v1.1.5 / chapter 5 of 5 / 01 feb 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* During most of the last half of the 20th century, international security concerns, including the development, use, and defense against CB weapons, were dominated by the Cold War confrontation between East and West. Now, in the 21st century, the major security threat is seen as terrorism, primarily in the form of Islamic extremism. This chapter describes the rise of the CB threat from domestic and international terrorist groups and attempts to deal with the issue -- though since this is an ongoing issue the discussion is necessarily a "work in progress". It concludes with comments on CB arms limitation, and radiological weapons or "dirty bombs".
* Although terrorism was not unknown in the United States through the 20th century, it wasn't really until the 1980s that the issue began to acquire a higher profile. There had been some domestic terrorism from the left during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, most notably in the form of the "Weather Underground" group, but by the end of that decade the focus had turned towards the right, first in the form of the "Survivalist" movement and then the rightist / white supremacist "militias" that followed them. Religious cult organizations also became a potential domestic terrorist threat. Of course, leftist domestic terrorism was an active threat in Europe during the 1970s and into the 1980s, in the form of the German "Red Army Faction" and the Italian "Red Brigades", both of which were eventually crushed by the authorities.
International terrorism also came of age in the 1980s. There had been a "dirty little war" between Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli Mossad intelligence organization in the cities of Europe during the 1970s, which was followed in the next decade by the rise of international Islamist terrorism, with the Palestinian issue becoming only a part of the agenda. The story of the rise of modern domestic and international terrorist groups is elaborate and of course not the focus of this document. They are important here because CB weapons have helped turn them from a serious nuisance to a major threat.
During the 1980s, domestic and international terrorism focused on "traditional" actions, such as kidnappings, assassinations, bombings, and hijackings. Although use of CB weapons by such groups was a possibility, it remained a theoretical issue through the decade. The Gulf War was not only a big wakeup call for the US on the possibility that CB weapons might be used on the battlefield, it also raised the possibility that such weapons might be used on American cities as well.
Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel-prize-winning biologist from Stanford University, had been warning for decades that new biological technologies made the prospect of bioweapon attacks much more fearsome. During the Gulf War, Lederberg spoke with government officials, saying that Saddam Hussein's best option for using CB agents was to give them to terrorist groups for attacks on domestic targets. Lederberg was taken seriously, though taking comprehensive action was out of the question given the short notice. An emergency response team was organized at the US Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), and antibiotics were stockpiled in Washington DC.
Lederberg's nightmare scenario didn't happen, but that didn't mean the issue could be forgotten. Rightist domestic terrorists were increasingly active at the time, and Islamists, encouraged by their successful war against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, were becoming more ambitious, eager to take on the United States.
On 23 February 1993, Islamic terrorists set off a truck bomb in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. The attack was a fizzle, though six people were killed, and the terrorists were arrested with impressive speed and efficiency. The bungled attack bred a degree of public complacency, with the terrorists mocked in op-ed cartoons, but a line had been crossed: Islamic terrorists had conducted their first major operation against a target on American soil. They had failed miserably, but it could be assumed that they would learn from their mistakes and would be back.
The terrorists had actually included a container of hydrogen cyanide with the truck bomb in hopes that the blast would drive the gas up the ventilation system of the building, but the gas was incinerated in the explosion. The threat remained mostly a possibility, and possibilities always end up being lower on the priority queue than active threats.
* The threat became much more active on 20 March 1995, when containers of a liquefied form of sarin were placed on five different subway cars on three different lines in the Tokyo subway system and opened by members of a Japanese religious sect named the "Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth)". Twelve people were killed and 5,000 required medical attention.
The Aum Shinrikyo sect preached a doctrine that combined elements of Hinduism and Buddhism with apocalyptic prophecies. Japanese authorities quickly arrested its leader, Shoko Asahara, born as Chizuo Matsumoto, and forty other members of the sect. Asahara confessed to the subway attack and other terrorist acts. The Aum Shinrikyo was linked to a 1994 sarin gassing in a residential neighborhood in Matsumoto, Japan, that killed seven people. The attack had been originally shrugged off by the authorities as an accident, caused by a chemical hobbyist who was tinkering with pesticides. That rationalization was implausible, but the idea that somebody wanted to kill large numbers of Japanese citizens at random with nerve gases was even harder to believe. Other acts of terror using chemical weapons that took place in Japan, including the release of phosgene at a train station in Yokohama, remained unresolved.
