Iraq was heavy-handed, going so far as to make claims that Saddam Hussein had links to Islamic terrorists, a claim that few took seriously. In fact, it was very plausible that Saddam Hussein's expulsion of UNSCOM in 1998 had been the actual provocation that led administration hardliners to decide that action was required, but this was "old news" and not emphasized in the public brief.
Iraq allowed the inspectors to return, but the US government insisted that the result was nothing more than the same old pattern of stalling tactics, not a good-faith attempt to abide by the terms of the cease-fire. Even the head of the inspection team, Hans Blix, admitted to reporters that the Iraqis had no credibility.
US forces began a major buildup in the Persian Gulf region in late 2002 and early 2003, and in the spring of 2003 the US invaded Iraq, touching off a storm of international protest. Although the expectation was that Saddam Hussein would "pull the lanyard" on his CB weapons arsenal this time around, nothing of the sort happened, and in fact the US quickly conquered the country, encountering very little effective resistance and suffering fewer casualties than suffered in the first Gulf War.
This triumphant march was quickly deflated by the emergence of a wasting insurgency against the occupation force that would gradually evolve into a civil war between Iraqi Sunni Muslims, who had long run the country, and more numerous Iraqi Shiite Muslims, who had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. To compound frustration, an "Iraq Survey Group" organized under the occupation authorities to search for stockpiles of WMDs failed to find them. Although the US and British governments kept insisting that such weapons would be found, nothing was, while the tide of criticism rose. The roving CB weapons labs turned out to be mobile hydrogen generators used to inflate balloons.
In late 2004, the US and British governments finally conceded the obvious if embarrassing fact that WMD stockpiles couldn't be found. Given the lack of results and the dangerous security situation in Iraq at the time, it made no sense for the Iraq Survey Group to continue the search, and it was shut down in early 2005. The Bush II Administration argued that the invasion had still been justified, that given Saddam Hussein's past conduct it wasn't prudent to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Given the documented history of Iraqi involvement in and enthusiasm for CB weapons production, and the evasive behavior of Saddam Hussein's regime, in fact many who had been following the issue were sincerely astonished when the facts became known and illuminated how shoddy the intelligence on Iraq had actually been. There had been little doubt in the previous Clinton Administration that Iraq was hiding stockpiles of WMDs. Even Hans Blix, who was sharply critical of the way the US and British governments had promoted the war to the public, calling Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair "salesmen", publicly admitted he was surprised that the Iraqis had been telling the truth.
Before disbanding, the Iraq Survey Group issued a final report that stated Saddam Hussein had shut down his CB weapons program shortly after the Gulf War. The report claimed that he had decided CB weapons were more trouble than they were worth in his effort to "break containment" by the US and its allies, and that he felt he could easily restart the program once he had. After all, many of the facilities were "dual use" and could be shifted from one purpose to another easily. Everything that UNSCOM found was essentially "old news".
According to the report, the Iraqi evasiveness and games played with UNSCOM team had been a bluff, an intimidation tactic designed to convince outsiders that Iraq really did still have CB weapons -- which could explain the occasional puzzling acts of cooperation of the Iraqis with UNSCOM inspectors. The report indicated that even senior Iraqi government ministers were surprised to find out that Iraq hadn't had active CB program. If a bluff it was, no doubt it came as a hideous shock to Saddam Hussein when his bluff was called. He went on the run but was captured, and then hanged at the end of 2006.
However, Saddam Hussein had a bit of a last laugh as well. Although it is very plausible that other "rogue states" like North Korea or Iran have ongoing CB weapons programs, the way the US and British governments ended up looking foolish over Iraq's suspended WMD program means that it would be very hard to sell the public on a case for action against such states. For the time being, nobody is making much effort to do so; the current focus of the threat has shifted from rogue states to terrorist groups.