Chlorine Bombs

It’s a disturbing development in the Iraq insurgency. So far, 2007 has marked the first time al Qaeda terrorists made good on their promise to use chemical weapons on U.S. troops, Iraqi forces…and Iraqi civilians.

Since January, al Qaeda operatives have detonated six vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, or VBIEDs, using chlorine gas. Three were employed last week alone. Though a Marine source in al Anbar – where most of the attacks have taken place – downplays the new tactic, it raises the possibility of U.S. troops having to don their hot, uncomfortable chemical warfare gear once again.

Our friends over at Stratfor have put together a pretty good intel brief on AQI’s new weapon of mass destruction.

From Stratfor:

The use of chlorine in chemical VBIEDs is attractive to militants because the chemical is widely available in Iraq and around the world. The problem, as Iraqi militants are finding, however, is dispersing the chemical with a VBIED while maintaining an effective concentration of the gas…

Regardless of these bombs' effectiveness as mass killers, however, insurgents like them because the immediate chlorine odor incites fear. Witnesses of the Iraqi attacks, for example, reported nasty smells and a white plume of smoke that turned black and blue. Furthermore, these attacks are valuable to insurgents as tests for future operations elsewhere. Whether this method of attack is the fixation of a particular insurgent leader or it represents an emerging doctrine by al Qaeda in Iraq, the attacks will allow the insurgents to gain tactical expertise and learn to construct more effective chemical bombs. The attackers also could be conducting these attacks to gauge security weaknesses or to divert attention from a different location where an operation is planned…

Chemical VBIED attacks are likely to continue in Iraq and to spread as those responsible for them export the knowledge gained throughout the region and beyond. Al Qaeda units in other locations followed the lead of al Qaeda in Iraq as it increased its use of tactics such as employing roadside bombs and conducting beheadings -- and the use of chlorine bombs could be next…

Because chlorine is so common, movement of the chemical cannot be severely restricted. This is especially true in areas where the state already has a weak hold on the security situation. Therefore, Iraqi insurgents are likely to continue refining their technique -- and their allies and sympathizers beyond the state will start to adopt the tactic themselves.

(Gouge:CM)

-- Christian

Low Tech Dirty Bombs Back in the Limelight

In the wake of the chlorine tanker truck bombing in Taji, Iraq today, domestic government agencies are taking another look at how easy it might be for terrorists to wreak stateside havoc. This from the Associated Press:

QUANTICO, Va. - Kirk Yeager makes bombs from the stuff found under kitchen sinks. He does it to help the FBI defend against what officials say is the next frontier for terrorists in the United States.

Ten years ago, peroxide-based bombs were mostly the work of young pranksters. But the easy-to-make yet deadly chemical cocktails were embraced in the late 1990s by Palestinian militants and suicide bombers bent on killing large groups of people.

Now, Yeager says, the "Mother of Satan" explosives are considered the most likely weapon that terrorists will use against the U.S., more so than a nuclear or radiological "dirty" bomb.

"Every serious terrorist group knows about them and knows how to make them," Yeager said. The forensic scientist heads the explosives unit at the FBI's laboratory in Quantico, Va., about 35 miles south of Washington.

"Bad guys are bombers. You don't have to have the level of sophistication to make a bomb that you need to get nuclear materials," Yeager said.

The bombs are made by mixing chemicals that are used in common household items, including hydrogen peroxide and paint thinner, and easily found at drug stores or hardware stores. Experts know them as TATP, short for triacetone triperoxide, and HMTD, or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine.

Recent cases of explosions or thwarted attacks with TATP or HMTD in the U.S. include:

-Millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam. He was carrying HMTD among the 124 pounds of explosives in the trunk of his car when he was arrested near the U.S.-Canadian border in December 1999.

-Richard Reid. The would-be British shoe bomber tried unsuccessfully to detonate 8 ounces of TATP hidden in his high-top sneaker during a Paris-to-Miami flight in 2001.

-University of Oklahoma suicide bomber Joel Henry Hinrichs III. He used TATP to blow himself up near a packed football stadium in October 2005.

-College student Matthew Rugo in Texas City, Texas. He was killed last July when a plastic storage container of TATP that was mixed in his apartment exploded. The FBI has not found any connection in the case to international terrorist groups, but the investigation continues.

Additionally, counterterrorist authorities say terrorists planned to mix a solution similar to TATP in last summer's thwarted attacks on as many as 10 London-to-U.S. flights - leading to the crackdown on bringing liquids aboard airlines.

Also, ecoterrorists and animal rights extremist groups such as Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front are believed by authorities to use peroxide-based explosives.

Yeager, 41, who helps the FBI solve bombing cases by investigating the crime scene debris, is the only U.S. official who makes TATP and similar explosives in mass quantities.

His interest in bomb-making began at Cornell University, where he earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry. He honed his skills at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, one of the nation's top centers for explosives research and testing.

Yeager's brews are used for testing and training police officers and bomb-sniffing dogs. Until recently, authorities knew little about peroxide-based bombs because they are too volatile to handle casually. Moreover, TATP in particular is hard for dogs to detect.

Over the past year, the FBI and Transportation Security Administration have trained dog teams to sniff out the chemical cocktails at 75 airports and on subway, train and bus systems in 13 cities. The government pays up to $50,000 to train each of the 420 teams currently in action.

"It's a threat that's not here right now, but we see it coming," said Dave Kontny, director of TSA's national explosives detection canine teams. "So we're better off to have these teams."

John Rollins, a counterterrorism expert at Congressional Research Service and former U.S. intelligence official, said TATP and other varieties of peroxide-based bombs are most likely to show up in the hands of homegrown extremists and other splinter sympathizers of international terrorist groups.

The larger and centrally organized groups, such as al-Qaida, are more interested in "big bang" weapons that he said would cause widespread deaths and economic losses.

But aspiring terrorists, Rollins said, "would lean toward this because it's so readily available, it's so hard to detect."

"It certainly would be enough of a bang to draw attention to their cause, and shake the foundations in the short term of society's belief that the government can protect the United States," Rollins said.

-- Ward

Researching Tomorrow's Chem-Bio Defense

This is part three of my investigation of the DOD Chemical Biological Defense Program (CBDP) budget for FY2008. Today, we invade the lair of the research and development community. Sixty-one percent of the R&D budget for next year ($610 million) is in budget activities 6.1 through 6.3, what is called science and technology or the tech base. Not much happens in here other than applied research into potential technologies that might develop into a practical application - someday. And that pays for a lot of scientists' salaries. The other 39 percent is advanced development (about $380 million), budget activities 6.4 and 6.5. These funds are used to prove that prototypes work and that a given project is ready for manufacture and fielding.

I'm going to talk about the advanced development funds first, because it's easier to explain. The medics will develop biological vaccines to counter plague and botulinum toxin ($40 million and $19 million respectively). We might see a fielded plague vaccine in 2010 - maybe. Don't count on a bot tox vaccine prior to 2015. Nearly $70 million is going to the Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative (TMTI). Although the project is supposed to be focused on far future "silver bullets" for BW threats, for some reason, DOD will start spending advanced development funds next year. On what, I have no idea, since the investigational part has barely started in the tech base. I'm not sure DOD knows what they'll be doing either - it's been more of a "here, take this $2 billion and put it to work with industry" kind of affair. Ready, fire, aim.

Medical chemical research funding is about one fourth of that of med bio research funding. The $36 million is being split nearly equally on an advanced anticonvulsant system, a nerve agent bioscavenger, and an improved nerve agent treatment system. There's about $7 million being spent at AFRRI for medical radiological countermeasures. This is a new area - previous to 2007, the CBDP really didn't want to do med rad countermeasures. Then Dale Klein (from DOE) decided that the CBDP might want to think about being a CBRN Defense Program. Hasn't completely happened yet, in part because the Air Force and Navy really don't want to do joint radiological programs, and there is so much medical radiological research already going on outside of the program.

The tech base for medical accounts for 42 percent of the R&D budget. There's nearly $250 million being spent in the TMTI program, $85.7 million spent on biological defense research, and $62 million being spent on chemical defense research. Don't ask me what they spend it on. Lots of drug discovery efforts, studies on how things work in the body, potential pre- and post-treatment therapies. I'm not a medical guy, and tech base is frankly a lot of small, high risk projects, many of which aren't successful. It's not DARPA-like, but it's not uncommon to see a project go for 3-4 years before being terminated if it isn't leading anywhere.

On the non-medical side, about 13 percent of the R&D funds goes to advanced development projects. Detection projects make up 4.5 percent ($45 million) of the R&D funds. In biodetection, most funds are going to the development of critical reagents for biological detection ($10 million) and development of a tactical (man-portable) biological agent detector ($3 million). I'm not enamored of a Joint Biological Tactical Detector System (JBTDS). The warfighters want a bio equivalent to the automatic chemical detectors, refusing to listen to the analysts quietly pointing out that chemical hazards are somewhat different acting than biological hazards. The requirements guys have ignored the challenge of managing the analysis of thousands of liquid samples every week if this system were to be fielded.

On the chemical detection side, DOD is spending $12 million on continued R&D for the Joint Chemical Agent Detector (yes, even as it is being fielded, there's still significant R&D tweaking going on). About the same is being spent on the joint reconnaissance systems, probably tests and evaluations. A few million being spent on the agent water monitor system. There's really not a lot of new R&D being spent in CB detection, largely in part that we've got good systems out there, and there are few potential future technologies to reach out toward.

Individual protection R&D, funded at $12.5 million, is addressing the Joint Service Aircrew Mask, probably for final testing and approval prior to production. No R&D going to new suits or masks for the first time in a while, and is not expected for several years more (other than in the tech base). In part this is because (again) we have pretty good suits and masks, and there are no great leaps forward in this area. Also, the CBDP is being lazy and not really searching for what ought to be the next big idea in individual protection. We're stuck with hot suits and rubber masks. If something comes up, they'll move the money.

Collective protection has just one R&D project, the Joint Expeditionary Collective Protection project. This effort will field mobile field shelters and expedient shelters replacing... well, there is nothing out there right now for troops other than medics. There's $14 million going to that project, which is really a realigned effort from a former CP shelter project that crashed and burned when the users wouldn't back off their unrealistic demands on technology and engineering (we want it much smaller, with air conditioning, easy to transport... whine, whine). So we're trying again, and maybe we'll see some shelters in 3-4 years.

Decontamination projects have a big $9 million going to three sensitive decontamination projects: the sensitive equipment decon system, a platform interior decon system, and a human remains decon system. As I mentioned yesterday, the sensitive equipment decon project may be ready in 2010, and the interior decon (for inside vehicles) won't be ready prior to 2012. Right now, the only option to handle contaminated electronic equipment is to junk it. The last project, human remains decon, is a "special demand" by the medics and quartermasters. OSD wants to have the capability to decon contaminated corpses in such a manner that the bodies can 1) come home to Mom and Dad, and 2) be viewed in an open casket funeral. Really unreasonable demands, considering the bodies were formerly contaminated with CB warfare agents, but who ever said OSD leadership was reasonable? So the CBDP will buy some commercial technology and test it, field it in an effort to shut them up.

Information systems are actually getting the most R&D funds (after medical) at $48 million (nearly 5% of the R&D budget), going to the three projects mentioned yesterday - JEM, JOEF, and JWARN. The great thing about software projects is that they can always spend R&D funds to tweak their products, even after they've been fielded (as Microsoft can tell us). Nothing really sexy - it's the usual stuff. Improve the accuracy of how models demonstrate how CB hazards act in the real world, display the information on military communication systems, and include more medical and environmental data in the models. The tough part is, as ever, integrating CB hazard data into battlefield data without stalling communications.

Tech base for the nonmedical efforts are funded at $186 million - about half that of medical tech base (thanks to TMTI). I don't get much details from the tech base - again, it pays for 3-4 year long science projects that investigate various ways to improve the above capabilities. Standoff and point detection science gets the most (more than $40 million in 2008), with information systems getting $30 million and protection (individual and collective) getting $25 million. Decon sciences get less than $10 million, because there aren't a lot of new technologies there. Maybe $30 million for various science research projects aimed at finding out more about threat agents and other innovative research efforts.

The test and evaluation money ($67 million, a bit under 7 percent of the advanced R&D) is just going to building capabilities (buying equipment, outfitting buildings) to modernize the DOD's ability to... test and evaluate CB defense equipment (duh). Lots of money for Dugway, Edgewood, and a few other small T&E sites - special equipment, development of test methods, etc etc. Yawn. Has to be done, I guess, to ensure the equipment works as advertised.

That's about it. Not really sexy like the Missile Defense Agency. But then again, they have a few billion - several billion actually - more than the CBDP does. Again, more information on these R&D projects can be found in the OSD annual report to Congress on CB defense.

-- Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

Buying Next Year's Chem-Bio Gear

Following up yesterday's post on the new budget, let's see what chem-bio defense equipment the Defense Department is planning to buy. The top line items include (unsurprisingly) CB detection gear, individual protection equipment, and vaccines. About 36 percent of procurement dollars are going to buy specialized CB defense vehicles for the Army and CB detectors for the services. Nearly 24 percent is going to individual protective equipment - mostly masks and suits. The rest is seven percent for collective protection systems, five percent for decon systems, less than three percent for information systems, and nine percent for biological vaccines. Last, 16 percent for installation protection equipment, largely paying for hazmat gear and exercises.

The CB Defense Program (CBDP) is buying 28 M31E2 Biological Integrated Detection System (BIDS) for the Army next year, each costing about $3.4 million. These feature the Joint Biological Point Detection System (JBPDS) as the heart of the system. Most of these BIDS platoons were justified as homeland security capabilities, and we're going to be buying them for several more years. The Navy's getting eleven JBPDS for their ships, for about $330,000 each. DOD will be buying 25,000 biological assay tickets at $50 a pop as the first phase of its Joint CBR Agent Water Monitor.  All the rest of biodetection funds is in R&D (tomorrow).

On the chemical side, the Army will get 13 Strykers modified with point and standoff chemical detectors (the Joint Service Lightweight Standoff Chemical Agent Detector) and other equipment (the vehicle designated as the NBC Recon Vehicle). Each one cost $7-8 million each, over twice what the older M93A1 NBCRS "Fox" cost (which it is replacing). We're buying nearly 7000 Joint Chemical Agent Detectors, and more each year through the POM at about $4000 each. The CBDP spent years and more than $100 million developing BAE's ChemSentry to be the JCAD before they gave up and went to Smith Detection's Lightweight Chemical Detector as the candidate. Finally, the Joint "Light" NBC Recon System (it's actually very heavy) is finally rolling out after a four-year delay. Seven Heavy HMMWVs and six LAVs will have the new equipment. Yes, it's duplicative of the Stryker NBCRV but the Strykers can get built faster.

In individual protective equipment, lots of masks - 7122 Joint Service Aircrew Masks (JSAM) costing about $3000 each, and 18,248 disposable Joint Service Chemical Environment Survivability Mask (JSCESM)costing $130 each. The JSAM are for all fixed wing pilots, while the Air Force decided that the program needed to buy them a second mask (instead of using O&M funds as it should). The main program buy is 176,007 Joint Service General Purpose Masks (JSGPM), which will replace both the M40 and the older MCU2/P masks at a cost of $170 each. Overall, there isn't a large improvement in capability, but it is slightly better than the two predecessor masks and it will offer one standard mask for all ground combatants.

Now the CBDP isn't supposed to buy consumable items, but the services bullied OSD into ignoring the public law and buying them lots of JSLIST protective suits, boots and gloves ($39 million worth) and Joint Protective Aircrew Ensembles (JPACE). The ground suits cost about $250 a pop, while the aviator version cost twice that. That's because aviators have to look good in protective suits, and they need pockets for their pens and sunglasses. In the vaccine area, the CBDP is procuring 1.43 million anthrax vaccine doses at about $26 each and 1.25 million smallpox vaccine doses at about $4 each. In a few years, DoD will be buying plague vaccine as well. It's starting to get really expensive to buy these doses for the total force every year, and some are suggesting DOD procure vaccine doses for military dependents as well.

In the information systems, there are three products - Joint Effects Model (hazard prediction), Joint Warning and Reporting Network (the communication backbone), and Joint Operational Effects Federation (for data management). Most of the procurement funds are going to make CDs to send the first products out to the field. It's amazingly small amounts of money ($14 million across all three products) for a "network-centric" military. Bottom line, the old-time CBDP people still focus on detectors and protective suits as the favored children over hazard prediction models.

The CBDP is continuing to buy Karcher decon systems as its Joint Service Transportable Decon System (Small Scale) - 338 systems at $24,ooo each, plus DF200 decontaminants. After the Army's government-produced system M21/M22 Modular Decon System wasn't accepted (and not deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom), it turned to industry for the solution. Again. In 2009, we might see the first buys of the Joint Service Sensitive Equipment Decon System - 52 systems at $80,000 a pop. These systems are way, way overdue, but critical if we're ever to clean up after a CB warfare event.

The medics wanted collective protection for their field hospitals and forward aid stations, so they're getting the Chemical Protective Deployable Medical System (CP DEPMEDS) for about $1.5 million each. The CB Protective System (CBPS), which is installed in medical HMMWVs, costs about $1.2 million each - we're getting 21 systems in 2008. The Navy convinced OSD to give it money back in the late 1990s to install collective protection systems in its amphibious ships and hospital ships. Next year, the USS Makin Island will get its collective protection for only $10.5 million. The Navy keeps getting money for this purpose (for which it ought to be paying for itself) through FY 2009. No one else seems to value collective protection for fixed and semi-permenant sites, strangely enough.