Investigators found that the Aum Shinrikyo had also attempted to develop bioweapons. Sect members had traveled to Africa in 1992 to obtain samples of the virulent Ebola virus, but returned to Japan empty-handed. In 1993, the cult had attempted to spray anthrax spores off the roof of a building they owned in downtown Tokyo, but they did it in bright daylight, which killed most of the spores, and they didn't have enough for lethal dosages anyway.
* The Tokyo subway attack was an alert to authorities around the world, and particularly in the United States. The Aum Shinrikyo sect had planned to carry out other attacks in New York and Washington DC.
In fact, the Aum Shinrikyo's attack wasn't the first time extremists had developed or used CB agents in the US. In September 1984, in the US state of Oregon, members of a cult community founded by guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh responded to a confrontation with the neighboring town of The Dalles by spreading salmonella bacteria over salad bars and coffee creamers in ten restaurants, as well as supermarket produce. The idea was to keep voters home in bed sick during local elections so the guru's people could vote their own candidates into office. Over 750 people were affected.
The incident didn't attract that much attention, since nasty salmonella outbreaks happen every now and then in the normal course of events, and public-health officials concluded that the outbreak was due to accidental contamination. The full details didn't come to light until September 1985, when law-enforcement officials descended on the Rajneesh community, arresting the leaders and interrogating them. They started singing and outlined the whole mad plot. Several Rajneesh officials received prison sentences of several years, while the Bhagwan himself was heavily fined, given a suspended sentence, then told to leave the country and not come back.
The salmonella attack hadn't been recognized for what it was because it was so unprecedented, though citizens of The Dalles were very suspicious of the cult and believed from the start that the Rajneeshis had caused the epidemic of food poisoning. Even after the facts came to light, there was a certain reluctance to discuss in the incident in the scientific press for giving other extremist groups ideas.
Rightist extremists were obviously getting the same ideas anyway, with numbers of them arrested for possession of biotoxins such as ricin, as well as for working on poison gases and toxins. In 1995, Disneyland received a videotape showing two hands mixing chemicals, along with a note threatening the theme park. No suspect was ever arrested. That same year, a one-time white supremacist named Larry Wayne Harris was convicted of wire fraud when he obtained under false pretenses three vials of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic plague. He received probation, though he told reporters he had managed to culture anthrax, and said that bioweapons might be a proper response to Federal attacks on anti-government groups: "How many cities are you willing to lose before you back off?"
Following the Tokyo attacks and presented with evidence of home-grown interest in CB weapons, US law enforcement agencies became increasingly worried about a CB attack on a US population center by domestic or foreign extremists. Even the idea that individuals were trying to synthesize CB agents in their garages or basements was enough to cause alarm. The history of the development and manufacture of CB agents is littered with reports of accidents, some of them disastrous. The likelihood of an accident in a basement laboratory would clearly be high, and anyone who would take such a risk was unlikely to be rigorously cautious or prudent.
* On 11 September 2001, the issue of a major terrorist attack on a US population center abruptly ceased to be theoretical. Islamic terrorists of the "al-Qaeda" network, led by Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, hijacked four airliners on domestic US flights, then flew two of them into the World Trade Center skyscraper towers in New York City and one into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside after a scuffle between the terrorists and the passengers. The Trade Center towers were levelled and a wing of the Pentagon badly damaged. Total casualties from the operation, which was as meticulously planned and executed as it was ruthless, were over 3,000 people.
