Information Related to "Pathogens, Poisons and Other Weapons of Terror"
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Just as the United
States was recovering from the Sept. 11 attack, a wave of envelopes containing
anthrax spread through its mail system—conjuring fears of even direr prospects
for the future.
by Tom Robinson
Thousands of hoaxes and false alarms followed. But more actual incidents cropped up too, several from people having been exposed to the pathogen in the offices of the U.S. Senate. Traces of anthrax were found in a facility that handled mail for the White House.
Eyes immediately turned to the terrorists. A few weeks earlier Americans had learned that individuals involved in the Sept. 11 attack had made inquiries into the use of crop-duster airplanes, possibly for disseminating biological or chemical agents. Though the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded crop dusters, officials assured the public that adapting their sprayers to disperse bioweapons is nearly impossible and that spreading chemicals with them would have little or no impact because of their low quantity if delivered in that manner.
Nevertheless government officials say biological and chemical warfare is on the terrorists' agenda. Newsweek reports: "What we know for sure is that terrorists are experimenting with chemical and biological weapons. Operatives of (Osama) bin Laden's Qaeda network have tried ... to obtain anthrax and botulinum toxin in Czechoslovakia, an FBI official tells Newsweek. Dozens of rabbits and dogs have been found fatally poisoned near bin Laden's Jalalabad training camps, accordin to a foreign intelligence agency ...
"Convicted terrorist Ahmed Ressam (he was planning to blow up the Los Angeles airport as 1999 turned into 2000) testified that he had spent six months in 1998 at one of bin Laden's Afghan training camps. There, he said, he learned to release cyanide into the ventilation systems of office buildings. Bin Laden, Ressam told intelligence officials, was also interested in the use of 'low flying aircraft for the distribution of toxic materials'" (Oct. 8, p. 24).
As this issue of The Good News goes to press, no one knows who is behind the anthrax mailings or what will happen next. Whatever the case, fanatical Islamic terrorists have no reservations about using biological and chemical weapons along with other weapons of mass destruction.
The threat of biowarfare
Six days before the Sept. 11 attack,
Frank Cillufo, chairman of the Committee on Combating Chemical, Biological,
Radiological and Nuclear Terrorism at the Homeland Defense Initiative Center
for Strategic and International Studies, said before the U.S. Senate Committee
on Foreign Relations:
"A Hamas training manual expounds that it is foolish to hunt a tiger when
there are plenty of sheep to be had. And Osama bin Laden has publicly pronounced
that acquiring weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, radiological,
and nuclear ..., is a religious duty."
How would terrorists obtain bacterial or viral agents? It's not that difficult because plenty are available.
Amazingly, before 1996, when the U.S. government finally cracked down, "it was appallingly easy to buy an anthrax starter kit. All you had to do was find one of the 500 culture collections kept by universities, governments or private companies around the world and pay them about $50. That's how Saddam Hussein did it, according to bioweapons experts" (Time, Oct. 22, p. 35).
In 1984 the United States experienced its first biological-weapon attack when fanatic followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh contaminated drinking glasses and salad bars in an Oregon town with salmonella legally purchased from a Maryland company, American Type Culture Collection (ATCC, now in Virginia). No one died, but 751 people became severely ill with salmonella poisoning. In 1986 the same company sold three types of anthrax and five strains of botulinum to the University of Baghdad. Two years later the firm sold anthrax and other pathogens to the Iraqi ministry of trade.
The next known attempt at biological mass attack came in April 1990, when Japan's Aum Shinrikyo sect drove a truck outfitted with a compressor and vents for disseminating botulinum toxin around Japan's parliament building. The group's members tried the same tactic in June 1993 to disrupt the wedding of Japan's crown prince. Thankfully, in both cases they hadn't acquired a virulent strain and didn't have nearly enough of the toxin to do damage. Cult members also tried, for four straight days that June, to spread anthrax from a rooftop in Tokyo. Again, they failed, this time because they didn't turn the germ they had acquired into a breathable powder or fine enough mist.
Aum Shinrikyo probably obtained its pathogens from a national government, although such agents could have been derived from naturally contaminated soil.
In spite of these events, not until 1996 did American laws change. The previous year Larry Wayne Harris, a member of the white-supremacist group Aryan Nations, purchased three vials of freeze-dried bubonic-plague bacteria from ATCC for $240 and stored them in his car's glove compartment. Though the germs turned out to be an innocuous vaccine strain, the incident gained the attention of Congress. Congressmen than passed legislation to restrict access to 24 deadly pathogens including anthrax, Ebola, smallpox and yellow fever.
