Biological Weapons

LONDON -- Imagine that the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France gave up all their nuclear weapons under international treaty. Next, imagine that a rogue nation secretly developed a nuclear arsenal and posed the risk of threatening a nuclear attack. Now imagine that the big powers quietly decided to overlook the situation and continue to live without the capacity to retaliate in kind.Actually, that is what has happened with another weapon of mass destruction, one that could, in the right conditions, kill 100,000 people in a city of 500,000.

Army personnel at Aberdeen Proving Ground are developing methods to detect biological weapons in response to recent threats from North Korea, including a 15-foot-high device that soldiers have dubbed "the Kraken. " North Korea has issued a series of threats in recent weeks, and U.S. officials are monitoring the Korean peninsula, from which Kim Jong-un's government could launch ballistic missiles. While the danger of missiles is more pressing, Army officials said developing better capabilities to detect biological warfare threats has also been a priority for the past six years.

WASHINGTON -- Iraq covered up evidence of a biological weapons program to develop cholera, tuberculosis and the plague that was much larger than previously suspected, U.N. officials disclosed yesterday.In the 1980s, the Iraqi government imported enough material to cultivate 3.3 tons of bacteria, said Rolf Ekeus, chairman of the United Nations Special Commission in charge of Iraqi disarmament.When confronted last week, Iraq claimed that the material was imported for medical use. But when U.N. inspectors asked for the growth media or documentation about it, Iraq claimed that both were destroyed during 1991 uprisings after Operation Desert Storm.

Albert Einstein once said the reason he was able to accomplish so much was because he had "stood on the shoulders of giants" like Newton and Galileo. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist's remark was a reminder how much scientists depend on discoveries made by others. The system depends on the free and unfettered exchange of ideas, which is why the government's effort to restrict publication of research that it says could be used by terrorists has sparked a controversy over how to balance the need for openness against concerns that certain kinds of information might be misused.

UNITED NATIONS -- After four years of denial, the Iraqi government, desperate for the lifting of international sanctions against it, has finally admitted that it developed a powerful, offensive biological weapons program in the years leading to the Persian Gulf war, United Nations officials reported yesterday.But Iraq asserted that it had destroyed all the biological weapons a few months before allied planes began bombing Iraq in January 1991.U.N. officials said they would soon try to verify this claim.

CHICAGO -In 1972, the nations of the world approved a treaty outlawing biological weapons. It was a commendable document with a major omission: It had no enforcement mechanism. A few years ago, the signatories decided they needed to come up with a system to prevent and detect violations. But it turns out they may have had it right the first time. Last week, the Bush administration announced it would not sign a draft protocol intended to police the ban on germ warfare agents. The proposed agreement, said chief U.S. negotiator Donald Mahley, was seriously flawed in two ways: It would not catch violators and it would jeopardize American military and business secrets.

WASHINGTON -- The White House and the Pentagon strongly denied a report from Iraq yesterday that allied warplanes had bombed a baby formula factory near Baghdad, saying that the targeted plant was actually a disguised facility for germ warfare."

LONDON - The arms expert at the center of a dispute about whether the British government doctored its intelligence reports on Iraq's weapons programs to gain public support for going to war was found dead on yesterday morning near his home in Oxfordshire, his wife said. The weapons specialist, Dr. David Kelly, left his home on Thursday afternoon saying he was going for a walk, and never returned, his wife, Janice Kelly, said in a telephone interview on yesterday. Janice Kelly said yesterday that the police had confirmed that the body was her husband's and that the cause of death was suicide.

In the summer of 1763, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the British commander in chief of North America, received disturbing news from the Pennsylvania frontier. Fort Pitt, a key British outpost situated in present-day Pittsburgh, was under siege by Indian tribes. Worse, Amherst learned, a second deadly foe had emerged from within the garrison: smallpox. And that apparently gave Amherst an idea. On July 7, he dipped quill into inkwell and made this suggestion to his commander in the region: "Could it not be contrived," Amherst wrote, "to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians?

WASHINGTON - As the Pentagon prepares for a possible invasion of Iraq, military planners say the most complicated problem they face is the chance that President Saddam Hussein might use chemical or biological weapons against American forces and their allies. That prospect has colored planning for almost every aspect of a possible invasion, from training and supplies to the best location and time of year for an assault, military officials said. The chance of Hussein's firing missiles tipped with chemical or biological warheads at Israel and other U.S. allies has also prompted discussion of destroying his stockpiles or limiting his ability to use them.