I'm going on too long, but let me just note the PM Guardian's fine efforts for installation protection. For the past year (and this year going through next year), the program's been buying gear for the installation response teams. Each base gets eight DFU-200 air samplers, two chemical point detectors, three chemical agent monitors, six radiation detectors, and assorted other gear. In 2006, 50 bases received this gear. In 2007 they plan to drop this at 17 sites, and in 2008, at 15 sites more. So in 2008, we're going to see 15 sites get a limited amount of CB defense gear, some comm connectivity, and exercises for $86.4 million. Read the description in the P-forms, and you'd never know what an insufficient capability is actually being provided. This isn't a protection effort, it's augmenting the response capability.

Hell of a program. But no one said that passive defense was at the top of any priority lists. "Combating WMD" means air and missile defense, special operations, and interdiction missions. My personal observation - field grade officers are making poor procurement decisions to which the general/flag officers pay little attention, because it benefits their respective services to do so (and I include the Army in this). They're not going to change until there's an actual attack and people die from CB weapons, and that's the real shame of it all.

-- Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

Inside the Pentagon's Chem-Bio Budget

The Defense Department's chem-bio defense budget (CBDP) only accounts for less than one percent of what the U.S. military spends. But there's still a lot to pore over. I thought that I would give an overview today, talk about procurement tomorrow, and talk about RDT&E on Thursday. (Go to the Defense Department Comptroller's web site for fiscal year 2008 and access the procurement and RDT&E programs, to find the appropriate documents.)

Overall, the DoD CBDP will obligate $1.63 billion dollars in FY 2008 against 40-odd acquisition projects and other efforts. That's a bit less than one percent of the DoD modernization budget for that year. Breaking it down, the CBDP will spend:

• $609.6 million for science and technology (37.4 percent)

• $381.9 million for advanced research and development (23.5 percent)

• $543.8 million for procurement (33.4 percent)

• $93.6 million for management functions (5.7 percent)

The services were a bit snippy about this budget because of the spending pattern - R&D spending is twice that of procurement, which means they don't get as many toys. It's a trend that continues through the 2008-2013 Program Objective Memorandum (POM), which is the Pentagon's five year spending plan. Part of this is because of Rumsfeld's direction to "assume risk in the short term" in order to invest more in out-year future tech. The other part is because most, if not all, of the CB defense projects (detection in particular) have slipped their fielding dates by several years (for several reasons, most involving poor management), forcing a move of funds into R&D (lest they be taken away).

Medical biological countermeasures is the obvious favorite in the program this year (see breakout of funds by area here). You can thank the DOD vaccine program (anthrax and smallpox vaccine buys) and the Transformational Medical Technologies Initiative (TMTI) for that. The vaccine program is spending about $48 million in 2008, while TMTI is spending $248 million in tech base and $69 million in advanced R&D. Both programs' costs will continue to climb through 2013. The TMTI is the latest "good idea" from OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense], where DoD is basically sending a hell of a lot of money to industry to find "silver bullets" - a therapeutic that will address a broad range of BW threats, instead of a "single vaccine-single disease" approach.

This ambitious project is the latest Holy Grail for CBDP. In the late 1990s, the program promised free protective suits and vaccines for everyone. Then it was stand-off biological detection in 2000-2001. In 2002, OSD decided that every military base should have CB defense gear for antiterrorism, and threw a billion dollars at that problem. Now it's the terrorist BW threat, combined with the worry of "genetically engineered" BW agents, that drives OSD's "good idea" effort. Funny as in tragic. The installation protection effort started in 2004 (PM Guardian) got half its funds taken to kick-start TMTI, had to be reorganized, and is trying to get back on track. More on PM Guardian's failures later.

We're not going to see anything from TMTI for several years though. First, as a warning shot, Congress took $90 million of TMTI money from the DOD CBDP FY07 budget because there was no business plan other than "throw money at industry." Now a plan has been put together, and they're hiring lots of managers. But as with all medical research projects, and this one in particular, there's not going to be a final product ready for FDA approval for six to ten years, if we're lucky. But it's really, really important! To OSD leadership, not the warfighter, mind you.

In general, the DOD CBDP priorities run like this - chem-bio detection, protective suits and masks, and medical biological countermeasures. The funds left over go to CB defense information systems, medical chemical countermeasures, collective protection systems and decontamination systems. This has been pretty much the same profile for both R&D and procurement since 1995, which is funny since both Gulf Wars (1991 and 2003) showed that our forces really have no effective CB defense information systems, collective protection, or decon capability for most of our operational units or fixed sites.

Test and evaluation efforts have recently been called out in a separate budget line. Nearly $67 million is going to projects to modernize test and evaluation capabilities at Dugway Proving Ground, Edgewood, Dahlgren, and other test sites. The aging test infrastructure was one reason why new CB defense equipment has been delayed. Hard to tell when - or if - this funding is going to get the projects back on schedule. Another $54 million in management funds goes to Dugway every year to pay for salaries and other T&E needs. Past CBDP management funds were kept down to 4 to 4.5 percent of the total program costs, but that's bounced up to 5.8 percent (and rising) due to OSD deciding it's going to spend more on studies and upgrading service laboratories. This management slice also doesn't reflect the R&D funds spent at DTRA CB and the Joint Program Executive Office on managing projects directly.

More information can be found at the OSD office site in its annual report to Congress on CB defense.

UPDATE 02/14/07: Analysis from Dick Destiny.

-- Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

BioShield Has BioFailed

The Washington Post has this article on the BioShield program. It's a bit of a scorecard on the four-year old program, and the score doesn't look good for homeland security. Let's take a look, agent by agent.

• Old Anthrax Treatment: "As the result of an effort that began before BioShield, there are enough antibiotics in the national stockpile to treat 40 million people for more than 60 days, HHS says. Stockpiles also include 9 million doses of an anthrax vaccine produced by Emergent BioSolutions of Gaithersburg, with another 1 million to be delivered by the first quarter of this year." You might know "Emergent BioSolutions" better as BioPort - the controversial supplier of anthrax vaccine to the Defense Department.

• New Anthrax Treatment: "The agency is struggling to develop a more modern anthrax vaccine that could be administered in fewer doses and with fewer side effects. In 2004, the agency tapped a small California firm, VaxGen, for an $877 million contract to deliver 75 million doses of an anthrax vaccine. VaxGen encountered delays and technical problems, and HHS canceled the contract in December after the firm failed to begin human testing on time." VaxGen just laid off half its force and its CEO resigned.

• Botulinum Antitoxin: "Cangene has begun delivering the first of 200,000 doses of an antitoxin, which would have to be delivered shortly after patients show symptoms to counteract the effects of the toxin. There are currently no plans to pursue a vaccine, according to HHS." Bot tox is not really a mass casualty agent, more of an assassination tool. Not sure the victims will know what they have prior to... ah, dying. Not sure why this is even in the stockpile.

• Smallpox: "There is a stockpile of more than 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine, enough for everyone in the United States, according to HHS. That effort began before BioShield." Good news - lots of vaccine. Bad news - this is the old smallpox vaccine, which has odds on killing people who take it. No work for a new smallpox vaccine is underway.

• Potassium Iodide: "Enough potassium iodide to treat 1 million people is already in the national stockpile, according to HHS. Potassium iodide doesn't treat most aspects of radiation exposure, but scientists believe it can protect the thyroid gland from cancer in such an attack." Great! Now we don't have to worry about stunted growth! Does nothing for the rest of your irradiated body, though.

• Plague and Ebola: "Despite President Bush's mention of plague and Ebola in his State of the Union speech, the government has yet to contract with any company to produce a defense. HHS officials say the implementation plan to be issued in the next few months will include a roadmap to address both threats. Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health is pursuing research on vaccines for both. NIH has completed the first phase of human testing for the Ebola version and is seeking volunteers for the second, according to an NIH official, who said it would be several years before it could be stockpiled."

So how's your scorecard look? Four years ago, President Bush announced BioShield as key initiative of the "Biodefense Strategy for the 21st Century." It took two years just to get the legislative language into shape. Four years later, we're still not much better than we were before 9/11. The administration's homeland security policy for medical biological countermeasures has failed.

-- Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

UPDATE: I failed to consider the British company Acambis work on a new, safer smallpox vaccine. It's in an IND status, not approved for general non-emergency use. I don't think that the R&D work is being funded through BioShield, however. They've been working on the vaccine for several years, with a large international customer base in mind.

Pharma Hearts Big BARDA

And who wouldn't love a seven-foot Amazonian woman leading the Female Furies to save the day? Oh, we're not talking about the DC comics book character "Big BARDA"? It's also the name of a new Department of Health and Human Service's (DHHS) effort? Well, we can talk about that, too.

Last Thursday, the Senate approved legislation within the "Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act" (S. 3678) to create a Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA). This particular legislation has been in the works for about two years as Congress has tried to address industry gripes about Project BioShield, the DHHS effort intended to fastrack industry's development and fielding of medical countermeasures used in the response to a terrorist CBRN incident.

The biggest challenge to the U.S. government has been to encourage industry to make drugs that may never be used, and if given out in large quantities during an emergency, may be misused or abused by the general public and/or panicky emergency responders. Big Pharma took a look at the risks, the liability insurance needed, and the profit margin, and said "no thanks, we'll stick to curing male impotence issues." However, little brother Pharma (the small start-up labs struggling to break out) said "give us an indemnification agreement against future liability suits and make it worth our while and we'll talk." In short, that's what BARDA's role will be.

The legislation is much more pretty-sounding. It says the DHHS Secretary will “coordinate the acceleration of countermeasure and product advanced research and development” by:

- facilitating collaboration between DHHS and other agencies, industry, academia, and other persons, with respect to such advanced research and development;
- promoting countermeasure and product advanced research and development;
- facilitating contacts between interested persons and the offices or employees authorized by the Secretary to advise such persons regarding requirements under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act; and
- promoting innovation to reduce the time and cost of countermeasure and product advanced research and development

The legislation also authorizes BARDA to execute a $1 billion budget, and it limits any disclosure of “specific technical data or scientific information that is created or obtained during the countermeasure and product advanced research and development carried out under subsection (c) that reveals significant and not otherwise publicly known vulnerabilities of existing medical or public health defense against biological, chemical, nuclear, or radiological threats.” That means FOIA or FACA requests would not apply to BARDA working groups or the National Biodefense Science Board.

That part is a little controversial, and was one of the main reasons why it's taken Congress two years to actually try to improve Project BioShield. DHHS has awarded a few procurement contracts for anthrax vaccines, a botulinum toxin antiviral, and potassium iodide, but not much else. This legislation will enable BARDA to "help" industry through the long, expensive process of making other vaccines, ones that probably won't have too much use outside of emergency response to the very low probability of bioterrorism incidents. Needless to say, industry loves this idea and can't wait for the House to agree to the words and print this baby into law.

Passage by the U.S. Senate of this bill, which includes critical BARDA provisions and provisions to reauthorize bioterrorism grants, is an important and necessary step toward improving America's defenses against bioterrorism and pandemic diseases.

This legislation recognizes that the 'Valley of Death' remains a barrier to effective countermeasure product development, and authorizes the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) within the Department of Health and Human Services. Through BARDA, contracts and grants for advanced research and development will be made to companies working on products to protect the American people. The bill also contains important contract reforms that improve upon the advances made under Project BioShield, by allowing, for example, milestone payments and surge capacity provisions to improve the viability and sustainability of biodefense product development and manufacture.

Significantly, the Senate-passed bill contains strong funding levels and important provisions to permit competing companies to cooperatively respond to government-declared emergencies without violating antitrust laws.

The "Valley of Death" refers to the time period between industry's drug development and the FDA's approval of the drug. The current BioShield legislation doesn't award any federal funds until the industry firm is producing the actual approved drug, and the small pharma firms just don't have the investments to make it that long. Thus, like a superhero racing to the rescue, comes Big BARDA!

- Jason Sigger

Real Korea Worry: Chem-Bio

North Korea's newly-tested nuke is bad news, for sure. But the bigger worry, says Popular Mechanics is the "huge arsenal of mass casualty weapons" that Kim & Co. have been assembling for 45 years: biological and chemical arms.

While it would be foolish not to be gravely concerned about North Korea's purported development of an offensive nuclear capability, the actual threat for the foreseeable future is, arguably, minimal. North Korea's threadbare economy (it has a GDP of $40 billion - compare that to California's gross state product on $1.55 trillion per year) is incapable of maintaining an effective nuclear weapons program. Its nuclear science is at best second rate and, certainly, is second hand.

In contrast, as one North Korea expert explained to me, CBW is mass destruction on the cheap. "Biological and chemical weapons are very inexpensive, many, many times cheaper than nuclear." Another expert gave this grim assessment: "The use of anthrax is a distinct possibility for this nation [North Korea]..."

The consensus among weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts, academics and others I have interviewed—–which is backed up by the available open source material—-is that North Korea has developed anthrax, plague and botulism toxin as weapons and has extensively researched at least six other germs including smallpox and typhoid. It is also believed to have 5,000 tons or more of mustard gas, sarin nerve agent and phosgene (a choking gas). The Center for Nonproliferation Studies says North Korea ranks "amongst the largest possessors of chemical weaponry in the world." South Korea's military estimates half of North's long-range missiles and 30 percent of its artillery are CBW capable...

Yet the West's myopic obsession with North Korea's nuclear efforts has allowed this far more real and equally lethal threat to escape into the shadows: a WMD program, backed by in excess of 13,000 specially trained troops, capable of devastating its southern neighbor, attacking U.S. troops in Asia and disrupting the regional economy in ways that could see the U.S. and other western nations plunged into crisis.

Yes, the new [United Nations] resolution 1718(2006) includes a reference to biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, but only as an afterthought, and the resolution exists only because of the nukes and their perceived threat. Unfortunately, in this case, as with others, the world is overly focused on a potential retina-searing nuclear detonation, without properly appreciating the very clear-and-present CBW killer that exists just a virtual button's push away from Kim Jong Il's perfectly manicured fingernails.

If the whole thing sounds a little hysterical to you, chem-bio guru Jason Sigger says: get real. The story is "100 percent right in regards to N. Korea. And you can extend that argument to China, Iran, Syria, Israel, Pakistan, and India, and potentially in the near future (because of Iran), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others."

Seriously, I see this all the time in the "combating WMD" community. The arms control and counterproliferation people talk "WMD" but the subtext is "nuke." Even the majority of the consequence management tasks are now "dirty bomb" or "improvised nuclear device" scenarios... [the] mentality is [that] nukes are the only thing that can drastically affect US military power in any region of the world.

But there are other threats, too.

BioShield: Bad News

This story about "Project BioShield," the government's botched effort to build up a vaccine supply against anthrax and other bioterror threats, is a nice wrap-up of one of the administration's most troubled homeland security efforts (and that's saying a lot). But the story also kind of misses, or at least sidesteps, the point.

Since it was introduced in 2003, the core of the BioShield program has been a slow-motion trainwreck. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to get this new supply of vaccine -- with few results to show for it.

But the real tragedy may be in the billions of research dollars BioShield is twisting around. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is now spending "$1.7 billion on biodefense -- up from just $42 million in 2001 -- out of a $4.3 billion budget," Time noted earlier in the year. That's to fight bioagents which are really, really hard to turn into weapons -- and even when they are weaponized, don't kill all that many. Remember the 2001 anthrax attack? Five people dead. "Compare that to a real biological killer, like tuberculosis," I suggested in a 2003 Tech Central Station article.

It ends the life of more than 2 million people every year. But the federal government is "luring researchers away" from scientific research into TB and other infections of mass destruction, notes... the Federation of American Scientists.

UCLA's Dr. Marcus Howritz was "on the cusp of real progress" in developing a better TB vaccine... Now he's been diverted into working on a barely-lethal biological agent.

Nancy Connell, who heads a Pentagon-funded bio-defense lab in Newark, NJ, doesn't think a biological strike is all that likely. But she takes grants to study smallpox and anthrax, because she can use the same research funds to work on flu and TB, which "actually do kill people," she notes.

But the redirection of resources may not be the worst part. It's where all this semi-questionable research is happening that's truly spooky. The government is funding the construction of a bazillion new "hot zone" labs, packed with the deadliest of biothreats. And it's these labs that are the most likely sources of an outbreak. Because safety at these places ain't exactly iron-clad. Three Boston University lab workers were infected with tularemia, or rabbit fever, back in January, 2005. Nine months later, plague-ridden mice escaped from Connell's lab in New Jersey. Thanks, BioShield.

Iraq's Biowar Labs: Mystery Solved?

Okay, just when you thought that the whole Curveball-Iraqi biological weapons story couldn't get any weirder, it does. Milton Leitenberg of the Center for International Security Studies has provided me with the exclusive third (and last) part of the story behind the story of the alleged Iraqi mobile biological warfare labs. In Part 1, he revealed that in 2001 the U.S. government had fabricated a "mobile BW lab" for the purposes of training SOCOM operatives on how to identify and exploit an adversary's BW production facility. In Part 2, Leitenberg discusses how a U.S. contractor developed the now infamous graphics of an Iraqi mobile BW lab - not based on any existing mobile BW lab or any hard intel from Curveball, but rather based on "the processes he [Curveball] described," which were "assessed by an independent laboratory as workable engineering designs."

In Part 3, Leitenberg completes the full riddle inside the enigma within a mystery. It may be that we can trace back the idea of a mobile BW laboratory to Scott Ritter during his tour of duty in Iraq in 1998 with UNSCOM. Ritter was trying to obtain information from the Iraqi National Congress, specifically on Iraq's intelligence agencies and WMD program. In 1998, he talked to Ahmed Chalabi about his suspicion that Saddam may have had mobile chemical or biological weapons labs, which would explain the UNSCOM's lack of success in finding any evidence. In late 1999-2000, Curveball - the brother of a top lieutenant to Ahmed Chalabi - starts talking to the German intelligence about mobile Iraqi BW labs, who forwards this information to the CIA. At the same time, Chalabi is talking to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith about the danger of Iraq's "WMD program."