The attack did not involve CB agents but in early October 2001, while the dust was still settling from the 11 September attacks, somebody sent off a set of letters to number of strangers. Within a month five people had died of anthrax, contracted from spores contained in the envelopes that had contained the letters. The five included two postal workers in Washington DC, a New York hospital worker, a Florida photo editor, and an elderly woman in Connecticut. Several others received the envelopes, but were saved by prompt medical attention.
The letters used the rhetoric of Islamic militancy, but their intended targets were generally liberals, suggesting a rightist was using the 911 attacks as a cover. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) originally zeroed in on Dr. Steven Hatfill, who worked at Fort Detrick, where the strain of anthrax had originated. Hatfill was finally exonerated after being thoroughly raked over the coals; he sued the Justice Department and won a multimillion-dollar award in 2008. Although the Hatfill investigation turned out to be a dead end, the FBI persisted, and in 2007 began to focus on a colleague of Hatfill at Fort Detrick, 62-year-old Dr. Bruce Ivins. The evidence against Ivins began to pile up, and on 29 July 2008, he committed suicide by overdosing on non-prescription drugs.
Ivins' suicide left the Justice Department with the uncomfortable appearance of having hounded a man to death, and in the aftermath a Justice Department spokesman claimed that the evidence against Ivins was conclusive. Ivins had been responsible for the flask, labelled "RMR1029", that contained the specific anthrax strain used in the attacks; all others who might have had access to RMR1029 were cleared; Ivins had the non-trivial technical knowledge required to make use of the spores as a weapon; and during the timeframe of the attacks, Ivins spent much more extra time in the labs than he had before or did since. However, nobody could identify any strong motive Ivins might have had to perform the attacks, and statements by some who knew him that he was prone to write threatening letters were contradicted by others familiar with him. Who actually performed the attacks may never be positively identified.
* The anthrax letters were clearly not part of a well-planned terrorist campaign, but the 11 September attacks gave them very high visibility at the time and an awareness that things could have been much worse. Intelligence obtained from the US military intervention in Afghanistan, the main enclave of al-Qaeda, that followed the terror attacks revealed that the al-Qaeda network was seeking to develop CB agents, and they had already demonstrated that they had the will to use them without restraint. Investigators unraveling the trail of the al-Qaeda terrorists who participated in the 11 September attacks found they had also investigated obtaining use of a crop spraying aircraft, clearly to disperse CB agents over a population center.
Ironically, except for the anthrax letters, the abrupt rise of the Islamic terrorist threat coincided with the near-disappearance of the domestic rightist terrorist threat. After rightist terrorists truck-bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995, killing 168 people, the FBI and other US law-enforcement agencies zeroed in on the ultra-violent militias, and militia leadership mostly ended up behind bars. More significantly, although their rank-and-file membership remained generally in circulation, the rightists had predicted that the year 2000 would bring an apocalypse, and when no apocalypse occurred there was widespread disillusionment with the cause. However, although domestic extremists are now keeping a low profile, they haven't disappeared, and the authorities believe the threat could revive at any time.
* The worries over CB terrorist attacks against US population centers grew through the 1990s and came of age on 11 September 2001. The US government is now grappling with the threat and trying to prioritize it against the unbounded range of other possible threats.
The CB threat can be overstated. Worries over terrorists poisoning reservoirs or dusting down cities with anthrax or nerve gas are not all that credible. A reservoir is very big and it would take a truckload of toxin to achieve useful concentrations; water quality is monitored and chlorinated water tends to break down toxins. Crop dusters are designed to distribute pesticides, which are heavy and not supposed to act as aerosols, and so such aircraft would not be effective in distributing finely-powdered bioagents. They could distribute nerve gas, but loading up a crop duster with such fast-acting toxins without killing the pilot before he could get into the air would be very tricky.
Similarly, in 2002 the British Broadcasting Corporation produced a semi-fictional documentary program that depicted terrorists who had deliberately infected themselves with smallpox and then went around in public, leaving a trail of death behind them. Medical authorities familiar with the disease replied that smallpox, while very dangerous, cannot be transmitted by such casual contact; it requires exposure over an extended period of time.