A critically important bipartisan commission headed up by former senators Bob Graham and Jim Talent recently and ominously warned that, "A recent study from the intelligence community projected that a one-to-two kilogram release of anthrax spores from a crop duster plane could kill more Americans than died in World War II (over 400,000)." As a follow-up to that sobering news, they reported: "Clean-up and other economic costs could exceed $1.8 trillion." As the Paul Reveres of bioterrorism, Messrs.

The impending closure of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax-laced mailings of 2001 has generated new interest in the question: Are we safer today than we were when anthrax was distributed up and down the Eastern seaboard, killing five people and sickening 17 others? Unfortunately, the answer is probably no - despite our government's best efforts to prevent a future bioterrorist incident. Bioterrorism is like no other national security threat. What makes defending against it so challenging is the blurred line between beneficial research and destructive intent.

Jan. 9 1861 Mississippi seceded from the Union. 2003 U.N. weapons inspectors said there was no "smoking gun" to prove Iraq had nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Sealed in a small steel chamber at the Edgewood area of Aberdeen Proving Ground, Tim Blades drilled a hole in a 1980s-era nerve gas artillery shell recovered in Iraq. Insurgents there used chemical shells at least once in an improvised explosive, and the Army wanted to determine how big a threat similar aging weapons posed. As the drill pierced the metal skin, something unexpected happened. A mix of sarin and cyclosarin, two super-toxic nerve agents, shot out, spraying yellow poisons inside a protective box, which began to leak.

Peter Joseph Stopa, a civilian researcher with the Army who made important scientific and diplomatic contributions to biological defense technologies, died Tuesday at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, three weeks after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. The Freeland resident was 54. Since 1988, Mr. Stopa had worked at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, where he helped develop tools that can detect chemical and biological weapons. He was also a lead liaison between the U.S. and Polish militaries in the two countries' coordination of biological defense efforts.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A group of high-ranking Iraqi officials from the previous regime, including two female biological weapons experts known as Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax, have been released after almost three years in detention, American officials said yesterday. The releases came as violence again struck across the country and as an Islamic militant group released a videotape that it claimed showed the execution of an American hostage kidnapped earlier this month. Dubbed "Dr. Germ" for her involvement in Saddam Hussein's biological weapons, Rihab Taha was one of eight people released, according to the U.S. military.

Sealed in a small steel chamber at the Edgewood area of Aberdeen Proving Ground, Tim Blades drilled a hole in a 1980s-era nerve gas artillery shell recovered in Iraq. Insurgents there used chemical shells at least once in an improvised explosive, and the Army wanted to determine how big a threat similar aging weapons posed. As the drill pierced the metal skin, something unexpected happened. A mix of sarin and cyclosarin, two super-toxic nerve agents, shot out, spraying yellow poisons inside a protective box, which began to leak.

WASHINGTON - Libya, a leading outlaw state of the 1980s, acknowledged last night that it has pursued nuclear, chemical and biological weapons but pledged to dismantle the programs and to admit international inspectors. In a brief televised speech at the White House after Libya's surprise decision was announced, President Bush said Col. Muammar el Kadafi, the Libyan leader, made the pledge after nine months of secret negotiations with U.S. and British diplomats. Bush portrayed Libya's actions as a victory in his hard-line policy toward terrorism and states that seek weapons of mass destruction.

CONFUSED ABOUT the war in Iraq? You're not the only one. More than two years after the fighting started, it's still going on and it's becoming harder and harder to remember what it was all supposed to be about. So today we're offering a Readers' Guide to the Road to War. We turn the clock back to the spring of 2003 and let the people who opened hostilities explain, in their own words, what they were shooting for. Compiled by Will Englund; artwork by KAL. So, why did we have to go to war in Iraq?

WASHINGTON - Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned yesterday that they might not be prepared to vote on John R. Bolton's nomination as ambassador to the United Nations on May 12, as they had agreed to do. In a letter sent yesterday to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asking for more documents, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the committee's ranking Democrat, wrote that when he agreed to the date he believed the administration would...