So here we have a rumor started by a former U.S. marine supporting a UN inspection team, where he passes the idea to Chalabi, who passes it to German intel and U.S. defense officials, both of whom pass the story to the CIA. The agency develops graphics drawn by a U.S. contractor based on Curveball's story and might have known of the mock-up BW lab built for SOCOM, both of which "confirms" the concept that Iraqi mobile BW labs exist, which leads to SecState Powell's speech at the UN in February 2003 and the media's echo chamber agreeing with the president that there's enough evidence to go to war against Iraq.

And as a bonus at the end of this short paper, Leitenberg reveals that Scott Ritter was pulled into a British intelligence op called "Operation Mass Appeal" run by MI6 in 1997. The purpose of "Operation Mass Appeal" was to leak weak and not "actionable" data about Iraq's WMD program to the media, who would fall upon it like hungry wolves and keep alive the public impression that Saddam had an active WMD program, despite the lack of official government endorsement. Leitenberg notes that the disinformation operation functioned similar to the DOD Office of Special Plans, but didn't involve disinformation regarding the Iraqi mobile BW production vehicles.

Call George Clooney. I've got his next movie plot all ready.

-- Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

It's Still Not Chemical Warfare - Israeli Edition

Back in November, a good-sized chunk of the press and blogosphere got all a-twitter about the American use of "chemical weapons" -- never mind that the munitions the Army used were anything but.

Now, we've got ourselves a new variation on the argument. This one comes from Wayne Madsen, who blogged his belief that Israeli military forces are using a dual-purpose fuel-air explosive/chemical munition in Lebanon (see his entry on July 23). Seems he's sold on the fact that one man can pick up the munition, clearly demonstrating that it is filled with a gas and not a liquid (plus some gruesome corpse photos).

The claim was all too easy to shoot down on general chem warfare principles. But it has been joined by other news sources (see here, here, and here). Most of the reports mistakenly believe that these are phosphorus munitions, similar to the stories of U.S. forces' use in Fallujah, mostly because of the blackened nature of the casualties' skin. Sadly, these reports are mistaken; the munitions aren't even phosphorus-filled.

The Defense Update has the story on this military system. It is indeed a minefield breaching system, called "Carpet," currently in use by the Israeli army and will be fielded with the French army next year. Not much imagination as to the name and its function: the armored vehicle that is the weapon platform can fire up to 20 rockets in a rapid squence for minefield breaching. The force of the FAE blast clears nearly all mines, regardless of terrain, foliage or man-made obstacles.

Pre-programmed for automatic, semi-automatic or manual operation, Carpet is operated remotely from inside the vehicle’s compartment, under cover from enemy fire. The system can also be reloaded rapidly in the forward area. Unlike the Vipers, firing line charges across the minefields, Carpet rockets contain only liquid fuel which is flammable but not explosive in regular operating conditions. Therefore, if Carpet rockets are hit in their canisters, they do not cause any danger to the system, vehicle or nearby troops.

Fully loaded, the Carpet launcher weighs only 3.5 tons. It can carry up to 20 x 265 mm rockets, each weighing 46 kg. Fully functional training rockets can also be fired with the system for training exercises, safely simulating the entire operation (without fuel-air explosion). The system can be towed, mounted on the rear of the armored fighting vehicle (as shown on the IDF Puma AFV at EuroSatory 2002) or installed inside an APC. The IDF used the Carpet during the war in Lebanon, neutralizing and clearing Hezbollah strongholds near the Israeli- Lebanese border. (See video here)

Only one newspaper I found - South Africa's Star - correctly identified the one potential violation of the international law banning the use of incendiaries against noncombatants, rather than the more popular accusation that Israel was using "chemical weapons" in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (to which Israel isn't a party, anyway). Comment from the Israeli army? "We use only weapons and ammunition which will best hit our targets and cause least collateral damage," said army spokesman Captain Jacob Dallal. Yep. FAEs are very powerful conventional weapons, but they aren't toxic chemical weapons.

-- Jason Sigger, Armchair Generalist

Subway Attack "Mostly Psychological"

In the Time article about the aborted attack on New York's subways, construction of Al-Qaeda's chemical bomb -- which supposedly combines sodium cyanide and hydrochloric acid -- is called "the equivalent of splitting the atom."

Uh, not really, experts are answering.

Globalsecurity.org's George Smith says that shows an "uneasy grasp of the science."

The reaction of hydrochloric acid, a common reagent... and sodium cyanide is... is not equivalent to splitting the atom... It indicates someone who was not a scientist or perhaps knowledgeable on the fine details, if there are any.

"This type of attack, whether the assailant realizes it or not, is going to be mostly psychological," an ordnance specialist adds.

Simply allowing the chemicals to intermingle without efficiently mixing them will not produce an effective chemical weapon. Even if it does, by some stroke of luck, emit a substantial amount of HCN, immediately leaving the exposed area and getting fresh air will limit its effects. HCN has never really been used as a weapon because of this; its only documented use was by the Nazis during WWII in their genocide chambers.

There is the possibility that a couple people may have an especially bad reaction and succumb to the effects of the chemical (as happened in Japan's subway system a couple years ago). Overall, the fear and lack of security it instills into the public's minds will be the greatest lasting effect.

Chem Attacks Still Tough to Spot

By now, you've probably heard about the nightmare scenario that almost came true: Al-Qaeda's aborted plot to release hydrogen cyanide into the New York City subway system. What you haven't heard much about are the systems to sniff out chemical weapons that are placed throughout New York's underground trains. And you probably won't, any time soon. Chemical weapon (CW) detection is really, really hard to do.

The U.S. military, for example, has been working on CW sensors for years. The systems are still awfully finicky. Take the CAM ("Chemical Agent Monitor"), which is used throughout the American armed services. The CAM relies on a technique called ion mobility spectroscopy. The machine sucks vapor samples in through a nozzle. Then it zaps the air with a radioactive material, like americium-241, sends its through an electrical field, and, finally, to an ion detector. The substance is identified by the amount of time it takes to run this little gauntlet. The problem is, breath mints, burning grass, and ammonia all set the machine off. So does diesel exhaust, noted Andrew Wolf, a chemist with the U.S. Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command.

These military systems only get more confused in the subways, where there are "5-10 times the amount of particulates in [the] air as compared to the air above ground," CW specialist Jason Sigger noted here last year.

But even if these sensors worked perfectly, they might not be all that helpful. CAMs are hand-held machines that have to be right in the area of a chemical agent, in order to pick up any traces of it. (Area air-scooper are practically useless as chemical warning systems.) Which means a cop would have to get luckily enough to wave his sensor right at a chemical bomber in order to catch him. Even a weapon at the opposite end of a subway platform would probably go unnoticed.

That hasn't stopped the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority from recently ordering up ion mobility spectrometers for themselves. Despite a slew of new, exotic detectors coming out of the national labs and industry, the choices for sensing chemical weapons still aren't all that great.

UPDATE 06/19/06 9:11 AM: "Using hydrogen cyanide, a toxic inhalation hazard, would certainly scare a lot of people just because it's a chemical. But because it can be smelled and it dissipates quite rapidly, it's not a great threat in small amounts," Jason Sigger notes. "A pistol would be as effective. It's good in a sense to hear of these incidents - it shows a much more clear example of what terrorist chemical incidents really are. They're a hazard, a threat just like any high explosive device or gun-waving nut, but not a WMD incident."

To Christian Beckner, "this story also raises questions about what we’re doing to protect the nation’s mass transit systems."

Last year the Congress appropriated $150 million for rail and mass-transit grants for FY 2006, via the Transit Security Grant Program. We’re now nine months into FY 2006, and DHS hasn’t even begun to distribute a penny of this $150 million (or if they have, they haven’t advertised it). That’s unacceptable.

It Plays the New DVDs, Too

The June edition of National Defense has this short tech talk article about a new chem-bio detector produced by Purdue University. If successful, it could be a useful tool for people searching bags or containers for chem-bio agents or as a quick forensic tool at a terrorist chem-bio incident.

Miniature chemical-biological detection devices, that in the future could be deployed in wireless networks to protect buildings, subways and airports, have been perfected by scientists from Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind.

Prototypes of the handheld mass spectrometers — called Mini 10s — are able to quickly identify traces of the triacetone triperoxide that was used in the London subway bombing and is found in many improvised explosive devices. Many other materials, including TNT and plastic explosives, have been tagged.

Test results are produced in seconds, which compares to the current method of collecting samples and then dispatching them to a laboratory for identification.

It may be slightly premature to run out and place stocks into this product's future manufacturer, though. What the National Defense article didn't mention, but the researchers admit, is that this is just a prototype design that could use a few more years of testing and design work.

Sampling is done with a long, tubelike wand that both delivers the gas and sucks up the resulting ionized compound. It is this wand that the team likens to their bloodhound’s new nose. The wand’s tip must come within 5 millimeters of the sample to be effective, but the group has also found a way to build a mass spectrometer that weighs about 18 kilograms (40 pounds), which means it can be carried to the sample, rather than forcing investigators to bring the sample to it.

"This backpack-size device will be useful for field analysis of chemicals, filling a need in airport baggage security and drug detection," said Wiseman, a graduate student working on the project. "While the technique obviously cannot look inside packages to see what is inside, residue from explosives and drugs often remains on the hands of whoever packed it, and some is transferred during handling to the package’s surface. That remaining residue is what this device will be good for detecting."

While the team is optimistic about the device’s potential for application in the lab and on the street, Gologan cautioned that a better understanding of its functioning was still needed.

Still, it's an interesting concept. I would hazard a guess that the military's laboratories are too focused on developing future gear for military combat operations - not that anything new has come out of the DOD's Chemical-Biological Defense Program for a few years now - and DHS's laboratories have relied too much on unrealistic R&D projects from the National Labs to have any new equipment, either. Good to see that we have universities and industry to rely on for future combating terrorist WMD tools.

-- Jason Sigger, Armchair Generalist

NBC Reconnaissance Vehicles -- Coming Soon

I hadn't seen a picture of the Stryker NBC Reconnaissance Vehicle (NBCRV), but now it's up at a few sites now (here and here). Word is that General Dynamics got the contract in January to start modifying the basic Stryker chassis to manufacture 17 NBCRVs under a low rate initial production contract for test and evaluation through FY2007.

This Army Chemical Review article offers more details on the advances of this system over the existing M91A1 NBC Recon System (Fox), including an upgraded chemical standoff sensor (you can make it out -- it's to the left of the remote weapons system in the picture), a biological agent detector, a CB mass spectrometer for sampling, and of course, the standard chemical and radiological point detectors. Plus there's the advantage of having a standard military vehicle instead of a German vehicle (which was always tough to get spare parts and maintenance for).

This might be the last dedicated Army NBC recon vehicle for a long time. Currently, there are no plans to have a Future Combat Systems NBC recon variant. Rather, the proposed FCS recon and surveillance vehicle will include the NBC defense systems, and one would hope that the chemical specialists would be an integral part of the future scout platoons. No offense to the infantry, but the scouts I knew had trouble keeping their protective masks clean, let alone operating sophisticated CB defense sensors.

--Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

Chem Plant Security Gets Serious

There are 15,000 chemical plants scattered around the country. A third of them are near major population centers. The estimated casualty counts if any of them were struck are utterly catastrophic. And there's no federal plan -- not even federal guidelines -- to secure these facilities. The chemical industry has been "reluctant to accept... security requirements" from Washington, Global Security Newswire notes. And, for the longest time, Washington didn't want the power to do so. "Unlike EPA, for example, which requires drinking water facilities to improve their security," notes a recent Congressional report, "DHS [Department of Homeland Security] does not have the authority to require chemical facilities to assess their vulnerabilities and implement security measures."

But there's been an "unusual turnabout by the Bush administration," the Times reports. "It is now lobbying for regulations that senior administration officials worked privately to block shortly after the 2001 attacks, saying then that voluntary measures would be sufficient."

In his speech Tuesday, at a forum sponsored by George Washington University and the American Chemistry Council, a trade group, [DHS secretary Michael Chertoff] said the regulations should be most stringent for plants that, because of the amount and danger of their chemical stockpiles or their proximity to urban areas, pose the greatest risks.

But he said the nation should have uniform standards, strongly implying that states should not be allowed to adopt their own rules, as New Jersey did late last year, particularly if those rules were more stringent.

He also said private-sector, "third party" inspectors could check on compliance, similar to the way accountants certify corporate financial compliance for the government.

Chertoff used the speech to endorse a chemical security bill, backed by Senator Susan Collins, that's currently making its way through Congress. According to IBM homeland security analyst Christian Beckner -- who's my go-to guy on these matters -- it's "sensible legislation that requires all parties to make compromises and can deliver the level of security that we need."

That is, if it can get passed. Beckner "walked away from the event feeling less confident about whether the key parties are actually ready to actually make these compromises, or whether they would rather hold out for legislation that meets more or all of their key demands."

Hopefully my gut intuition is wrong here, and we will instead see a sensible compromise in the weeks ahead and a bill signed into law in the next few months. Any failure to move forward on this legislation is unacceptably dangerous for our national security.

UPDATE 10:22 AM: Read the AP's account of Chertoff's talk, and you'll get the feeling that the wire service's reporter was at an entirely different speech.

He said the government would not set minimum standards for chemical companies to follow, allowing the industry to tailor its own "so we can go about the objective of raising our security in a way that doesn't destroy the businesses we're trying to protect."

"There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and we're going to let chemical operators figure out the right way, as long as the cat gets skinned," Chertoff said...

Critics said the proposal relies too much on the chemical industry to police itself.

"It's a lot like putting a 'Beware of dog' sign out in the yard but not actually buying a guard dog," said Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass. He said federal regulations should spell out minimum protections against different kinds of terror attacks, adding that the use of outside auditors was like "having the private sector grade the industry's homework."

Is That a Chem-Bio Munition?

The UK magazine New Scientist caught a hot tip from sources within the U.S. patent world. Seems that a team of individuals invented a new type of rifle grenade (image shown is actually an old Canadian rifle grenade), and the U.S. Army applied for the patent for the munition. Presumably the individuals worked for the government, and I might suspect their agency is associated with the Ordnance Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Problem here is how they described the munition...

There is the need to deliver and disperse a payload comprising an aerosol-forming substance without the use of high-explosives, the formation of shrapnel and shock wave. In addition, the devices for rapid dispersion and delivery must be capable of being readily launched from exiting conventional rifle muzzles, while providing efficient and effective target accuracy and range. Furthermore, the projectile is adapted for delivering a range of payloads while inflicting minimal injury and damage near or around target areas.

In the same manner, there is also a need for delivering non-aerosol payloads or articles, including. but not limited to, flash grenades, concussion grenades, nets, noise generators, stun balls, tire puncturing elements, electromagnetic pulse generators, mines or bomblets, listening devices, signal emitting objects, unmanned aerial vehicles, biological/chemical agents, and the like for efficient, rapid dispersal and delivery.

The patent actually makes this point four times in print. Oops! As New Scientist points out, developing munitions for the purpose of disseminating CB warfare agents is, well, against international treaty these days. The Army is reportedly trying to withdraw the offending words, but can it really take three years (it was filed in February 2003)?

My two cents - I don't think that the government is deliberately developing munitions to deliver CB warfare agents - I think a few enterprising government civilians designed the munition to be multi-purpose, and one possible purpose would be to deliver riot control agents or pepper spray (or any other non-lethal aerosol out there). They didn't think it through, and now it's in print. Rather than offend the arms control community and get the lawyers all excited, the U.S. government's trying to correct the situation. But still - hardly the thing you'd want to have floating around the internet. It's not like this government needs the bad publicity and the mistaken impression of flaunting international treaties...

Hat tip to Saurabh and Saheli!

-- Jason Sigger, crossposted at Armchair Generalist

Bioweapons Spread: Scare?

On Tuesday, I linked to a Technology Review article, "The Knowledge," about the accelerating spread of bioweapons gear and know-how. The story has touched off a big debate in the community that tracks biological threats. So I thought I'd give SUNY Purchase environmental science professor (and long time bioweapons researcher) Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation's scientists working group -- a chance to respond.

1. [The story's lead example, Russian bioweapons researcher Serguei] Popov, is a convenient tool for raising a number of ideas that have been around for awhile, and not just in Russia. The BWC [Biological Weapons Convention] does not prohibit research, and the US has been doing some of the same sorts of things for at least 20 years.

2. Terrorists would have to be crazy to spend time and other resources on long-term BW agent development, risking detection without any certainty of success. They don’t need MORE virulent agents. They don’t need to synthesize agents. Anthrax can be isolated from cowfields all over the place. Unless and until real defenses against the standard agents are universal, the latter will do the job. ( And an even better job is done by explosives. ) The agent is just the first, easiest, step. Weaponization and delivery are harder. Testing is required if they don’t want to fizzle. Testing is much more likely than genetic engineering to be detected.

3. If terrorists actually wanted novel BW agents, the way to get them is to buy/steal/infiltrate a biodefense lab, as [Rutgers researcher Richard] Ebright says.

4. The most notable information in the article is the description by Popov of how he was co-opted into working on BW, drawn in without at first knowing it until his career, his income and his future depended on it. To say nothing of patriotism. There are similar stories from S. Africa. Would a scientists’ “code of conduct” have mattered?

5. Interesting that the article brings up “pacification of a subject population” and other modification of behavior with “non-lethal” weapons. This is a very popular research topic in a lot of countries these days, especially since the Moscow theater hostage event -- the Manchurian Candidate concept, essentially. [Harvard University molecular biology professor Matthew] Meselson has been fighting this for years. Tell the public, please, that this kind of research is likely to be turned against themselves, ultimately, rather than terrorists.