However, as Newsweek has reported, many U.S. academic institutions work with pathogenic microorganisms and toxins that could be used in biological weapons development. "You can't just walk into a lab and swipe a vial of anthrax, but researchers admit that nothing would stop a determined individual from hiring on at a lab, as a student or technician, and obtaining a starter culture. 'We all use student workers who are 18 or 19,' says LSU's (Martin) Hugh-Jones. 'Most of them don't even have any background you can check'" (Oct. 22, p. 34).
"Since Sept. 11," reports Time, "acquiring anthrax samples has become even harder ... (Yet) it's still possible to order anthrax from a few unscrupulous labs overseas-last week (in mid-October) nearly 50 sources listed by the World Federation for Culture Collections were still advertising the bacterium" (p. 35).
Iraq admitted in 1995 that it had produced 8,500 liters of concentrated anthrax and 19,000 liters of undiluted botulinum toxin. The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) destroyed most of those supplies, "but officials believe that Iraq hid four times as much anthrax and twice as much botulinum as was discovered" (p. 38). This is of great concern in light of intelligence reports indicating "that an Iraqi agent has met with an associate of Osama bin Laden. Also, Mohamed Atta, the Sept. 11 hijacker, reportedly had a June 2000 encounter with an Iraqi operative in Prague" (p. 38).
Of course, as Newsweek explains, "there are other sources of pathogens besides terrorist-friendly states. Anthrax is a relatively common veterinary disease. 'It's in Afghanistan,' notes molecular biologist Paul Keim of Northern Arizona State University. 'If a cow dies of anthrax it will bleed out its nose. All you have to do is scrape up a little blood'-or even get spores from the soil or a carcass-'put it in a petri dish, and you have anthrax' ... Bubonic plague is also abundant in nature. 'There are little pockets of it in rodents throughout the world,' says Stephen Morse of Columbia University. Staphylococcus B enterotoxin comes from foodborne bacteria.
"A terrorist would not need to start with rotten chicken, however. The world's supplies of pathogens are ample, their security questionable. In Kazakhstan, site of the old Soviet Union's bioweapons plants, one research center keeps at least 80 strains of anthrax, as well as plague and cholera, at its main facility and eight satellite labs" (Oct. 8, p. 25). Though security has recently been strengthened at the main facility, people previously got in-and the satellite labs still have security problems.
"Smallpox is harder to acquire. After the World Health Organization declared the disease eradicated in 1980, only two repositories of the virus supposedly remained" -one in the United States and one in Russia in case the need to manufacture a vaccine arose again. "Both are well secured. But a classified 1998 report by the CIA concluded that clandestine stocks remain, probably in North Korea and Iraq (as well as secret sites in Russia). And China, Cuba, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and the former Yugoslavia might have retained smallpox samples from the days when the disease was rampant" (p. 25).
Yet it is important to recognize that it is not enough to just have the microbes on hand. As Aum Shinrikyo's failure illustrates, germs must often be "weaponized" into a dispersible form. With $300 million, a half-dozen labs, experienced biologists and a 500,000-acre sheep farm to test their methods, Aum Shinrikyo produced an effective biological killer.
"Weaponizing germs, says Sergei Popov, a Soviet biowarfare scientist who defected in 1992, 'is not a basement production.' It requires expertise. But there is, unfortunately, more of that on the loose than anyone dreamed" (p. 26). The former deputy director of the Russian bioweapons program said that "more than 60,000 people were involved in the biological weapons program in the Soviet Union" (Wired News, Sept. 28). Of major concern is the fact that many of the specialists are unemployed now and some have disappeared-prompting examiners to worry that some are now working in Iraq or Iran.
"Terrorists who are quite obviously willing to sacrifice their own lives, however," reports Wired News regarding smallpox, "wouldn't need the former Soviet Union's technological capabilities. They would need only to contract the virus, and walk around coughing and sneezing on people"-as smallpox, unlike anthrax, is contagious.
Chemical, agricultural and nuclear terror
In addition, there is always the threat of chemical warfare. After Aum Shinrikyo's failures with bioweapons in Japan, its members chose an alternative route. In 1995 they filled plastic bags with the nerve gas sarin, slipped into a Tokyo subway station and punctured the bags with umbrellas -and 12 people died.
"Chemical agents are easier
in every way but are generally less lethal ... Although you need more of a chemical
than of a biological agent to kill people (probably thousands of pounds dropped
over a city), delivery is an even lower-tech task than turning 767s into missiles.