These considerations do not rule out terrorist use of CB weapons, they simply say that such weapons hardly amount to a "poor man's atomic bomb" that could be used to wipe out a city. This is not entirely reassuring, since it is perfectly in the realm of possibility for terrorists to use CB weapons to perform attacks on more limited targets, such as a subway, office building, sports arena, shopping mall, and so on.
Islamic terrorists who were captured and interrogated said that their training in Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan involved exercises in dispersing hydrogen cyanide into the ventilation systems of buildings, which potentially could be a highly effective tactic. There is also the threat that terrorists could target a plant that manufactures dangerous chemicals and sabotage it to spread a huge toxic cloud, much like the 1984 accident at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, that killed over 2,500 people and permanently injured many more.
* US government efforts to confront the threat escalated in step with its rise. In 1995, US President Bill Clinton signed a secret directive organizing existing US agencies for response against a major terrorist attack. This was just a start on a very difficult process, since getting such a large organization as the US Federal government to deal with such difficult problems was clearly not an easy job.
Some things have been accomplished. Unsurprisingly, the government's Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is the first line of defense against a CB attacks. The CDC has an extensive network of communications with hospitals and doctors, and can both alert them of possible threats and receive intelligence from them about new threats. The CDC has built up a "National Pharmaceutical Stockpile (NPS)" consisting of stores of antibiotics that can be quickly brought from their secret locations to any major population center in the US in a matter of hours. The NPS stockpiles also includes atropine injectors, respirators, and other kit for dealing with CW attacks.
Serious concerns remain that America is unprepared for a major CB attack. In June 2000, Denver, Colorado, conducted a exercise in which the city was under simulated attack with plague pathogens. City officials were unable to contain the following "epidemic", and the exercise resulted in an estimated 3,700 "cases" and 950 "deaths". It is hard to think of any hospital in the US that could deal with even a thousand anthrax cases, and most would be overwhelmed by a hundred.
Advocates pressed for greater coordination between Federal agencies involved in dealing with terrorist attacks, as well as improved technology to detect CB agents, and funding to medical facilities to give them the means to deal with BW attacks. The issue remained on the sidelines until 11 September 2001, and then the Bush II Administration established a high-level "Office of Homeland Defense" to coordinate anti-terrorist activities. The complexity of the homeland defense issue has meant that results have been slow to emerge.
For the moment, the subject of CB weapons has gone surprisingly quiet, almost disappearing from the public debate. It seems very unlikely that the issue is going to stay quiet forever.
* The issue of terrorist attacks using CB weapons is linked to the issue of states attempting to develop stockpiles of such weapons. Developing really effective CB weapons is beyond the means of most terrorist organizations, but nations with active CBW programs could supply such weapons to terrorists out of sympathy with their aims or simple expedience. This reality raises the importance of arms control efforts to restrict the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Arms-control efforts seek to limit the spread of WMDs by controlling the sale of critical technologies, and by obtaining intelligence on sites that may be used to develop them. The greatest efforts have been made in attempting to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and such efforts have proven successful to a degree.
Limiting the development of chemical weapons is more difficult, since it is harder to uncover their production. The "Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)" came into effect in 1997 and, on paper, is extremely strict. The Geneva Protocol of 1925 had long established an international ban on the use of chemical weapons, though as previous chapters show it has often been violated. The CWC took the Geneva Protocol one step further, banning the manufacture and storage of chemical weapons as well. It even bans the use of nonlethal agents, at least for combat operations, though it says nothing about their use for crowd control.
The CWC also places restrictions on trade in certain chemicals that can be used as "precursors" for synthesizing CW agents, and allows intrusive inspections on short notice, implemented by workers of the "Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)". Although the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty allows a small handful of countries to possess nuclear weapons, the CWC is even-handed: the same rules apply to everyone.
The CWC has had some significant successes. As of 1998, 168 countries had signed up and 110 had ratified the agreement. India and South Korea joined and admitted to having CW stockpiles, which had to be destroyed under OPCW supervision. France and China claim to have destroyed their chemical weapons. As mentioned in chapter 2, America and Russia, with the world's biggest CW stockpiles, are committed to destroying them all.