As for terrorists developing such things — I don’t see why they would even want them. But if they did, they would know where to get them. Let’s stop focusing our fears on hypothetical terrorists, when governments are actually preparing the tools!

Bioweapons Getting Simple, Cheap?

I've been a skeptic of the bio-terror threat for a long time, now. The weapons seemed awfully finicky, compared to old-fashioned explosives. And the learning curve to acquiring these bugs and viruses looked steep, for a relatively low-tech operation like Al Qaeda.

Now, I'm less sure. In this month's Technology Review there's an article on the spread of bioweapons gear and know-how that's downright spooky, even to skeptics like me.

It starts with the Soviet bioweapons effort:

When the program was founded in the 1970s, its goal was to enhance classical agents of biological warfare for heightened pathogenicity and resistance to antibiotics; by the 1980s, it was creating new species of designer pathogens that would induce entirely novel symptoms in their victims...

The Russians' achievements tell us what is possible. At least some of what the Soviet bioweaponeers did with difficulty and expense can now be done easily and cheaply. And all of what they accomplished can be duplicated with time and money. We live in a world where gene-sequencing equipment bought secondhand on eBay and unregulated biological material delivered in a FedEx package provide the means to create biological weapons.

The article then goes on to describe some might scary weapons, including one that "in effect triggered rapid multiple sclerosis." And it makes a compelling case for how smallpox could be modified, with the help of a $5000, second-hand machine.

So how does the public defend itself, when this kind of knowledge and sophistication is spreading? None of the scientists interviewed had any blockbuster solutions. But they all agreed: the Bush administration's approach -- spinning up dozens of new hot-zone labs, all handling deadly agents -- has been shortsighted, even dangerous.

"There are now more than 300 U.S. institutions with access to live bioweapons agents and 16,500 individuals approved to handle them," [Rutgers University’s Richard] Ebright told me. While all of those people have undergone some form of background check -- to verify, for instance, that they aren't named on a terrorist watch list and aren't illegal aliens -- it's also true, Ebright noted, that "Mohammed Atta would have passed those tests without difficulty."

Furthermore, Ebright told me, at the time of our interview, 97 percent of the researchers receiving funds from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study bioweapon agents had never been funded for such work before. Few of them, therefore, had any prior experience handling these pathogens; multiple incidents of accidental release had occurred during the previous two years.

Slipshod handling of bioweapons-level pathogens is scary enough, I conceded. But isn't the proliferation of bioweaponeering expertise, I asked, more worrisome? After all, what reliable means do we have of determining whether somebody set out to be a molecular biologist with the aim of developing bioweapons?

"That's the most significant concern," Ebright agreed. "If al-Qaeda wished to carry out a bioweapons attack in the U.S., their simplest means of acquiring access to the materials and the knowledge would be to send individuals to train within programs involved in biodefense research."

(Big ups: Glenn)

UPDATE 03/15/06 9:13 AM: Chem-bio specialist (and former intermittent Defense Tech guest-blogger) Jason Sigger calls BS on TR, saying, "This is the prime example of why you shouldn't let scientists evaluate issues of terrorism or military combat just because the weapon's lethality derives from the hard sciences."

DTRA's New Digs

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency formally opened its new facility on Fort Belvoir: the Defense Threat Reduction Center (DTRC). VIPs in attendance for the ribbon-cutting included Dr. Dale Klein, the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Chemical and Biological Defense (DTRA’s boss); General James Cartwright, U.S. Strategic Command’s (STRATCOM) commander (overseeing the DoD combating WMD efforts); Mr. Ken Krieg, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics; and Senator Richard Lugar. Since Lugar practically funds half of DTRA through the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) effort, it was a nice touch to see the godfather of arms control there.

Most of the speeches were your typical political, generic statements: “WMD reduction is important, DTRA is a vital source of resources and people, it’s a big challenge but you’re well-positioned to meet the threat, blah blah blah.” Lugar of course was much smoother and had more time as the keynote speaker. He noted the strong success of the CTR in reducing the former Soviet Union’s ballistic missiles, silos, launchers, and bombers, and a little work in the chem-bio weapons side, too. “It’s critical to ensure the world’s most dangerous weapons are kept out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous people.” I think he meant the radical Christian evangelists, but I’m not sure. He made a strong pitch to increase the scope of Nunn-Lugar to nations outside the former Soviet Union, pointing out the success of U.S. efforts to assist Albania in disposing of sixteen tons of mustard agent it had picked up from the Chinese in the 1970s. He had an amendment to this year’s defense appropriations bill, but it was unfortunately killed in conference. He noted wryly that this expansion was necessary – who knows whether North Korea and Iran might someday ask for U.S. assistance in getting rid of their WMD arsenal.

The $78 million dollar DTRC facility is a real piece of work – construction started four years ago with the aim of bringing most of the disparate parts of DTRA to one office location. A primary factor was the desire to increase its force protection standards and to get off of Telegraph Road, where the building was maybe 30 yards from the road. DTRA reorganized within the last year to realign its research and development offices into one main directorate and all of its combating WMD operations support into another directorate. It has a collaboration center that “provides a core infrastructure and management architecture that translates operational requirements into decision support, situational awareness, and a unique support capability” for interagency work in combating WMD efforts.

The new third directorate is the STRATCOM Center for Combating WMD (SCC-WMD). Under STRATCOM’s responsibility to integrate and synchronize all DoD combating WMD requirements, this SCC-WMD represents the agency that will execute the day-to-day responsibilities such as advocating and advising the combatant commands on all WMD-related matters, providing recommendations on combating WMD operations and acquisition efforts, and maintaining 24/7 situational awareness of worldwide WMD and related activities through DTRA’s operations center. It won’t be until October that the SCC-WMD is fully staffed and operational, but expect its players to be actively involved in the interpretation of the Quadrennial Defense Review and the building of the FY08-13 Program Objective Memorandum this spring.

UPDATE: DefenseLink article on the ribbon-cutting ceremony is online here.

-- Jason Sigger, Armchair Generalist

Biodefense: Big Bucks, Small Results

The must-read article of the day comes from Time magazine, which has a long expose on the clusterfuck that is Project Bioshield, the government's $5.6 billion plan to shore up the country's defenses against germ attacks.

Despite all the cash, "BioShield hasn't transformed much of anything besides expanding the federal bureaucracy," says Time. "Most of the big pharmaceutical and biotech firms want nothing to do with developing biodefense drugs. The little companies that are vying for deals say they are being stymied by an opaque and glacially slow contracting process. The one big contract that has been awarded -- for 75 million doses of a next-generation anthrax vaccine -- is tangled in controversy."

With the industry's profits under pressure, none of the big firms are keen on diverting research from potential blockbusters to drugs for exotic germs like Ebola and plague, which may be stockpiled and used only in an emergency. Biodefense is "not attractive to Big Pharma, which is making money off things we use a few times a day," says Michael Greenberger, director of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. Companies are also leery of huge liability risks if biodefense vaccines and treatments are administered to wide swaths of the population. As for that $5.6 billion that is supposed to be allocated over 10 years? It's a pittance, given that the average cost of bringing a new drug to market is estimated to be $800 million, according to a 2001 study by the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development. "There has to be a big bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow to get the big companies," Greenberger says...

[S]ome scientists [also] question the government's "one bug, one drug" scientific approach to biodefense. Developing a new smallpox vaccine for a strain found in nature may sound reasonable, but what about bioengineered strains produced at old Soviet labs, say, which may be floating around on the black market? There's no guarantee that those germs will respond to drugs tailored to other strains. Dr. Steven Projan, vice president of biological technologies for the pharmaceutical firm Wyeth, argues that it would make more sense for the government to stockpile and invest in broad-spectrum antibiotics, antivirals and new vaccine technologies that could be applied to biodefense. He and other scientists are also concerned that the FDA's approval standard for biodefense drugs, which is lower than that for commercial medicines, could lead to unforeseen, perhaps dangerous side effects in humans. Companies aren't required to conduct human clinical trials to show that a biodefense drug is effective; they only have to demonstrate that the drug works in animals and is safe in humans (since infecting people with a disease like anthrax to test a medicine is obviously unethical).

Public-health experts are also worried that money is flowing into terrorism-related medicine at the expense of more basic needs like hospital beds and respirators, which may be just as critical to saving lives in a crisis. And they are concerned that the government's obsession with biodefense is distracting from research into infectious diseases. Last March, 758 microbiologists signed a petition to the NIAID, complaining about the "massive influx of funding" for bioterrorism agents like anthrax, tularemia and plague. The institute now spends nearly $1.7 billion on biodefense -- up from just $42 million in 2001 -- out of a $4.3 billion budget (although the biodefense funding hasn't detracted from other research, according to the agency). Meanwhile, hardly any new antibiotics have been approved by the FDA in recent years, despite the fact that scientists have grown more concerned about antibiotic-resistant bacteria. "The big challenge is how we deal with epidemic infectious diseases, not anthrax," says Dr. David Ozonoff, a professor at Boston University's School of Public Health.

Insurgents Using Chem Weapons - On Themselves?

This has to be the most bizarre twist in the WMD saga yet. Insurgents in Iraq could very well have chemical weapons. And they may be using them - on themselves.

The story starts over a year ago with a Marine blogger in Iraq. On June 2nd 2004 "The Green Side" - we’ll get back to the signficance of this source later - describes suicidal attacks by insurgents in Fallujah: “We could not understand why they kept coming but they did.” The reason, it turned out, was drugs: “…these ‘holy warriors’ are taking drugs to get high before attacks. It true, as we pushed into the town in April many Marines came across drug paraphernalia (mostly heroin). Recently, we have gotten evidence of them using another drug BZ that makes them high and very aggressive.”

BZ is not your typical substance of abuse. It’s a hallucinogenic chemical weapon. This weird concept originated in the 1950’s when “better living through chemistry” was a slogan to live by and warfare without blood was the goal. As the Washington Star noted in 1965:

New chemical weapons that win by creating confusion rather than death and destruction have proved so successful that they have been quietly added to the Army's arsenal. The latest and best, a gas called BZ by the Army, put a number of soldier guinea pigs out of action during field tests at a Utah Army base last November, and did it without harming a man.”

BZ or "Agent Buzz" is the military name for 3-quinuclidinyl benzillate, an extremely powerful hallucinogen. After experimenting with a whole stash of mind-altering substances including cocaine, heroin and LSD, the Pentagon selected BZ for weaponizing. Its major advantages are that it can easily delivered in an aerosol cloud, and it is very safe. With many substances, the effective dose can be dangerously close to the amount needed to kill - ask any anesthetist. With BZ, the tiny effective dose (maybe two milligrams) is around one-thousandth the lethal dose. It is also odorless and invisible, and there is currently no means of detecting it.

Agent Buzz was tested between 1959 to 1975 on some twenty-eight hundred US soldiers at several locations. It proved extremely effective as an incapacitant. The physical effects are increased heart rates, pupil dilation, blurred vision, dry skin and mouth, increased temperature, and flushing of skin – as a med school mnemonic has it “blind as a bat, dry as a bone, hot as Hades, red as a beet.”

But the psychological effects are more important than the physical ones, as the subject is also rendered “mad as a hatter.”

It also produces uncontrollable aggression, Wouter Basson, the man behind South Africa’s chemical and biological warfare program, notes. His version of BZ, in fact, was modified with CB (Carboxy-Methoxy-Benzoxytropane) specifically to reduce this effect.

The Serb army manual on their BZ munitions implies a violent reaction: “it can be expected that such individuals or groups will subsequently, under the effects of [this chemical agent], inflict great damage and losses on their own forces.”

Over a hundred thousand pounds of BZ were produced by the US. However, it fell out of favor because its effects were considered to be too unpredictable. Destruction of the BZ stockpile commenced in 1988 and was reportedly completed in Pine Bluff in 1990.

Could any be in Iraq? In 1995, the British reported that Iraq had produced Agent 15, similar or identical to BZ, and possessed ‘large stocks’ of it. A later CIA report discounts this and concludes that "Iraq never went beyond research with Agent 15—a hallucinogenic chemical similar to BZ—or any other psychochemical.” The British do not agree and as of the last updated in 2004, the MoD maintains its claim. This would appear to be the most likely source of any insurgent supplies.

I did not initially take the report from The Green Side too seriously. Posted in the form of letters home from a Marine to his Dad, it looked like just keeping in touch with the folks at home and recording a piece of personal history, not an intel report. But the blog turns out to be the work of Lt Col Dave Bellon (right), not just another Marine but intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team. The blog can no longer be easily accessed as it has now disappeared behind a USMC security screen.

Given Lt Col Bellon’s access to inside information, his rather specific claim about BZ becomes more serious. Other US sources do not mention BZ by name but do describe drug use by insurgents.

The account of the November 2004's "Fall of Fallujah" by Bing West in the Marine Corps Gazette mentions “crazies” rushing out in suicidal attacks as well as others “sustained by drugs.”

Elsewhere, Dan Senor, a Senior Advisor from the CPA stated: “Our delegation has been told by Fallujan leaders that many of the individuals involved with the violence are on some - are on various drugs. It is part of what they're using to keep them up to engage in this violence at all hours

Other drugs were clearly involved as well, and Lt Col Bellon’s information about BZ may simply be wrong. But it’s quite possible than coalition troops are facing a number of aggressive, paranoid insurgents, unable to tell friend from foe and unable to realize that there was anything wrong with them, beyond control and hallucinating their worst fears.

Could the guerillas be taking BZ -- sometimes called “the ultimate bad trip” – willingly? This seems unlikely: blurred vision, paranoia and hallucinations are not assets in a firefight. But the British Navy traditionally issued a half-pint ration of rum before action and there were always plenty of takers. In Iraq, cynical leaders might dole out BZ to unwitting cannon-fodder. A homicidally aggressive fighter, even an impaired one, is more useful than one who won’t fight against insane odds. This may remind some people of the fabled assassin cult, but don’t believe everything you read in Dan Brown.

Back during the first Gulf War, some in the tinfoil-hat crowd tried to argue that the US used BZ on Iraqis. Wouter Basson even claims to have found traces of BZ in the urine of supposed victims. As with the other alleged BZ attacks mentioned above there is no independent confirmation of this. And reading the incredible story of Basson’s involvement in the whole area of chemical and biological weapons – mind-boggling only begins to describe it – you can assess his credibility yourself. Anyone making such claims will need solid evidence.

But just in case: if anyone offers you any performance-enhancing substances with the words “Dude, this is weapons grade…” – just say no.

(Speaking of Weapons Grade, my publishers would like me to mention my book of the same title which provides an insight into military high-tech from directed-energy weapons to nanotechnology and how it will change both warfare and civilian life.)

-- David Hambling

Bioterror in DC?

What if Washington DC got hit with a bioterrorist attack -- and no one noticed? That's the scenario Mark Benjamin sketches out in Salon.

On Sept. 24, 2005, tens of thousands of protesters marched past the White House and flooded the National Mall near 17th Street and Constitution Avenue...

Unknown to the crowd, biological-weapons sensors, scattered for miles across Washington by the Department of Homeland Security... sucked in trace amounts of deadly bacteria called Francisella tularensis. The government fears it is one of six biological weapons most likely to be used against the United States...

The DHS scrambled... on Sept. 30 -- six days after the deadly pathogens set off the sensors and well into the incubation period for tularemia -- alerted public health officials across the country to be on the lookout for tularemia, the deadly disease caused by F. tularensis...

Sept. 24 was not the first time the Bio Watch sensors had detected possible biological weapons pathogens. Since the system was deployed, sensors around the United States have identified pathogens that could be used as biological weapons on five separate occasions, Jeffrey Stiefel, program manager for Bio Watch chemical countermeasures, said at an open lecture at the National Institutes of Health on Oct. 6. In all of those cases, the detections were apparently the result of natural phenomena. Indeed, some critics have long worried that one weakness of the Bio Watch program might be the difficulty of distinguishing between natural events and terrorism...

As for how the bacteria may have erupted through natural processes, says [Dr. Steven] Hinrichs of the University of Nebraska Center, "I can't imagine how it could have happened..."

Regardless of the source, [Alan Pearson, a former DHS official, who is now the biological and chemical weapons director at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation] says he was troubled that it took the government nearly a week to alert the public. "It points out that the system is still not working fast enough," he says. "If it turned out to be something that really affected people, which it turned out not to be, the system was too slow."

All true. But doesn't this "attack" also show how unattractive a weapon f. tularensis really is? Until now, Al-Qaeda and Co. have gravitated towards spectacular strikes -- one with lots of explosions -- and towards simple ones, that require a minimum amount of technology and expertise to pull off. Spreading f. tularensis over the Mall violates both of those rules of thumb. Could this be the harbinger of a new wave of bioterror attacks? I guess, maybe. But I'd worry more about subway bombs and hijacked planes instead.

THERE'S MORE: Jason Sigger, a chem-bio specialist, is less diplomatic. He says the Salon piece is "full of crap."

This is the problem with BioWatch, in that many natural pathogens will set these things off just fine without stirring up ideas of terrorist incidents. They're not that sensitive, they're air samplers that allow techs to take sample swabs to the labs for analysis. Tularemia is a natural bioorganism found in the environment. Lots of people kicking up dust on the Mall, the organisms float around. The BioWatch sensors HAVE false alarmed in Houston and LA at least (pretty sure) and probably other places unreported. The false alarm rate is in the single digits, but that still generates a number of false alarms. The public health people want this to be taken as a terrorist incident because it would increase their chances of getting more money into the general public health infrastructure, which is their goal to answer bioterrorism.

Tuli is a great BW agent, very infectious but not contagious, not a lethal agent as noted here - too easy to treat once detected. But the idea that this was a terrorist test? come on. If the feds were excited, it's because the combination of a large public event and the alarms were suspicious, but there's no big deal here. False alarm from detectors, fuel for the bioterrorism talking heads, good Tom Clancy material, nothing more. Bottom line, no one got sick, no one died, it wasn't a terrorist incident.