A truck, perhaps smashed into a concrete barrier, would do fine. Or, 'just put
an odorless poison into a building's ventilation system,' says chemist Igor
Revelsky, who helped develop the Soviets' chemical weapons. 'You could take
out half the Pentagon and you
wouldn't need to learn how to fly or train kamikazes'" (Newsweek,
Oct. 8, p. 26).
America faces another potential disaster not widely considered-agroterrorism. Reports MSNBC: "Fertilizers can be used to produce powerful bombs (as happened in the Oklahoma City bombing), pesticides can become chemical weapons and just a tiny amount of deadly bacteria can taint the food supply for thousands of people ... Contagious diseases have the potential to spread rapidly in places where hundreds, even thousands of animals are confined in close quarters ... And because farming takes place in rural areas, the nation's corn, wheat and peanut crops often have nothing more than scarecrows watching over them.
"That's been the case on Frank Lipinski's 360-acre farm near Buckley, Mich., for as long as he can remember. But lately, much of his time has been spent thinking about security, concocting elaborate doomsday scenarios: fertilizers and equipment turned into weapons, crops blighted, milk tanks sabotaged, livestock infected. 'If you think like a terrorist, I guess there's no end to the things you could do,' Lipinski said. 'It's kind of mind boggling'" (www.msnbc.msn.com, Oct. 15).
At the top of these concerns is the fear that terrorists could obtain nuclear materials. "The biggest potential source of such material is Russia and other parts of the old Soviet Union ... Take the Russian 'suitcase' bombs. Republican Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania recalls that in hearings held in 1997, retired Russian Gen. Alexander Lebed testified that Russian authorities couldn't account for dozens of portable nuclear bombs once in the Soviet arsenal and designed for use behind enemy lines ... Mr. Weldon said other top Russian military officials, including former Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, told him directly that such devices existed" (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 17).
If we thought the World Trade Center attack was devastating, imagine what would happen if someone set off a small nuclear weapon in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. If terrorists get one, does anyone doubt they would try to use it?
Further, if they don't buy or steal a bomb, terror groups could make one. "Making a nuclear weapon is relatively easy if you have the basic design, a good machine shop and enough weapons-grade uranium" (Newsweek, Oct. 8, p. 28). According to The Wall Street Journal: "Some bomb-grade material does seem to have made its way out of Russia. In 1994, Czech officials seized nearly six pounds of enriched uranium from a car in Prague. Investigators in that case believed that the material came from one of two Russian facilities."
Perhaps of more immediate concern
is that, even barring terrorist possession of actual nuclear weapons, "the
United States faces risk from two crude but
effective terror stratagems. One is a 'dirty bomb,' or radioactivity dispersal
device (RDD). An RDD consists of conventional explosives wrapped in a shroud
of radioactive material that creates fallout when the bomb explodes.
"Intelligence officials think
Al Qaeda has already obtained black-market cesium-137 and cobalt-60 and may
be experimenting with RDDs in Afghanistan. The other gambit would be a suicide
attack on a nuclear power plant, most likely using an airplane,... (which) could
create a Chernobyl-like radioactive disaster with widespread fallout and many
casualties" (Newsweek, p. 28).
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Other threats include e-bombs, or electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) devices. Put together for a mere $400, says an article in Popular Mechanics, such a bomb could "shut down a U.S. city, destroy all its electronics, its electricity supply, automobiles, computers, phone lines and just about all the modern technological devices and systems we now take for granted" (NewsMax.com, Sept. 21).
Although it would directly kill no one, a device of this sort would wreak havoc in major population centers and leave citizens much more vulnerable to greater atrocities.
Our only real refuge
Scenarios for the future do not bode well. More important, Bible prophecy warns us that calamitous times lie ahead. Jesus Christ foretold an increase of "pestilences" -massive disease epidemics-before His return to earth (Matthew 24:7). Revelation 9:1-12 apparently describes the use of weapons that cause pain and suffering without killing. The rest of the chapter mentions an incredible army of 200 million that kills a third of mankind. Clearly, weapons of mass destruction will be used.
Jesus told us to watch world events-"and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man" (Luke 21:36).
Our only real refuge lies in the Creator God (see Psalm 91). Scripture warns: "Unless the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain who build it; unless the LORD guards the city, the watchman stays awake in vain" (Psalm 127:1).
In his testimony before the U.S. Senate committee, Frank Cilluffo warned, "No matter how robust our defenses, we will never be able to protect everything, everywhere, all the time from every potential adversary." That is why America needs to turn to God in repentance and seek His forgiveness and protection.
As conditions around us worsen,
it is imperative that we repent of our personal sins and draw close to Him in
faith. He will never fail us-if we live for Him and put our trust in Him. GN
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