OPCW inspectors have conducted hundreds of inspections, though critics wonder if the inspectors are not simply reviewing lies fed to them by member nations. While the convention does provide the right to snap inspections, so far none have been performed, partly due to the slow speed at which the bureaucracies of member nations have moved towards declarations of compliance.
The snap inspections make many member nations uneasy. Members of the US Senate have opposed snap inspections, but the lack of such a provision would greatly weaken the CWC. The states of the Middle East are generally absent from the list of signatories. Among them, only Israel and Jordan have signed the treaty, but neither has ratified it.
* Biological weapons are a nastier problem. Biological weapons have been against international law since the Geneva Protocol in 1925. The fundamental treaty for the control of biological weapons is the 1972 BTWC, which bans development, manufacture, and use of BW agents. However, the BTWC is weak, lacking much in the way of enforcement measures, and, as the Soviet Biopreparat organization proved, it has been widely violated in practice. There has been a push towards adding such measures, in the form of "challenge" inspections of suspect sites where an inspection team can arrive without prior notice at any time, with no right of refusal.
The European Union and some other states strongly favor such a strengthened treaty, and pressed for it at the fifth Five Year Review Conference of the BTWC in 2001. The Clinton Administration was also enthusiastic for a strong BTWC, but the Bush II Administration distanced the US from discussions of the new enforcement protocols, on the basis that the enforcement provisions would be ineffective at restraining BW development but would be an open door to theft of industrial secrets or intrusions into US defense labs, even those with no connection to biological research of any sort.
The Bush II Administration insisted that they were earnest in maintaining a constructive dialogue on the subject, and in fact took a very soft stance in their resistance to the BTWC. US representatives did not denounce the protocols, but they did remain silent during the discussions. However, the US received very bad international press over the matter, all the more so because the Bush II Administration seemed to be establishing a pattern of disengagement from international agreements. The fact that the BTWC had been so provably and massively violated as to undermine its credibility was not emphasized in the news reports.
* In addition to outright violations, there are subtler pressures that undermine the BTWC. The United States is currently engaged in a long and troublesome war against drugs, and the US Congress has passed a bill that includes funding for research into bioagents to attack drug plants like coca, opium poppy, and marijuana.
Interestingly, the BTWC is ambiguous on the legality of such agents. If they were not used in a war, and were used with the consent of the country in which the bioagents were dispersed, that would be perfectly legal under the BTWC. However, as with the use of "nonlethal" chemical agents in Vietnam, critics are quick to point out that a limited use of bioagents could set a dangerous precedent for the future.
Another problem is that the BTWC does not address the issue of the experimental distribution of pathogens. The Iraqis and other countries suspected of manufacturing bioweapons obtained their pathogens from Western germ banks, under the pretext of using them for the development of vaccines. This has led to an effort to tighten controls on the distribution of such pathogens, although at the moment there is nothing much in place.
* While CB warfare is publicly regarded as an extraordinary evil, arguing that it is more vicious to kill someone with gas or pathogens than with bullets or cluster bombs is unpersuasive. There are still substantial arguments for CBW control.
One argument against chemical weapons is that they are inferior to conventional steel and explosives. Any reasonably trained and equipped military force can endure a gas attack with few casualties, though chemical defensive measures are a great nuisance, particularly for an army on the move. Furthermore, gas weapons tend to require more care in handling than other weapons, and in the confusion of battle gas can backfire against an attacker due to changes in wind direction and other confounding events. They are much more difficult to handle than more conventional weapons.
The most significant drawback of chemical weapons is environmental. Their manufacture tends to be a nasty process, and once produced and stockpiled, they require substantial security and maintenance that is hard to assure over a period of decades. Disposal of decrepit chemical weapons is a dangerous and extremely expensive task.