He's got more to say over at his blog, Armchair Generalist.

Plague Mice Escape Newark Lab

Just when we we starting to breathe a sigh of relief, that nothing toxic appears to have escaped New Orleans' anthrax labs. Now comes word, from the Star-Ledger, that three mice "carrying deadly strains of plague" have disappeared from the biodefense lab at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, N.J.

State Health Commissioner Fred Jacobs said mice infected with plague die "very fast," so "the risk to the public ... is probably slim to none. We didn't think -- nor did the CDC think -- there was any public health threat..."

Infectious-disease experts... called the episode ... very troubling -- raising serious issues of security and control...

Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and a critic of the government's rapid expansion of bio-terrorism labs... noted there has been a series of serious incidents across the country involving accidental human infections at several of the labs working with agents like anthrax and plague. At the same time, he said, federal guidelines call for only minimal security -- a lock on the lab door and a lock on the sample container and cage.

"You have more security at a McDonald's than at some of these facilities," he said.

THERE'S MORE: Back in April of '03, I profiled the lab's chief, pacificst-turned-biodefender Nancy Connell, for Wired News.

AND MORE: Want an idea of how little oversight there is of these biodefense labs?

New Jersey... does not know how many labs in the state are actually conducting experiments involving lethal bacteria or viruses.

It was just Wednesday that the Emergency Health Powers Act was signed into law, requiring all people, companies or institutions working with or possessing disease strains that can be used for biological weapons to register with the state Department of Health and Senior Servicers.

NoLa Biolabs: Research Wrecked

The AP, following on Nick's research over the last few days, says that Katrina "decades" of biodefense and other research.

Important work on heart disease, cancer, AIDS and a host of other ailments may be lost forever to scientists at Tulane and Louisiana State universities' medical schools in New Orleans.

LSU lost all of its 8,000 lab animals, including mice, rats, dogs and monkeys. Many drowned. Others died without food and water and the rest were euthanized, said Dr. Larry Hollier, dean of the LSU Health Sciences Center School of Medicine.

About 300 federally funded projects at New Orleans colleges and universities worth more than $150 million - including 153 projects at Tulane - were affected in some way.

The article also confirms the "thin silver lining" that Nick had found: "no deadly diseases were released from the area's "hot labs,' where researchers routinely handle and store some of the world's most dangerous germs."

NoLa Biolabs: No Prob?

The biodefense labs in and around New Orleans appear to be okay, Defense Tech readers are finding.

"Foo" spotted this announcement from Tulane, which says that its primate center, located in nearby Convington, is "already functioning under near normal conditions." And veteran LSU anthrax researcher Martin Hugh-Jones told Defense Tech pal Nick Schwellenbach:

"Off the cuff I would not expect a great threat as without electricity the refridgerators will slowly warm up and thus kill any stored organisms. Ditto any liquid nitrogen storage devices. ..."

"...the present BSL-3 labs now have locks, some mechanical, some electronic/electric. So anyone wanting to break into such a lab in a possibly abandoned LSU or Tulane or LADHHS building in New Orleans will have to have a sledgehammer with them... [and that person would have to] know exactly where to go to get what."

"Yesterday I had the opportunity of discussing this problem with Dr Raoult Ratard, the Louisiana State Epidemiologist, who temporarily has his office & staff in Baton Rouge. He said that they got police permission to open the LADHHS PHS BSL-3 lab, and suitably supervised they cut the chain on the door, got in, poured chlorox into their single vial of Brucellas suis from a recent investigation --- all that was in the laboratory --- and then got on with the real business which was to recover the two laptop computers in the lab (using the bolt cutter again) which they really needed in Baton Rouge."

THERE'S MORE: "I just spoke with Von Roebuck, a CDC [Centers for Disease] spokesman," Nick reports. He told me “the CDC did do a call out to programs associated with the Select Agent Program” [that's lab-speak for biodefense -- ed.] and there were “no losses, no problems” related to Hurricane Katrina. The facilities in the path of the Hurricane “put high security measures in place,” he said.

To which Rutgers University biomchemist Richard Ebright responded:

I would translate "put high security measures in place" as "locked the freezer and the lab door before leaving." I would be surprised if more than that has been done.

NoLa's Biolab Mystery

Anybody know what happened to New Orleans' anthrax labs? That's the excellent and scary question Defense Tech pal Russ Kick asks over at the Memory Hole.

In and around the Big Easy are a number of Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) labs, meant to handle some of the nastier biological agents out there -- stuff like anthrax, plague, and genetically-engineering mousepox. Louisiana State University’s Medical School and the State of Louisiana both ran BSL-3s within the city. Tulane kept 5,000 monkeys for biodefense studies in its "National Primate Research Center," located in nearby Covington.

"What's happened to the infected animals? Are they free and roaming?" Russ wants to know. "Are they dead, with their diseased bodies floating in the flood waters? And what about the cultures and vials of the diseases? Are they still secure? Are they being stolen? Were they washed away, now forming part of the toxic soup that coats the city?"

And not to turn the fear dial up any higher, but, if the national average is any guide, the keepers of the Louisiana labs weren't particularly experienced. 97 percent of the "principal investigators" who got biodefense grants from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases were newbies to that kind of work.

The government oversight these neophytes get is minimal, at best. Instead, the labs are expected to police themselves, through "Institutional Biosafety Committees." But the records of these committees is, to put it politely, uneven. When the Sunshine Project, a biowatchdog group, "asked for all minutes of all meetings of [Tulane's] IBC since January 1st, 2002, Tulane replied that it has no responsive documents. That is, Tulane University cannot produce a single page of minutes of any Institutional Biosafety Committee meeting for the past two and half years."

THERE'S MORE: "What happened to all the cargo at the Port?" wonders Adam Rogers, Defense Tech's editor at Wired. "In October of 2001, the executive director of the Port of New Orleans, Gary LaGrange, told me that the Port of New Orleans has about a quarter of all the containerized cargo traffic on the Gulf of Mexico. It was the country’s largest importer of steel, rubber, and coffee. Steel was going down drastically, but still. But what always really interested me the most was that New Orleans was the largest London Metals Exchange port in the country — that’s precious metals. Platinum and gold don’t rust..."

The Well-Dressed Aviator

Many of you may be familiar with the DOD's current chem-bio protective garnment, the Joint Service Lightweight Integrated Technology (JSLIST) suit. This suit, which DOD began buying around 1998, uses carbon spheres sprayed on the inside of the suit instead of activated charcoal embedded in a foam layer. The procurement of these suits was deliberately slow, due to "business logic," which resulted in troops in the Gulf getting only two JSLIST suits per instead of the stated basis-of-issue of four per. Oops - good thing there weren't any WMDs in Iraq. But the aviators had it worse, in that their modern protective suit wasn't even in production.

The Joint Protective Aircrew Ensemble (JPACE) came into advanced development in 2000. This Air Force-led project focused on developing an aviator suit that would protect against chem-bio hazards, be fire resistant, and launderable (while uncontaminated). There's nothing like wearing a suit of carbon when your jet fuel is on fire, so the fire resistance was important, but the launderable was too - the pilots had to look good and smell good in their one-piece outfits (another requirement - the JSLIST was a frumpy two-piece outfit). Also, the JPACE had to have pockets that would hold those pens, notebooks, and aviator glasses (kidding). Initial plans were to have this suit out to the field by 2005, but, unrealistic plans and technology not cooperating, this date was extended past 2007.

Now the Army and Marine Corps also have the modern M40A1 protective masks to replace the older M17A3 masks. The Air Force and Navy are still hanging onto their old (1980s era) MCU-2/P masks for their ground/ship personnel, waiting until the next generation ground mask is fielded. The Joint Service General Purpose Mask (JSGPM) should begin fielding in 2007, but... the aviators need something special. Right now, each service has unique aviator masks for their rotary wing and fixed wing pilots. At least this time they have good logic - the fixed wing pilots need a mask that has oxygen hoses and that can stand high-G performances, and the rotary wing pilots need to go to a standard mask that's compatible with their comms and optical requirements. Enter the Joint Service Aviator Mask (JSAM), a Navy-led program that will eventually come up with a standard fixed wing mask (possibly with two modifications - one for high performance pilots and one for "normal" performance pilots) and a standard rotary wing mask. Initial plans were to have this mask out by 2006, but it too has slipped cost, performance and schedule to a more comfortable 2008 fielding date.

You'd think that this lack of modern capability would have a good many influential fighter pilots up in arms, but they're not really that concerned. You see, many Air Force analysts believe that their air bases are only threatened by a few ballistic missiles (as far as chem-bio threats are concerned), since they'll shoot down or intercept anything else (counting on the troops to keep those pesky artillery systems away). Also, some Air Force analysts believe the issue of persistent contamination to be overblown by the Army and others. If you just wait about 8 hours, they reason, all the life-threatening agent will be largely gone. It's kind of a "What, me worry?" attitude that I certainly don't share. But then I'm a biased Army guy...

One of the debates going on within the DOD CB Defense Program is whether the aviator masks and suits should be tested and evaluated together, as a system. Problem there is, does one penalize the aviators by delaying the JPACE to match the later JSAM schedule, possibly risking those troops in future combat operations? Or will the tests and evaluations be less effective if the two items are not jointly evaluated? Odds are on the bureaucrats winning this one...

-- Armchair Generalist

Biosniffers

The Air Force Research Laboratory thinks they have a new biodetector in the form of a hand-held sensor that would collect and isolate samples, detect and identify agents, and tell the operator how serious of a threat exists. This sensor, developed by DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in cooperation with the Air Force, operates very similarly to the M1 Chemical Agent Monitor (CAM), in that it is intended to manually detect the relative level of contamination after an attack or following decontamination of a person or piece of equipment.

With the prototype system, the user sprays the suspected contaminated area, creating a sample that can be picked up by a swab. The sample material on the swab is suspended in liquid by rinsing it in a container. Once in a liquid form, the sample is injected into a special flow cell, the place where the assay occurs.

The flow cell is currently designed for one-time use. Since the cell is sealed, it can be decontaminated by immersion in a bleach solution and then safely transported to a forensic laboratory for further analysis where it can be opened to retrieve the sample material.

A liquid crystal display, or LCD, provides a quantitative readout of the concentration of targeted material present, and a set of red, yellow, and green light emitting diodes provides an easily interpreted reading of the threat level. For instance, "no threat" is green, a barely detectable to medium level of an agent is one or two yellow dots, and a high detection level is red.

Sounds great! When can we buy a dozen? Well there are a few hurdles to be passed yet. Traditionally, the National Labs have worked in the basic research area, which means while they have a proof of principle here, the device will require several months, perhaps years, until it gets to the point that it is a ruggedized and fully tested and accepted military item. In the usual course of events, this item would transition to the DOD Chemical-Biological Defense Program and continue its maturation.

The usual challenges in biodetection focus on the reliability and timeliness of detection, especially at low levels of biological warfare agents. Traditional air samplers take 15-30 minutes to detect and identify large samples of agent. Smaller polymerase chain reaction diagnosis systems (which appears to be the basis for this sensor) can take up to an hour, and usually require very clean samples (free from environmental interferrents). Since many biological warfare agents can cause illnesses with such small concentrations and the possibility of contagion is high (particularly with viruses), there's always been a very real challenge in achieving high reliability and high sensitivity in small, hand-held detectors. So don't send in your orders quite yet.

-- Armchair Generalist

So How's The Air?

Following 9/11, there was a renewed interest in placing chemical and biological (CB) sensors in subways to detect and alert authorities to the threat of terrorist CB incidents. We can thank Aum Shinrikyo and the 1995 Tokyo sarin incident for that. The funny thing is, while there are certainly those agencies still interested in using CB sensors in subways, you don't hear much about the actual success or failure of these concepts.

You might see one of these air samplers in the DC or New York subways, in the corner quietly chugging away. The challenge has been air particles - as this Science News article demonstrates, there is about 5-10 times the amount of particulates in subway air as compared to the air above ground. Automatic point detectors can false alarm to particulates or will jam up. Air samplers, on the other hand, don't alarm automatically but require the "man-in-the-loop" to extract samples and to analyse them. So the best we can do today is tell people what they were exposed to, not prevent them from being exposed in the first place.

This isn't great news, so we don't hear about the actual concepts of operation or the challenges these emergency responder agencies are going through. Every now and then, someone like the Los Alamos National Lab will show their wares and concepts. But it's important to anyone involved in homeland security to be able to understand the pros and cons of relying too much on detectors and air samplers that were designed more for battlefield use than for homeland security.

Does this mean we shouldn't trust detectors and monitors? Well, that depends. For military environments where the threat is high, the CB warfare agents are known, and the time duration of use is relatively short, detectors and monitors make sense. For antiterrorism situations where the threat is low or unknown (as compared to conventional threats), the weapons are unknown and many, and the time duration of use is year-round, detectors and monitors do not make sense. There are two exceptions - response teams need detectors and monitors for post-incident analysis and remediation, and it makes sense to place monitors and detectors at national special security events. Both are short-duration, focused efforts. Other than those exceptions, this issue is a money pit.

-- Armchair Generalist

Biolabs Metastasize

Been sleeping well lately? This Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article by Defense Tech pal Nick Schwellenbach should take care of that.

It's on a subject we worry about a whole lot here at Defense Tech HQ -- the ginormous growth in biodefense research, and how the hell to maintain safety amidst that growth. For example, 97 percent of the folks receivng National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grants for biodefense research hadn't touched the bugs before 9/11, Nick notes.

No wonder three Boston University lab workers were infected with tularemia, or rabbit fever, back in January. "Things like that happen when people are not trained well," explained NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.

And those infections went down at a relatively low-risk, "BSL-2" lab. What happens when the school's BSL-4 facility -- designed to handle killers like Ebola -- gets up and running?

Take an ambien, for starters.

(PopSci has more nightmare fodder here)

Spray Me, Pay Me

Most of us laughed pretty damn hard when we learned that the Air Force was thinking about spritzing enemies of freedom with aphrodisiacs, to temporarily turn them gay. But, apparently, some researchers at the University of Zurich found the idea downright inspirational.

The brains haven't found the so-called "gay sex bomb," yet. But they have come up with a hormone spray that makes folks almost comically naive, according to the Washington Post.

Researchers had some volunteers inhale oxytocin [also known as the "hormone of love" or "cuddle chemical" -- ed.] and then examined how they and those who inhaled a placebo invested money in a mock transaction.

The transaction involved taking a risk: handing over money to a "banker" who had the option of returning the investment with a profit or withholding principal and profit, leaving the investor with nothing. The experiment was a measure of the trust that the investors had in the bankers.

Volunteers who inhaled oxytocin were more likely to trust the banker with money and risk larger sums, the researchers said in an article published yesterday in the journal Nature.

The scientists said they made sure the chemical was not merely enhancing risk-taking behavior by substituting bankers with computers. Without the interaction with a human, the hormone had no effect.

Antonio Damasio, a University of Iowa neurologist, tells Nature that the spray might be a bit superfluous. "Modern advertising already uses tricks to get us to trust a brand that probably make us boost our own oxytocin levels. 'It lures you in with images of wonderful landscapes or sex, and it probably works in exactly the same way,'" he says. (big ups: Ed)

DEADLY FLU SHIPS; BIOSAFETY M.I.A.

This is a nightmare. But it's not a surprise.

A dangerous strain of the flu virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 1957 was sent to thousands of laboratories in the United States and around the world, triggering a frantic effort to destroy the samples to prevent an outbreak, health officials revealed yesterday.

With the government tossing out biodefense research grants like Louisville Sluggers on Bat Day, universities and private companies by the dozen have been building labs to handle the nastiest bacteria and viruses around. As a result, "hundreds of inexperienced researchers [are being drawn] into work with hazardous organisms," the Times observed a few months back.

But the federal government is largely leaving oversight of these labs up to the colleges and companies themselves, the bio-watchers at the Sunshine Project note. Each institution is supposed to be policed by a home-grown "biosafety committee." But, as of last summer, at least, "some three dozen laboratories" receiving federal biodefense dollars hadn't even set their committees up.

When these committees are active, they often work in secret. So no one from the outside the lab has a good idea what's going on inside. There's little, if any, independent safety advice. And that makes it easier for potentially-deadly mistakes -- like distributing an ultra-dangerous flu strain to thousands of sites scattered around the globe.

"As if recent tularemia incidents, SARS escapes, and the myriad of other accidents in recent years were not enough," writes the Sunshine Project's Edward Hammond. "When will researchers and regulators come to grips with the inevitability of human error and equipment failures and restrict research and require transparency (as a restraining measure) - by law - as is so obviously required?"

THERE'S MORE: POGO has put together a creepy timeline of biosafety mishaps over the last three years.

SCIENTISTS BLAST BIOTERROR BOONDOGGLE

Researchers have been quietly complaining for years about the gigantic piles of cash being burned on bioterror defense -- while threats like tuberculosis, which kill millions every year, are given short shrift.

Finally, these microbiologists are starting to get organized, and speak out in public. From the Times:

More than 700 scientists sent a petition on Monday to the director of the National Institutes of Health protesting what they said was the shift of tens of millions of dollars in federal research money since 2001 away from pathogens that cause major public health problems to obscure germs the government fears might be used in a bioterrorist attack.

The scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners and a biologist who is to receive the National Medal of Science from President Bush in March, say grants for research on the bacteria that cause anthrax and five other diseases that are rare or nonexistent in the United States have increased fifteenfold since 2001. Over the same period, grants to study bacteria not associated with bioterrorism, including those causing diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis, have decreased 27 percent, the petition said...

signers of the petition insisted that the government was making poor trade-offs. "These projects obviously take money away from basic research in the United States," said Sidney Altman, a molecular biologist at Yale who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989. He said that while a risk of bioterrorist attack existed, he considered it "a very minor factor" among all the threats faced by the nation. "There's no question that microbiology has suffered" by the focus on obscure organisms, Dr. Altman said.

