[ALBSA-Info] NYTimes.com Article: Who Made the Anthrax?

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Who Made the Anthrax?

October 18, 2001 

By RICHARD BUTLER


 

Let's call it what it is: Sending mail laced with anthrax
is an act of terrorism. Terrorists aim to cause terror, and
in this they have succeeded, up to a point. The run on
Cipro at pharmacies demonstrates that. If they also aim to
use biological weapons to kill on a large scale, they have
not succeeded - not yet. 

To ensure their failure we need to act fast, following a
largely scientific path. At the end of that path the
politics of responding to this form of terrorism will enter
the picture. It will be a dark picture if it is discovered
that the anthrax spread in the United States was supplied
by a state. 

We need first to determine what kind of anthrax was in the
mailings. Was it basic material fermented in some basement?
Or was it more sophisticated, weapons-grade anthrax, which
could only have been made by skilled people in possession
of expensive equipment? The findings from the office of
Senator Tom Daschle, although they are still quite
tentative, may suggest the latter. That would be serious. 

When we know the answer to this first technical question,
we can move to the second: Who has the requisite know-how
and equipment? This may position us to achieve what is
essential - to find out who is mailing the anthrax and stop
them, and to deal with their source of anthrax if they did
not themselves make it. 

Given the apparent quality of the anthrax mailed to the
Senate, the candidate list for an answer to the second
question is small. High-quality anthrax was made by the
United States, Russia, Britain and a few other cold war
participants. The consequence of this is that there is a
pool of scientists out there who have the know-how. 

Their continuing access to the equipment used to make
weapons-grade anthrax, however, is a matter of much less
certainty. All those countries signed the Biological
Weapons Convention of 1972, pledging to get out of the
biological weapons business and destroy their existing
stocks. It seems that all of them acted accordingly -
except Russia, which continued a sizable clandestine
biological weapons program, including work on anthrax,
until 1990. 

Iraq also signed the 1972 convention. But at President
Saddam Hussein's direction, Iraq embarked on a substantial
biological weapons program, in which anthrax production had
the leading role. 

As the leader from 1997 to 1999 of the United Nations
effort to remove Mr. Hussein's weapons of mass destruction,
I found one rule of thumb to have merit: The vigor with
which Iraq conspired to defeat any given step toward arms
control was a good indicator of how interested Mr. Hussein
was in the weapons system at issue. I concluded that
biological weapons are closest to President Hussein's heart
because it was in this area that his resistance to our work
reached its height. He seemed to think killing with germs
has a lot to recommend it. 

Iraq had problems in refining its crude anthrax to the more
potent, longer-living form of dry, small particles. Saddam
Hussein's regime spent millions of dollars on the necessary
equipment. Because of his resistance to our arms control
program, we never knew precisely what he had achieved. But
we know he loaded anthrax into shells, bombs and missile
warheads. 

Iraq has not been visited by international weapons
inspectors for the past three years. It is impossible to
know what further steps Mr. Hussein has taken, but all the
signs are that he has remained in the bioweapons business. 

If the scientific path leads to Iraq as the supporter of
the anthrax used by the terrorist mailers in the United
States, no one should be surprised. Meetings between
Mohamed Atta, who is thought to have been an organizer of
the Sept. 11 attacks, and an Iraqi intelligence official in
Prague in June 2000 may have been an occasion on which
anthrax was provided to Mr. Atta. There have also been
reports of meetings between senior Iraqi intelligence
officials and members of Al Qaeda. 

The possibility of a Russian origin for the anthrax also
needs to be investigated because of the scale of Russia's
past program and the collapse of large portions of its
weapons laboratories. It is not clear what has happened to
the biological materials it made. Criminal groups have
attempted to sell Russian nuclear materials. Could the same
be true of biological materials and bioweapons know-how? 

We need the facts. The politics will then follow. 
Richard
Butler is ambassador in residence at the Council on Foreign
Relations and author of the forthcoming "Fatal Choice:
Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Missile Defense."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/opinion/18BUTL.html?ex=1004380377&ei=1&en=ef4fa58b57cce236



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