The arguments against biological warfare are even stronger. Bioagents are at least, or even more, hazardous to develop, manufacture, store, and transport than chemical agents. If actually used, they could lead to a pandemic that afflicts all sides equally. Even if "nonlethal" bioagents are used, there is no saying that their widespread production and dispersion might lead to a new strain that is much more virulent, and for which no defenses are available. Genetic modification to design highly specific bioagents could have unpredictable and extremely dangerous consequences. Poor countries often look to bioweapons as a cheap equivalent to the atomic bomb. On the other hand, poor countries do not have the same level of public health resources available to meet attacks by CB weapons, making them even more vulnerable to attacks by bioweapons.
Given CB weapons control treaties with tough provisions to reveal cheating, countries do have strong incentives to renounce the development, manufacture, stockpiling, and use of CB weapons. Whether such incentives will balance the pressure to acquire such weapons remains to be seen.
* Traditionally, chemical and biological agents have been lumped together with "radiological agents", or radioactive materials dispersed as a form of warfare.
The concept of radiological warfare goes back a long time. In 1941, science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote a short story titled "Solution Unsatisfactory", in which the dusting of enemy cities and installations with radioactive materials created a new balance of terror, foreshadowing the nuclear standoff that would begin a decade later. Despite that, no army has ever used a radiological weapon, or as far as anyone knows even introduced one into their arsenals. Production, handling, and use of radiological agents would be extremely troublesome.
However, a simple explosive bomb loaded up with radioactive materials, or "dirty bomb", is very attractive to terrorists. Although it is unlikely to do a lot of damage in itself, with most of the casualties due to the explosive instead of the radioactive materials, it could cause a great deal of public shock. It could also contaminate prominent public landmarks, rendering them uninhabitable without a major cleanup effort. The scene of wrecking the entire US Capitol building and carting off its rubble to a waste-disposal site would be extremely demoralizing.
The other issue with a dirty bomb is that the materials are available. Most concern over control of radioactive materials is focused on the bomb-grade uranium and plutonium that can be used to build a true nuclear weapon. In contrast, the low-grade radioactive materials that could be used to build a dirty bomb are relatively widespread, with millions of containers storing such materials produced, and they are much more poorly controlled. Cesium-137 is used in treating cancer, cesium chloride is used to sterilize medical supplies, cobalt-60 is used to irradiate food, and americium is a component in sensors for oil exploration.
Even in the US, hundreds of items with such radioactive materials are lost, stolen, or simply thrown out each year, and the situation is worse in other countries. The Soviet Union made extensive use of "radioactive thermoelectric generators (RTGs)" containing strontium-90 to power isolated communications stations. Nobody seems to know where they all are, and not all have been accounted for.
Leaving radioactive materials simply lying around is an invitation to trouble even if no malice is involved. In Brazil, in 1987 a scavenger picked up a canister of radioactive cesium from an abandoned clinic and cut it open. A number of people were killed, dozens suffered radiation burns, and an expensive cleanup effort followed. If this kind of trouble could happen by accident, it is unpleasant to think of what could happen if someone were out to do as much damage as possible, and it is known that al-Qaeda terrorists have tried to obtain radioactive isotopes.
* My sole involvement with chemical weapons was the gas training I was provided during my US Army Basic Combat Training session at Ford Ord, California, in the fall of 1972. All trainees were required to go into a room full of CS aerosol powder and inhale it to give them an appreciation of what gas can do, a training technique that goes back to gas training in WWI. I compare being tear-gassed to having my head shoved into a bucket full of hot pepper sauce and chili powder and being forced to inhale and swallow. It was very effective training, as I haven't forgotten it in over thirty years.
We were also given familiarization with the use of gas masks, though the only full-body protection we had available was to put on a rain poncho, and were given a short training session with atropine auto-injectors and, I vaguely recall, decontamination powders.