THERE'S MORE: Nick directs our attention to this handy (and depressing) chart, showing just how out-of-whack the biodefense spending numbers are.

AND MORE: "The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has repeatedly claimed that the biodefense boom has not adversely impacted funding for public health research," the Sunshine Project's Edward Hammond notes in a release. "But NIH data does not support [that] position. In fact, analysis of competitive grant data shows double digit declines in funding for high priority public health diseases since the end of 2001."

BIO-SENSORS: DON'T BOTHER

Do yourself a favor and check out Slate's roundtable, from the authors of Safe: The Race To Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World.

All of the items they're discussing will be at least passingly familiar to Defense Tech readers -- stuff like next-generation lie detectors and programs that comb through data trails for potential enemies of the state.

But yesterday's discussion, about the ability (or lack thereof) of government-funded machines to detect biological attacks, is particularly illuminating. Because, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars dumped into the sensors, the gadgets are, for all intents and purposes, useless.

A quick example: for years, the military has been trying to put together bio-detectors that use laser radar, or LIDAR, to pick up toxic clouds. But the dust and organisms that naturally float around in the air often blind the sensors, absorbing the light before it gets to the cloud. And even when LIDAR sensors can see through the grime, they don't have the ability to figure out what that cloud actually is. Just like radar can only figure out the broad outlines of a plane, LIDAR only sees that there's a cloud of something biological in the air. But what exactly that something is -- the sensors can't tell. Pollen, anthrax, and diesel exhaust all look about the same, according to Al Lang, a LIDAR researcher at Sandia National Laboratories.

Of course, most reports about America's bio-defense never bother to mention this not-exactly-insignificant point. Nor do they get too caught up by fact that the attack the Bush administration is gearing up to stop -- a giant toxic cloud, released over a crowded city -- is just about the least likely terrorist attack of all time.

The Safe crew, on the other hand, nails it. "At the moment, there's really only one feasible way to put together a sensor network for detecting biological attacks: assign the job not to technologies but to people. Today, as throughout the history of public health, most disease outbreaks are spotted when a clinician recognizes something unusual or out of place."

BOSTON BIO-BOTCH: GET READY FOR MORE

Boston was only the beginning. With so many biodefense labs being built across the country, you can expect to see more news like the weekend's revelation that three Boston University lab workers were infected with tularemia, or rabbit fever.

Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, the federal government has been pouring money into labs that research the deadliest of bioagents. "Currently there are four [maximum security] Biosafety Level 4 laboratories nationwide, with six more planned," the New York Times notes. "50 laboratories operate at Biosafety Level 3, sufficient to work with anthrax, and 19 more are planned at universities and government institutions, according to the Sunshine Project, a Texas group that is tracking the growth."

With these labs flowering so quickly, "hundreds of inexperienced researchers [are being drawn] into work with hazardous organisms," the Times adds. Security is being compromised, as a result.

In 2002, the discovery of lethal anthrax outside a high-security laboratory at the military's premier biodefense laboratory, the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland, led to sampling throughout the institute. Investigators found three different strains of anthrax bacteria outside the sealed-off laboratories, indicating at least that many leaks, according to an Army report.

Then, last spring, Southern Research Institute, a contractor in Frederick, Md., shipped anthrax bacteria to an Oakland, Calif., hospital after immersing it in hot water to kill the germs. When mice injected with the supposedly harmless bacteria for a vaccine experiment quickly died, researchers realized the bacteria were still lethal.

The list goes on. "A US Army-funded biosafety level three lab in Tennessee that holds biological weapons agents... hasn't had an Army biosafety inspection in three years," the Sunshine Project notes. Tulane University, which runs a similar center, hasn't convened its biosafety committee in years. Since 1998, the safety group at Rockefeller University in New York City "has met exactly twice," according to the Project.

Now, all of this might be perfectly acceptable, if these labs were really helping to save lives. But that's a questionable proposition, at best. Because many of the agents being investigated at these labs are only marginal threats to public health.

These bioagents are notoriously difficult to turn into weapons. And, with a deliberate spread, they aren't hurting that many people. There are only 130 cases per year of tularemia. Smallpox isn't infecting anyone these days. And the anthrax that killed five people in 2001 -- that probably came from one of these biodefense centers.

"Compare that to a real biological killer, like tuberculosis," I suggested in a 2003 Tech Central Station article.

It ends the life of more than 2 million people every year. But the federal government is "luring researchers away" from scientific research into TB and other infections of mass destruction, notes Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, with the Federation of American Scientists.

UCLA's Dr. Marcus Howritz was "on the cusp of real progress" in developing a better TB vaccine, Merrill Goozner reports in this month's American Prospect. Now he's been diverted into working on a barely-lethal biological agent.

Nancy Connell, who heads a Pentagon-funded bio-defense lab in Newark, NJ, doesn't think a biological strike is all that likely. But she takes grants to study smallpox and anthrax, because she can use the same research funds to work on flu and TB, which "actuall do kill people," she notes.

TERROR WMD - WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?

I meant to link to this before, but was off in holiday la-la land. Last week, the Washington Post put together a really excellent series on the real likelihood of terrorists getting nuclear, biological, or chemical arms.

The short answer is: no on nukes, maybe on bio, and sure could be on chem. It's about what I would have guessed. But the series is definitely worth a read, nonetheless.

SWISS CHEESE DEFENSE FOR NUKE, BIO THREATS

It's been three years since 9/11 started making America twitch over a potential nuclear or biological terror attack. And still, the U.S. isn't anything close to ready for such an assault.

In 2001, "the federal government began passing out pills that may protect against some of the most dangerous effects of radiation. Fourteen states whose residents live near nuclear power plants haven't bothered to accept them," Wired News reports. That's despite the fact that "last year, a report commissioned by Congress recommended that everyone under 40 near a nuclear power plant should have the pills on hand."

Despite the efforts of nuclear safety advocates and medical associations, the pills' existance remains fairly obscure. "You sit there scratching your head and say, 'Why aren't they giving it out?'" said Alan Morris, president of Anbex, the only potassium iodide pill manufacturer in the United States.

On the biological front, things are a bit different. The federal government has unleashed a torrent of cash for bioterror research -- $7.6 billion, just for next year. But on the nuts-and-bolts of basic defense, giant gaps remain, the Washington Post notes.

• Hobbled by budget pressures and day-to-day crises, many health agencies say they cannot comply with federal officials' urgent demands that they gear up for bioterrorism.

• Overlapping jurisdiction among federal agencies working on biodefenses -- including the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services -- leads to confusion inside and outside government about who is in charge of preparations for, and response to, bioattacks...

• Large drug firms with track records of developing medications have little interest in making bioterrorism vaccines and treatments.

The Post notes that "because of the scientific complexities, no technology exists to detect a biological attack as it occurs." But the paper's too nice to say that Biowatch, the sensor program the feds are pushing, is basically useless.

Relying on air filters in major cities, Biowatch only detects a large-scale, airborne biological strike -- about the least likely kind. And it only gives information way, way after the fact. "You're getting very little specific data. And it's unclear what you could do with that information that's useful in the middle of an emergency," Peter LeJenue, a biodefense specialist with Potomac Institute for Policy Studies told Defense Tech last year.

PAINT VS. BIOTERROR

Army-backed researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are working to develop a paint that would change color in a biological or chemical attack -- and might even kill off the deadly agents, too.

CHEM-SNIFFING PLANE OVER RNC

I think it's uber-unlikely that terrorists are going to blast New York with chemical weapons during the RNC. But, just in case they do, the Environmental Protection Agency is ready.

The EPA has a twin-propeller Aero Commander 680 plane, refitted with sensors and software to become a flying chemical detector. And since it became operational in 2001, this ASPECT (short for Airborne Spectral Photometric Environmental Collection Technology) plane has been deployed 36 times throughout the country, to track industrial accidents and potential terrorist targets.

"The missions [have] rang[ed] from a chlorine-spilling train derailment near San Antonio, to the 2002 Olympic Games, to the crash of the space shuttle Columbia (with its release of toxic fuel). Normally based outside of Dallas, the aircraft has been sent to both of this year's political conventions," GovExec.com says. "It is currently standing by at an area airfield near New York City."

"PETTY" CHARGES FOR "BIOTERROR" SUSPECT

It was clear from the start that the government's "bioterror" case against Buffalo artist Steve Kurtz was BS. Now, even federal prosecutors are admitting that the charges are bogus.

Last month, FBI agents quarantined the biotech-inspired artist's home -- and confiscated his recently-dead wife's corpse -- on terror suspicions. But on Tuesday, a federal grand jury in Buffalo charged Kurtz instead with a minor infraction, petty larceny, according to his supporters. No bioterror allegations were made.

Also indicted was Robert Ferrell, head of the Department of Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Public Health. The charges concern technicalities of how Ferrell helped Kurtz to obtain $256 worth of harmless bacteria for one of Kurtz's art projects.

The laws under which the indictments were obtained--Title 18, United States Code, sections 1341 and 1343, covering mail and wire fraud--are normally used against those defrauding others of money or property, as in telemarketing schemes.

"Regardless of the plans these two men had for these materials, we can't allow people to buy and distribute bacterial agents like this under false pretenses," U.S. Attorney Michael Battle told the Buffalo News. It's not a case of terrorism, but it's a case of mail fraud."

BIO-BATTLIN' BUILDINGS

Office buildings are just about the juiciest target there is for a chemical or biological attack: windows that don't open, self-contained airflow, and lots of people in an enclosed space. That's why Darpa is developing its "Immune Building" program -- an effort to use a structure's heating, ventilation, and AC systems to get rid of toxic agents.

I take a quick look at the mostly classified program in a postage-stamp-sized Wired magazine article, out now. And here is a presentation on the project, from the DarpaTech 2002 conference.

BUSH ADMIN EXPLORING BIO-OFFENSE

"The Bush administration is ramping up bioterrorism research that will press beyond traditional defenses against natural biowarfare germs to explore genetically engineered superbugs, as well as the means to mass-produce and disseminate them," the Oakland Tribune reports.

The Homeland Security Department's new National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center... tasked scientists to study how to "acquire, grow, modify, store, stabilize, package (and) disperse" bioweapons and to run computer simulations of large-scale production.

It called for "red teaming" operations, in which scientists would figure out how to execute terrorist attacks...

"If any other country set forth a program like this, U.S. intelligence undoubtedly would call it an offensive program," said Edward Hammond, head of the Sunshine Project, a group in Austin, Texas, that tracks bioweapons and biodefense issues.

THERE'S MORE: "There is a danger that these activities would provoke an international arms race in bioweapons," says chembio authority Barbara Hatch Rosenberg.

The proposed functions, combined with the secrecy under which they may be conducted; the precedent set when secret US projects of dubious legality under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) became known several years ago; the omission of those projects from the annual BWC confidence-building information exchange; the proliferation of high-containment laboratories and funding for research on bioweapons agents now underway in the US; and the recent US rejection of a BWC Protocol containing on-site inspection measures -- all these are certain to generate suspicions abroad about US capabilities and intentions...

Compared to nuclear weapons, bioweapons are far more readily accessible to a large number of nations. If the US undertakes the planned activities, other countries, uncertain of what is going on and wanting to keep up, are likely to pursue similar biodefense and threat assessment activities, possibly using them as covers for bioweapons programs. Even if the initial intentions are defensive, potentially offensive capabilities would thereby proliferate, with the risk that they might eventually fall into the hands of terrorists.

A second group of chembio bigwigs have teamed up to blast the new Center. Read their remarks here.

FBI NABS BUFFALO MAN FOR "BIOTECH" ART

Waking up with his wife dead was only the beginning of Steve Kurtz's troubles. Within a few days of her untimely passing, the FBI had raided his Buffalo home. Health workers dressed in hazmat moon suits had turned the place into a quarantine zone. Now, in Kurtz's livelihood may be in jeopardy, too. And let's not even get into the legal bills.

Kurtz is a University of Buffalo professor and artist specializing in biotechnology-inspired works: subversive remixes of big pharma corporate materials, kits to see if food is genetically modified. Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, New York's New Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC displayed his art. The New York Times and Washington Post, among others, have looked on it favorably.

Earlier this month, Kurtz woke up to find his wife, Hope, dead of apparent heart failure. In shock, he called the police. But when the officers came over, they saw strange things: test tubes, Bunsen burners, Petri dishes, and the like. So they brought in the local counter-terror task force, and the FBI.

Kurtz was detained on the way to the funeral home. His house was cordoned off, while the county health department searched for chemical or biological agents – and the local TV cameras rolled. And Kurtz's equipment was all confiscated, for further testing and investigation.

The artist was planning to use some of that gear in a new show at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, slated to open Sunday. Now, that's not happening. Other works – including a book in progress – are also on hold. And Kurtz has a $10,000 mountain of legal bills; he's retained celebrity lawyer Paul Cambria (Larry Flynt and DMX's defender) to represent him.

Some would say Kurtz had it coming; a 2002 workshop by his group in Halifax two years back lead to a scare with a feaux "bomb." But, to others, Kurtz's story is yet another example of how brittle rights can be in Ashcroft's age of terror.

NERVE GAS FOUND IN IRAQ

"An explosive containing sarin nerve gas was discovered by American troops in Baghdad and detonated," the Times reports. "It was the first sarin shell the American military has found since the invasion of Iraq last year, the spokesman, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, said in a televised news conference.

The explosive, a 155 millimeter artillery round, had been rigged as a roadside bomb, the general said. It was detonated before it could be defused, producing "a very small dispersal" of the gas, he said.

Two members of a bomb squad were treated for minor exposure, and the sarin did not present a threat to the surrounding neighborhood, the spokesman said.

The incident occurred "a couple days ago," he added.

General Kimmitt said American officials believe the weapon came from the stockpiele of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Mr. Hussein had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War.

The bomb was a "binary chemical projectile" with two chambers each containing a distinct chemical. When the projectile is fitted into an artillery round and fired, the rotation of the round causes the wall between the chambers to break, thereby blending the two chemicals. On impact with the target, the shell explodes, releasing the sarin.

But the explosive discovered last week was not launched as an artillery round, so only a small amount of the two chemicals mixed together, General Kimmitt said. It was not known whether whoever rigged the bomb knew of the presence of sarin in the explosive.

THERE'S MORE: "While deadly, sarin gas is not likely to be effective when used in this manner," explains Lt. Smash. "Chemical artillery shells are designed to "pop" rather than explode, and are generally fused to detonate well above ground level for better dispersal. Any chemical attack via artillery would have to use several shells over a wide area to be effective.

So either this is a false alarm, or whoever planted this explosive:

- Didn't know that it was a chemical weapon, or

- Doesn't know how to properly employ such a chemical weapon, or

- Intended to terrorize the Coalition, rather than cause significant damage.

Given that the proven existence of chemical weapons in Saddam's arsenal represents a major propaganda victory for the Coalition, I find the third possibility to be highly unlikely. Of the remaining two possibilities, I'm more inclined to believe that the bombers weren't familiar with the difference between chemical and conventional artillery shells, and assumed they had the latter.

AND MORE: "It appears the insurgents didn't even know they had a chemical round," former weapons inspector David Kay tells the AP.

While Saturday's explosion does demonstrate that Saddam hadn't complied fully with U.N. resolutions, Kay notes, "It doesn't strike me as a big deal."

RICIN MYSTERY

The big news today, of course, is that the biotoxin ricin appears to have been found in the office of Bill Frist, the Senate's majority leader. An envelope filled with the powder was discovered in Frist's mail room. And now, three Senate office buildings have been shut down while the mail is checked there, too.

There's something odd about the discovery, however. As near as I can tell (and I may have this wrong) people don't get hurt from inhaling ricin -- at least, not a little bit of it. Eating the stuff is what's so deadly. That's why previous terror plots using ricin have involved poisoning the food or water supply.

"When you talk about anthrax versus this ricin -- the same amount of anthrax, about one kilogram -- you would need four metric tons of ricin to produce the same effect. So a little bit of it really isn't going to create much of a problem," CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta said.

"To the best of my knowledge, in a human being, inhaling it has never hurt anybody," Frist tells the New York Times.

THERE'S MORE: "Ricin may actually indicate a fair bit of sophistication: it suggests an attacker familiar enough with it to know it would survive the irradiation of senate email unharmed, unlike other living biological agents," writes reader TH.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who heads the Federation of American Scientists' chemical and biological weapons efforts, disagrees.

"Ricin is easy to make," she writes. "ANYONE could have done it. I suspect that this is routine nut stuff."

What's more, Rosenberg adds, "if it was not weaponized to form an aerosol, it would have to be eaten to be toxic (eg, eating with contaminated hands--unlikely to deliver much of a dose). The lack of precautions being taken at Dirksen suggests they know already it is not aerosolizable."

AND MORE: Gary Ackerman, with the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), warns that ricin can be ultra-deadly in an aerosol form. "About 3 milligrams will kill the average adult," he notes.

Making ricin aerosolizable is easier than doing it to, say, anthrax -- a living organism that can be killed at it's crushed into a fine powder. But, according to a CNS report from last year, ricin "aerosolization by means of a dispersal device... would require extensive prior research, development, operational planning, and testing, and [is] thus probably beyond the means of most terrorists."

"This is not a weapon of mass casualties," Ackerman says, referring to the Frist letter. "This is intended to get media attention."

AND MORE: The White House was also sent a ricin letter -- way back in November, ABC News is reporting. Another ricin package was left in a South Carolina post office last October.

MORE MONEY FOR LAME BIOSENSORS

The Bush administration wants another $119 million for its BioWatch program, which puts air filters in 31 major cities, to sniff for toxic terror attacks.