I read a book on CB warfare while I was in the Army and was amused at the experiments with "Agent Buzz". Recreational drug use was widespread and blatant in the US Army in the early 1970s, though there was a crackdown later in the decade. I joked with a pal that if our guys were attacked with hallucinogenic gases, they'd tear off their gas masks and inhale as much as they could, and the enemy wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
* Concerning the use of CS powder in Vietnam: I once met a fellow who said they used it to render VC bunkers uninhabitable. If US soldiers simply blew up the bunkers, the hole and position were still basically intact and could easily be restored to effectiveness. According to my acquaintance, however, the VC hated CS, and instead of demolishing the bunkers he and his team built charges with a combination of explosive and CS that thoroughly dispersed the powder through the bunker. The VC wouldn't use the bunker again. I speculate that they had been trained to believe that the powder was lethal, or that the Americans were likely to sooner or later sneak in other gases that were lethal.
* Experiences with natural biotoxins gives me a great respect for what they could do if used as a weapon. In the early 1980s, I suffered through a period of a few months where everything seemed to go wrong at once, with troubles including food poisoning and contact with poison oak.
The food poisoning involved an all-night session in agony that I tried to cope with by imagining I was being tortured. It was the sickest I had ever been in my grown life, and I should have been hospitalized. After a few hours of it, I would have given away any secret to make it stop. In the morning, I was purged, drained, white, and feeble. I suspect I would have been killed if I had been old or in bad health.
Poison oak exposure itself resulted in no more than a severe red, itching, swollen rash that took about a week to subside, though I had a friend who took a dose of it and had an allergic reaction, with his face hideously puffed up. However, after the worst of my exposure was over I kept having minor relapses on my forearms and facial areas. Some of the oily toxins had rubbed off on doorknobs and the like, and I had to give my apartment a thorough cleaning to put a stop to the relapses. When I finally found out what mustard gas was and what it could do while writing this document, I remembered I'd been through an experience that gave me a mild taste of what it was like.
* This document evolved out of some notes taken from a six-part historical television documentary titled SCIENCE AT WAR, broadcast on the US History Channel in 1999, which included individual installments on chemical and biological warfare. The installment on chemical warfare focused strongly on the tragedy of Fritz and Clara Haber, which is such a neatly Shakespearian melodrama that I found it a bit hard to believe. However, the facts do bear it out. More formal sources for this document include:
The MitreTech website has a wide range of well-organized and rather technical materials on biological and chemical warfare. The section on chemical agents on the MitreTech site provides a number of strong warnings that trying to synthesize a CB agent is extremely dangerous. I have not included such warnings in this document, since there is almost no prospect that anyone could use this survey to actually produce a CB agent.
I have doubts such warnings make sense. To be sure, an organization has to provide such fine print to avoid bad press, but the idea that somebody who tried to make CB in his basement would not know it was dangerous, and having taken that step, would be inclined to heed warnings, seems very hard to believe.
* The revisions of this document following the highly controversial US invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 were mostly made to address the various conspiracy theories that went into wide circulation around that time. On examination, these theories could be generally described as grasping at straws, so much so that they hardly seem worth worrying about, but as long as such misinformation is floating around I end up being forced to deal with it.
I have had to modify several of my documents in other fields in response to the "conspiracy theory of the day", and I am beginning to regard a conspiracy theory as something like a computer virus: an absolutely obnoxious nuisance and a gross waste of time and effort. I will concede that a very small percentage of conspiracy theories may actually have some basis in fact, but my only reaction to them now is simple annoyance.
* Revision history:
v1.0 / 01 nov 99 / gvg
v1.1 / 01 apr 00 / gvg / Minor polishing.
v1.2 / 01 jul 01 / gvg / Polishing, corrections, Ken Alibek material.
v1.0.3 / 01 may 02 / gvg / Cleanup, added 9-11 anthrax attacks.
v1.1.0 / 01 mar 03 / gvg / Added new chapter, many more details.
v1.1.1 / 01 jun 03 / gvg / Minor corrections.
v1.1.2 / 01 nov 04 / gvg / Various minor updates, mostly about Iraq.
v1.1.3 / 01 feb 05 / gvg / Further clarifications about Iraq, terrorism.
v1.1.4 / 01 feb 07 / gvg / Minor cosmetic update.
v1.1.5 / 01 feb 09 / gvg / Bruce Ivins case, cleanups.
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