Too bad the system's close to useless, experts say.

First off, BioWatch protects against the most unlikely of terror threats: a crop duster, releasing a gigantic toxic cloud over an urban area. Maybe James Bond's bad guys would come up with such a scheme. But Osama & Co. haven't shown anywhere near the technical sophistication to brew up and maintain that much poison. And even if they did, a cold wind or a hard rain neutralizes most biothreats.

Plus, why fly a biplane over Times Square when you can send anthrax through the mail, or release it in a skyscraper's vents?

Even if a grandiose attack should come, BioWatch wouldn't provide any warning. The BioWatch filters are checked every 24 hours. Then, samples have to be run over to a Centers for Disease Control-approved lab. And then it takes another 12 hours to run tests. So if a pathogen is released, BioWatch won't know about it until a day-and-a-half later.

"You're getting very little specific data. And it's unclear what you could do with that information that's useful in the middle of an emergency," Peter LeJenue, a biodefense specialist with Potomac Institute for Policy Studies said.

What's more, LeJeune added, hundreds of these filters would be needed, to completely track the air in a single city. And the current program isn't anywhere near that extensive.

THERE'S MORE: Our friends at DARPA are looking for research proposals to neutralize toxic clouds before they can reach troops on the battlefield.

AND MORE: Speaking of hare-brained schemes, the Pentagon is asking for a 13 percent increase in its missile defense programs next year, to $10.2 billion.

CHENEY: LIAR OR FOOL?

Around the Defense Tech dinner table in the 1980's, there was a common theme (other than would my brother finally eat his vegetables): Was Ronald Reagan a conniving genius, a guy who willfully ignored the facts, or just a complete idiot?

I find myself asking the same questions after reading this L.A. Times story about Dick Cheney today.

Vice President Dick Cheney revived two controversial assertions about the war in Iraq on Thursday, declaring there was "overwhelming evidence" that Saddam Hussein had a relationship with Al Qaeda and that two trailers discovered after the war were proof of Iraq's biological weapons programs...

U.S. intelligence officials agree that there was contact between Hussein's agents and Al Qaeda members as far back as a decade ago and that operatives with ties to Al Qaeda had at times found safe haven in Iraq. But no intelligence has surfaced to suggest a deeper relationship, and other information turned up recently has suggested that significant ties were unlikely.

Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is in custody, has told American interrogators that Al Qaeda rejected the idea of any working relationship with Iraq, which was seen by the terrorist network as a corrupt, secular regime. When Hussein was captured last month, he was found with a document warning his supporters to be wary of working with foreign fighters.

"There's nothing I have seen or read that backs [Cheney] up," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who called Cheney's remarks Thursday "perplexing."

Cheney also argued that the main thrust of the administration's case for war — the claim that Iraq was assembling weapons of mass destruction — had been validated by the discovery of two flatbed trailers outfitted with tanks and other equipment.

"We've found a couple of semi-trailers at this point which we believe were in fact part of [a WMD] program," Cheney said. "I would deem that conclusive evidence, if you will, that he did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction."

That view is at odds with the judgment of the government's lead weapons inspector, David Kay, who said in an interim report in October that "we have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile [biological weapons] production effort."

THERE'S MORE: "Given enough time, Iraq certainly could have and probably would have developed CBW weaponry, and probably would have formed closer ties with Al Qaeda. By going into Iraq we pre-empted those possibilities," writes Defense Tech dad (and dinner table talk leader) Tom Shachtman. "Cheney could have said that, and been more believable. We really need to get beyond the seeming imperative, in our culture, that politicians must not admit to having been wrong."

AND MORE: "How about conniving genius liar?" asks Defense Tech reader MB. "All you have to do is look at the numbers of people the polls show still believe in the Al Qaida connection and WMD. These claims have been completely debunked, so Bush can no longer tell such bald lies to continue to reinforce these ideas among the rubes, but Cheney as VP is not subject to the same rules. So he keeps telling the lies, and the rubes keep falling for them, but Bush keeps his hands squeaky clean."

AND MORE: "David Kay, who stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction, said on Friday he does not believe there were any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq," according to Reuters.

"I don't think they existed," Kay tells the wire service. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s."

VIRUS BUILT FROM SCRATCH

Scientists, lead by the genome sequencing pioneer Craig Venter, "have built a virus from scratch in only two weeks," Nature reports. "It is the second virus to be synthesized from commercially available ingredients. The first - a poliovirus completed by Eckard Wimmer and his colleagues in 2002 - took three years to make."

Defense Tech reader JB says Venter's breakthrough shows that, not too long from now, "it will be a trivial exercise for a rogue government or other moderately scientifically sophisticated group to create modified organisms for use as terror weapons. The genomes of various pathogens are already known, and modification for increased virulence or communicability, or even vaccine/drug resistance, would… be easily achievable with some targeted experimentation."

The CIA, apparently, shared JB's gloomy views.

"Growing understanding of the complex biochemical pathways that underlie life processes has the potential to enable a class of new, more virulent biological agents engineered to attack distinct biochemical pathways and elicit specific effects," reads a CIA report, "The Darker Bioweapons Future."

A few weeks ago, JB and Barbara Hatch Rosenberg form the Federation of American Scientists engaged in a semi-civil throwdown here at Defense Tech over the bioterror threat.

TERRORISTS COULD BREED NEW POX

"With a basic level of biological training, terrorists could modify smallpox or monkeypox viruses and create a previously unseen strain of biological weapon," Global Security Newswire reports.

Monkeypox is the easier of the two to make and get, says St. Louis University virologist Mark Buller. But it's less lethal -- with a mortality rate around 10 percent. The Newswire notes that "a strain of monkeypox was brought into the United States by a pet giant Gambian rat earlier this year, but there were no fatalities among the 49 reported cases."

Earlier this month, Defense Tech heavyweights duked it out over whether terrorists would ever take the time to breed a new, pox-based biological monster.

PANEL: REVIEW BIORESEARCH FOR TERROR CONNEX

"Despite scientists' general distaste for any constraints on research, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday recommended prior review, at the university and federal levels, of experiments that could help terrorists or hostile nations make biological weapons," the New York Times reports.

Though physicists have long lived with the fact that certain areas of research are classified and cannot be discussed openly, biologists are relatively new to security concerns. Apart from biological defense research, done mostly at military institutions, academic biology is focused on medicine and conducted without security restraints...

The panel's work seems likely to be palatable to many scientists, but it remains to be seen if those concerned with national security will be satisfied.

BIGGER WORRIES THAN BIOCHEM

Lost in the hullabaloo over David Kay's report on Iraq's unconventional arms are some pretty basic questions. Like, why all the hysteria about biological and chemical weapons in the first place? And why is America spending billions to defend against on a large-scale biochem attack that'll almost certainly never come?

Maybe the hyperventilating news accounts are true, that Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups have tried to get their hands on such agents. But without the expertise and funding of a state sponsor like Iraq, it's almost impossible to pull off the attack of Biblical significance that the press has been wailing about for so long.

Heck, even with a state sponsor, it's extremely difficult. Lots and lots of money and expertise and needed. Environmental conditions have to be just right; a strong breeze or a light snow will neuter a big chunk of biological strikes.

So it's no surprise that, since 1900, there have been only 40 recorded bio-attacks. Compare that to conventional terrorist strikes, the ones using guns and bombs. There have been more than 650 of them worldwide -- just since the start of 2002, observes Gary Ackerman, with the Center for Nonprofileration Studies, in a soon-to-be-published article. What's more, "there has never been a single bioterrorist incident with more than 15 fatalities -- an all-too-common occurrence when terrorists use conventional weapons," he writes.

Despite this, the Department of Homeland Security's 2004 budget, signed into law last Wednesday, allocates nearly $900 million for "Project BioShield," an effort to prep vaccines and treatments for biological and other threats; $88 million for the "National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center," to protect people and crops from germ attacks; $38 million for air filters to catch pathogens; $84 million for the public health system, to treat biological and chemical-attack victims; the list goes on, just about endlessly. And it doesn't even begin to touch the $1.2 billion the Pentagon wants to spend next year on chem-bio detection, the $1.6-or-so billion from the National Institutes of Health, or the $600 million that President Bush wants to spend to keep looking for Saddam's unconventional stash.

My Tech Central Station article has more.

THERE'S MORE: A number of people wrote in, expressing upset with this story. But JB -- a doctor -- was the most eloquent, by far. Here's what he had to say:

Your analysis and conclusions are probably correct, with regard to both chemical weapons and biotoxins such as botulinum.

But they are utterly and dangerously incorrect when applied to biological agents that can infect humans, reproduce and amplify themselves and then spread to other people. Then it is not a question of quantity or dispersion, but of creating an agent with the right incubation period, mode of transmission and lethality, and then introducing it into the target environment in the proper way.

All of which is, unfortunately, now easy.

You may have heard of the Australian mousepox experiments, the news of which made quite a stir in interested circles a year and a half ago or so. Researchers, in an effort to use mousepox virus (a normally mild, nonlethal murine infection) as a vector for a cytokine (IL-4) to induce inflammation in infected mice and suppress their reproduction, found that the insertion of the gene for that cytokine turned this little nothing disease into a fatal one, and that previously useful mousepox vaccine became fairly ineffective, to boot.

Note that mousepox is related to the virus that causes human smallpox, that you can buy the necessary materials mail order easy as you please, and that the technology for inserting a gene for this or something else into an existing viral genome is trivial, and could be done by any grad student in the subject with access to any reasonable university or industrial molecular bio/genetics lab.

This, of course, is just an example. You could just as well modify Ebola virus to extend its non-prostrating contagious period a little, so epidemics would spread instead of burning out, etc. etc.

The danger is acute. We are now in a period of time, which may last 10 years or so (no one knows), in which the ability to create such genetically modified killers is widespread, but the ability to identify, respond to, and neutralize them quickly enough to avert catastrophe, has not yet developed. And every day's news reminds us that the irrational evil that would not for a moment hesitate to use such a weapon continues to exist in the world.

By downplaying the need to use all available methods and strategies (including, of course, pre-emptive military action when necessary) to prevent this threat from killing millions of innocents is wrong.

AND MORE: Barbara Rosenberg, with the Federation of American Scientists, calls JB's warning the "typical response of the scientist who knows nothing about BW (biological weapons)."

He says it is easy. Ha. No terrorist group would waste time and resources to genetically engineer a new agent and test the result, including field tests of delivery etc etc. when they can get a bigger, faster and far more reliable bang by simple, conventional means. Extending the incubation time of ebola is not something you take off the shelf. Furthermore, the uncontrollable epidemic scenario is vastly exaggerated. Ask public health officials who have seen smallpox epidemics.

Incidentally, the mousepox experiment increased lethality, not infectivity. Existing agents are already sufficiently lethal.

He's right, we need to be able to respond quickly to outbreaks -- but no intentional outbreak will ever rival what nature already does (while few in the developed world pay any attention).

AND MORE: The tone of the piece was that defending against biological weapons is pointless because they have never killed more than 15 people per given incident," writes Defense Tech pal Wyatt Earp.

"But that's not accurate because bioweapons have killed more than 15 people per incident in the past. Bioterror is just a spin-word for an act of war using biological weapons. And biological weapons while not changing the outcome of wars, have inflicted mass casualties on civilian populations during warfare and have killed more than 15 people (during anthrax leaks) in Russia.

AND MORE: James Lewis, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, forwards on an article (unavailable online, sorry) that basically says the worry over bio-terror began when Bill Clinton started reading apocalyptic novels like the Cobra Event and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six.

AND MORE: Defense Tech reader DS reminds us to "keep in mind (that) setting priorities is always hardest at the outset of war. Over time, have faith that the USA will get its act together."

AND MORE: RS, a distinguished Defense Tech reader, says to check out the Adrienne Mayor's Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare inthe Ancient World. (The Times did a story on Tuesday keyed off of the book.)

Biochem warfare "all started in -- I swear by the Gas Mask of Gilgamesh -- Sumeria, circa 1700 BC," RS notes. That "provides Iraq with considerable wiggle room, as thay can claim that anything Dave Kay digs up is just war surplus from Tilgath Pileser's last hit on Uruk."

AND MORE: "When deciding where to allocate resources, one must take into account not only the probability of the threat, but its potential consequences," JB fires back at Barbara Rosenberg. "While a conventional suicide bomber or another plane hijacking are certainly much more probable than the scenarios we are discussing here, the deaths and civilizational disruptions they would cause would be trivial in comparison to a successful biological or nuclear attack."

PENTAGON SOLD BIO-LAB GEAR ONLINE

The Defense Department sold openly, over the Internet, gear that could be used for a bio-weapons lab, according to a draft Congressional report.

"Many items needed to establish a laboratory for making biological warfare agents were being sold on the Internet to the public from DoD's excess property inventory for pennies on the dollar, making them both easy and economical to obtain," CNN quotes the report from the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, as saying.

"As requested, GAO established a fictitious company and purchased over the Internet key excess DoD biological equipment items and related protective clothing necessary to produce and disseminate biological warfare agents."

CNN notes that "The Defense Department agency responsible for the sale of excess property to the public, the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service, halted the sale of such items September 19 while the practice is reviewed."

THERE'S MORE: "The DoD selling excess equipment that could be used to make CBW agents is a problem, but focusing on that sale will mislead us," writes Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman. "The equipment bought from DoD (by the GAO sting) could also have been bought from regular commercial outlets, possibly even the same ones that sold the stuff originally to DoD.

"The GAO is correct, however, in concluding that DoD does not check out the buyers of its surplus equipment in any significant way; that aspect of the surplus-inventory reduction program could be easily fixed."

EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT WMDs

How can inspectors tell if a chemical plant might be used for making mustard gas? It's one of a number of interesting questions answered in this "FAQ on WMDs" on Allsci.com.

KAY: NO IRAQI WMD

"After searching for nearly six months, U.S. forces and CIA experts have found no chemical or biological weapons in Iraq and have determined that Iraq's nuclear program was in only 'the very most rudimentary' state, the Bush administration's chief investigator formally told Congress yesterday.

"Before the war, the administration said Iraq had a well-developed nuclear program that presented a threat to the United States," the Washington Post notes.

Now, "It clearly does not look like a massive, resurgent program, based on what we discovered," former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, who heads the government's search, said yesterday after briefing House and Senate intelligence committees in a closed session on his interim report. He said he will need six to nine months to conclude his work, and congressional sources said the administration is requesting an additional $600 million toward the effort to find weapons of mass destruction.

Kay, who heads the CIA's 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group, said the team had "discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment" that Iraq had hidden. He said he believes "there was an intent . . . to continue production at some point in time." Among the evidence unearthed was a network of laboratories and safe houses, a laboratory complex hidden in a prison and evidence of a program for ballistic and land-attack missiles with ranges prohibited by the United Nations.

Kay's statement and a few, undated, supporting photographs are here. The New York Times provides Kay report highlights here.

CHEM-ARMS DESTRUCTION PLAN DERAILED

Already more than $23 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule, America's program for destroying its stockpile of chemical weapons will now be delayed until 2012, at least.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon announced that it had asked for international regulators' consent to miss by three and a half years an April 2004 deadline to eliminate 45 percent of its blister and nerve agent cache.

What was left unsaid, according to government reports and Army sources, is the new final deadline: 2012, the last moment possible under the Chemical Weapons Convention. And even that date could slip.

"We're planning on finishing by 2012, presuming everything goes right for the next eight, nine years. But you know as well as I that nothing 'always goes right,'" said Dick Sloan, a spokesman for the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky, where 523 tons of lethal VX and sarin are slated for disposal, starting around 2006.

At the moment, none of the military's disposal installations are getting rid of any chemical arms, according to Army representatives at the facilities:

• A recently opened incinerator in Anniston, Alabama, is closed for the week for furnace inspections. The facility has been shut down more than 20 percent of the time since it first started firing in August.

• An older incinerator, in Tooele, Utah, has been down since Sept. 4. The Chemical Weapons Working Group claims that more than 75 alarms about escaped lethal agents have sounded in the last six months alone at Tooele, which was closed from July 2002 to March 2003 after a plant worker was exposed to sarin.

• The chemical neutralization plant in Aberdeen, Maryland -- which began work in April -- has been offline since Aug. 16, after air filters started to spew smoke. It won't return to full capacity until mid-November.

My Wired News story has more.

"TURMOIL" FOR U.S. CHEM-WEAPON DESTRUCTION PLAN

The Pentagon's program to get rid of America's stockpile of chemical weapons is in "turmoil," according to a new study from the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm.

"Long-standing leadership, organizational, and strategic planning issues remain unresolved," the report notes. "Roles and responsibilities are often unclear," leaving "the program without a clear road map."

Simply put, there are "no assurances" that the Defense Department "will be able to meet the program's principal goal—to destroy the chemical stockpile in a safe manner and by the Chemical Weapons Convention 2007 deadline."

CHEM INCINERATORS CONKING OUT?

On Saturday, the Associated Press reports, the Army "fired up its first chemical weapons incinerator near a residential area and destroyed a Cold War-era rocket loaded with enough sarin to wipe out a city."

But less than a week into its operation, the incinerator at the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama has run into trouble, according to local press accounts. It's been shut down twice -- once for a hydraulic fluid leak, then for a problem with the machinery that cools the exhaust filters.

About 190 M-55 rockets, filled with nerve agents, are in the facility awaiting processing, says the Anniston Star.

"More than 661,000 munitions containing nerve and blister agent are stored in concrete bunkers at the depot. The Army plans to burn them in the $1 billion incinerator over the next several years."

THERE'S MORE: "The U.S. Army has stopped burning some chemical weapons at its Tooele, Utah, incinerator while it investigates an incomplete burn of M-55 rockets filled with VX nerve gas during test last week," Global Security Newswire reports. And the service has also decided to delay the destruction of VX at the Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana. The facility, expected to be ready in October to dispose of the stuff, now won't be prepared to do so until January, at least.

CHEMICAL AGENTS AT BALTIC'S BOTTOM

"American teams may be struggling to find chemical weapons and other poisonous materials in Iraq," the New York Times reports, "but tens of thousands of bombs and barrels filled with blistering agents and nerve gas lie scattered in the Baltic Sea and the eastern Atlantic."

American, British and Soviet military dumped them there after World War II. Entire ships full of weapons, most of them captured from Nazi Germany, were scuttled for disposal and forgotten. Now they have come back to haunt the environment.

Over time, scientists say, the weapon casings have corroded in the seawater and become brittle, allowing poisons like arsenic, lewisite, mustard gas and sarin to leach out. Scientists from the Baltic countries and Russia have found lethal material mixed in with sediments, and highly toxic sulfur mustard gas, transformed into brown-yellow clumps of gel, has washed ashore.

The problem is compounded by fishermen who have gone into risky areas to chase depleted fish stocks, using increasingly aggressive methods, including bottom tackle that snag the bombs. They routinely find mustard gas clumps among their catch and haul up whole or damaged chemical bombs in their nets.

"PROJECT BIOSHIELD": CLUELESS

Project BioShield is President Bush's $6 billion proposal for helping pharmaceutical firms develop drugs to beat bioterror agents. And it is, simply put, a complete mess, National Journal reveals.

Paul Redmond had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day recently. It was the day that Redmond, assistant secretary for information analysis at the Homeland Security Department, testified before the House Select Homeland Security Committee about Project BioShield...

Redmond didn't have an opening statement. He admitted he has only one person working under him to assess the bioterror threat. He said he isn't getting the information he needs from the intelligence community. His description of the bioterror threat was nothing more than what lawmakers had already read in the newspapers. And he wasn't prepared to brief them in a closed session. Redmond eventually made a plea for sympathy: "I'm trying to do my best at this point."

Redmond's lack of preparedness on BioShield is evidence of a potentially grave weakness: Redmond's intelligence cupboard is largely bare, yet the department appears to have no trouble launching big expensive programs without having assessed what the country's highest-priority threats are.

Despite this keystone kop approach, Project BioShield is "cruising through the House," according to the magazine.

COAL-MINE CANARIES ON A CHIP

"Hundreds of subways riders and stadium spectators may one day owe their lives to the death of a single cell," Erik Baard writes in today's Wired News.

Engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have merged a living cell with an electrical circuit so that in a chemical attack the cell's death would trip an alarm.

The bionic chip, made by Boris Rubinsky and Yong Huang, updates the 19th-century coal miners' trick of bringing canaries down into shafts. When the delicate birds died from inhaling poisonous gases, the workers knew to evacuate.

The Berkeley bionic chip works by gauging the electrical resistance of a cell membrane. In the cell's death throes, that resistance spikes, and then plummets.

"Most current security systems work by detecting specific pathogens and toxins, so if an attacker uses a more exotic agent, it could slip by unnoticed," Rubinsky wrote in an e-mail. "Our system will detect anything that has the ability to kill a cell -- even when not expected."

U.S. WMD-HUNTERS OUT OF TARGETS

The Associated Press reports, "U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on President Bush to explain why no banned arms have been found.

After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say they are now waiting for a large team of Pentagon intelligence experts to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and documents.

"It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time," said Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 percent. "We're hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future."

Over the past week, his and several other teams have been taken off assignment completely. Rather than visit suspected weapons sites, they are brushing up on target practice and catching up on letters home.

(via Cursor)

THERE'S MORE: A former senior Iraqi brigadier general says that, in 1996, Saddam began putting together teams of scientists and mobile labs to someday rebuild his stockpile of illict weapons. But the program "did not produce any illegal arms and that none now exist in Iraq," according to the Los Angeles Times.

However, the officer insists that the teams did put plans on paper "to quickly develop weapons of mass destruction if U.N. sanctions against Iraq were lifted," the paper reports.

"We could start again anytime," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he fears for his life. "It's very easy. Especially biological."

"The point was, the Iraqis kept the knowledge," he explained during a lengthy interview Friday in which he offered tantalizing details of secret programs. But U.S. weapons hunters "will never find anything here. Only oil..."

The intelligence officer's account, parts of which could not be independently verified, gives ammunition to both sides of the controversy (over whether or not Iraq had banned weapons). He said that U.N. sanctions and inspections in the 1990s crippled Iraq's ability to build illegal weapons and that Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear programs were effectively eliminated in the mid-1990s.

But his description of an ongoing effort to prepare for illicit weapons production programs in the future suggests that Hussein would have remained a serious threat if U.S.-led forces had not ousted the dictator.

DOUBTS ON IRAQI BIOTRAILERS

"American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs," reports the New York Times' Judith Miller and William Broad. "In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment."

"Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process."

The Bush administration has said the two trailers, which allied forces found in Iraq in April and May, are evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding a program for biological warfare. In a white paper last week, it publicly detailed its case, even while conceding discrepancies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof.

Now, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the administration's conclusions in what appears to be a bitter debate within the intelligence community. Skeptics said their initial judgments of a weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to light.

This story is significant both for what it says, and for who is saying it. For months, Miller has been the media's lead cheerleader on Iraq's WMD programs. Under a highly unusual arrangement with the U.S. military, which gets to vet her stories, she's passed along rumors fed to her by Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi. Miller's stories are still getting the military once-over. But now, she has new sources -- ones in American and British intelligence.

THERE'S MORE: "In (a) report last September, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it could find no reliable information to indicate that Iraq had any chemical weapons available for use on the battlefield. But the agency also said Iraq probably had stockpiles of banned chemical warfare agents," according to the Associated Press.

AND MORE: In a separate article, the AP says, "The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war."

AND MORE: One Defense Tech reader -- who works in military intelligence -- thinks that the story above is disingenuous.

"You can usually always find one analyst who will disagree with official and published analytical reports," he writes. "It bothers me that the media seems to be searching out those dissenters and presenting them as a 'Gotcha', which leads me to believe that perhaps they have an agenda at work (i.e. Making Bush look bad)."

Even the "retired intelligence official" quoted in the article "thought there were WMD to be worried about," he notes.

Thielmann said he had presumed Iraq had supplies of chemical and probably biological weapons. He particularly expected U.S. forces to find caches of mustard agent or other chemical weapons left over from Saddam's old stockpiles.

"We appear to have been wrong," he said. "I've been genuinely surprised at that."

AND MORE: The Guardian breaks down the reasons why these trailers, at least, weren't for biowar.

ANTI-TERROR ANSWERS BLOWIN' IN THE WIND

Scientists have a pretty good idea how wind rushes in between mountains, and over the plains. But the paths air takes in the urban canyons of New York City are more of a mystery.

So researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration plan to put wind monitors on rooftops throughout Midtown Manhattan and the West Village -- just down the street from Defense Tech world headquarters.

Supposedly, this Urban Atmospheric Observatory project will boost terrorism preparedness in the City. Figuring out how air flows should help determine where to put radiation detectors and air filters, like the ones being used in Tom Ridge's "Bio-Watch" initiative.

Once the sensors are in place this summer, the Daily News reports, scientists plan to release harmless gases in Manhattan and use the devices to track them.

Why the West Vilage? The Daily News calls my former neighborhood a "potential terrorist target." Maybe -- if the bad guys are looking to disrupt the City's supply of antiques and men's bikini briefs.

WMDs, PLEASE

Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News all have big stories on the so-far fruitless search for Iraq's banned weapons. And all of 'em have juicy tales from the previously-behind-the-scene fights over the accuracy of America's WMD intelligence.

U.S News:

On the evening of February 1, two dozen American officials gathered in a spacious conference room at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Va. The time had come to make the public case for war against Iraq. For six hours that Saturday, the men and women of the Bush administration argued about what Secretary of State Colin Powell should--and should not--say at the United Nations Security Council four days later. Not all the secret intelligence about Saddam Hussein's misdeeds, they found, stood up to close scrutiny. At one point during the rehearsal, Powell tossed several pages in the air. "I'm not reading this," he declared. "This is bulls- - -."

Time:

Several current and former military officers who saw all the relevant data through this spring charge that the Pentagon took the raw data from the CIA and consistently overinterpreted the threat posed by Iraq's stockpiles. "There was a predisposition in this Administration to assume the worst about Saddam," a senior military officer told TIME. This official, recently retired, was deeply involved in planning the war with Iraq but left the service after concluding that the U.S. was going to war based on bum intelligence. "They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction," the officer says.

Newsweek:

As the military began to gear up for an invasion, top planners at Central Command tried to get a fix from the CIA on WMD sites they could take out with bombs and missiles. After much badgering, says an informed military source, the CIA allowed the CENTCOM planners to see what the agency had on WMD sites. "It was crap," said a CENTCOM planner. The sites were "mostly old friends," buildings bombed by the military back in the 1991 gulf war, another source said. The CIA had satellite photos of the buildings. "What was inside the structures was another matter," says the source. "We asked, 'Well, what agents are in these buildings? Because we need to know.' And the answer was, 'We don’t know'," the CENTCOM planner recalled.

When the military visited these sites after the war, they found nothing but rubble. No traces of WMD. Nor did Special Forces find any of the 20 or so Scud missiles, possibly tipped with chem-bio warheads, that were said by the CIA to be lurking somewhere in the Western Desert.

BURIED BACTERIA AT MARYLAND ARMY BASE

"Two years of digging at the U.S. Army's Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland has unearthed more than 2,000 tons of hazardous waste -- including vials of live bacteria and nonvirulent anthrax that the military did not know was buried there," the Washington Post reports.

Discovery of the pathogens at the former biological weapons research center turned what the Army thought would be industrial waste removal into the biggest cleanup in its history. So far, cleanup crews have discovered more than 100 glass vials, many containing live bacteria, and in a few, a nonvirulent strain of anthrax. The $25 million excavation is due to end this year.

While the Army searches for evidence of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, Fort Detrick's cleanup saga shows how, nearly 40 years after the United States ended such programs at home, it still struggles with their lingering dangers. As in the Middle East, poor documentation, the passage of time and the programs' secrecy have slowed the effort.

"You find it, contain it and try to figure out what it is," said Col. John Ball, Fort Detrick garrison commander. "We're learning, but it's expensive."

(via Global Security Newswire)

A VIRUS TO FIGHT ANTHRAX

One of the biggest bioterror fears is that the bad guys will use a strain of anthrax that's resistant to the traditional antibiotics. But researchers are quickly developing new defenses that could overcome these extra-tough anthrax breeds, according to Technology Review.

One of the most promising approaches "pits a virus against anthrax," the magazine says.

Rockefeller University microbiologist Vincent Fischetti identified an enzyme from a virus that infects only anthrax-causing and closely related bacteria. In test-tube experiments, the enzyme kills about a hundred million bacteria in two minutes or less. “It drills a hole in the cell wall, and the organisms explode,” Fischetti says. He adds that the treatment should boost the power of existing antibiotics against anthrax, as well as kill resistant strains of the bacteria.

ANTHRAX SUSPECTED IN EGYPTIAN SAILOR'S DEATH

An Egyptian sailor has died in northern Brazil -- and anthrax is suspected in his death.

Details are sketchy in this case. But according to wire reports, the man, Ibrahim Saved Soliman Ibrahim, had traveled from Cairo to the Amazon state of Para about two and a half weeks ago. There he was to meet a ship, destined for a smelter on the Saguenay River in Quebec. But before he could get on board, Ibrahim died in his hotel room, after vomiting, internal bleeding and multiple organ failure.

A spokesman for Brazilian police said that anthrax was responsible for the death. Ibrahim was given a suitcase in Cairo by an unidentified person and was due to deliver it to somebody in Canada, according to the spokesman. But he fell ill after opening the case.

Canadian authorities now have the ship in quarantine, 1,000 meters off the Nova Scotian port of Halifax. But they're not convinced that anthrax is to blame for the sailor's death.

"I can assure you we've discovered no threat to Canada, criminally or terrorism-wise," a Canadian inspector in Halifax told Canada Press. "Right now it's just a story."

Health Canada officials are expecting definitive test results on samples taken from the ship "early this week."

For background information on anthrax, click here.

THERE'S MORE: Now Brazilian health officials are saying that whatever killed the sailor, "it is not anthrax."

MORE CONFUSION OVER IRAQ CHEMICALS

It's happening again. A chemical cache first touted as possible "smoking gun" evidence for Saddam's WMD programs is now being called into question.

"Initial tests indicated the presence of the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin and an unspecified blister agent in a stash of 55-gallon drums, about 130 miles north of Baghdad," says CNN.

But a later test on the material turned out negative. Now, the chemicals are being flown back to the U.S. for definitive exams.

Why the conflicting answers? A recent Tech Central Station story of mine has the answers.

IRAQ DESTROYED CHEM WEAPONS ON WAR'S EVE, SCIENTIST SAYS

Why haven't U.S. forces found Iraqi banned weapons? Because Saddam's government destroyed them, only days before the war began, according to New York Times' Judith Miller.

A scientist "who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team" all this, Miller says. As proof, the man showed soliders barrels filled with "pre-cursors" to chemical weapons.

The scientist alleges that "Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda."

Explosive stuff. But there are some odd things about Miller's story, as Slate's Eric Umansky notes:

As part of the deal to report on the chemical-hunting unit, Miller agreed to submit a draft of her article "for a check by military officials." Miller says the officials, trying to protect the unnamed scientist from retribution from Saddam leftovers, requested that the names of the actual chemicals uncovered be stricken from the piece. The NYT agreed. That may have been the right move, but it's potentially an important omission: Aren't pre-cursors to some chemical weapons also the basic ingredients for things that have commercial applications? Also, while most of the article forwards some officers' contentions that they've found a smoking gun, the last paragraph quotes the division commander on the scene saying, "work must still be done to validate the information."

CHEMICAL "SMOKING GUNS" FLAME OUT -- WHY?

It's a scene being replayed all over Iraq. American soldiers stumble upon a mysterious liquid or powder. The material is tested - and it's shown to be a nerve agent, or mustard gas. Embedded reporters and military flacks rush to tell the world that, at last, they've found the "smoking gun" that proves Saddam had banned weapons all along.

And then, a few hours later, further analysis shows that the whole thing was just a false alarm. The sample has to be sent to a lab, where a third and final determination can be made about whether or not the material is toxic.

What's going on here? Why do these "false positives" - as they're called in weapons inspectorese - keep popping up? Why are these tests so consistently inconsistent?

Check out my Tech Central Station story for answers.

THERE'S MORE: "Nerve agents like VX and sarin gas are scary terrorist threats, but a top federal official is more worried about chemicals that travel the nation's highways every day," the Associated Press says. "For instance, toxic industrial chemicals such as chlorine, phosgene and hydrogen cyanide are readily available. These are among the earliest chemical weapons and were used by troops in World War I. Today, they are commonly used in commercial manufacturing, and experts believe they could easily be used for terrorism. "

ARMY FOXES HUNT FOR CHEMICALS

When U.S. soldiers found drums of suspected chemical weapons yesterday at a warehouse in Albu Muhawish, Iraq, two Army Fox mobile laboratories were quickly brought in.

The Philly Inquirer takes a look at the three-man, 20-ton vehicles, each equppied with more than a million dollars worth of chemical testing gear inside.

My question is: with all that equipment, why are the Foxes coming up with so many "false positives" -- reports that banned weapons are present, only to be later disproved?

According to the Telegraph, U.S. Central Command is receiving an average of three reports a day of suspected weapons of mass destruction. None has so far held up.

TOXIC ROCKETS DISCOVERED NEAR BAGHDAD

National Public Radio is reporting that Marines near Baghdad have discovered rockets equipped with sarin and mustard gas. They found significant quantities of the toxins -- "not just trace elements" -- in the cache of 20-foot long BM-21 projectiles.

U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar had no immediate comment on the report. But if the story is accurate, this would be the first time major quantities of banned weapons have been found in the current conflict with Iraq.

This is one of several potential chemical discoveries in Iraq.

"U.S. soldiers evacuated an Iraqi military compound on Sunday after tests by a mobile laboratory confirmed evidence of sarin nerve gas," according to the Knight-Ridder News Service. "The evacuation... followed a day of tests for the nerve agent that came back positive, then negative. Additional tests Sunday night by an Army Fox mobile nuclear, biological and chemical detection laboratory confirmed the existence of sarin."

Col. Tim Madere, the top chemical officer in 101st Airborne V Corps, told the New York Times he'd withhold final judgement on whether or not the substance is sarin until the 51st Chemical Company can perform a more thorough analysis. Those tests are supposed to be completed by Wednesday.

On Friday, MSNBC.com reported finding traces of the ricin and botulinum toxins at a militant camp near the Iranian border.

THERE'S MORE: The chemical fog of war is rolling in thick. AFP now says that the "sarin" supposedly found by the 101st is actually a pesticide.

MARINES SICK OF CHEMBIO SUITS

Marines fighting around Baghdad are "starting to doubt the seriousness of the chem-bio (weapon) threat," and are sick of wearing the suits designed to protect them against such dangers, according to Army Times.

It's been widely reported that the MOPP ("Mission-Oriented, Protective-Posture") gear makes the desert heat even worse. What's less known is how the clumsy, charcoal-lined suits are turning relatively routine acts into major productions.

"The Marines’ trousers don’t even have a zipper, turning a simple bathroom break into a nightmare of untucking and unbuckling," the paper says.

During an artillery mission (outside Baghdad on) April 4, while grabbing for a 100-pound shell from the dirty bed of his ammo truck, the corporal’s slick (MOPP) rubber boots lost traction. In the middle of a combat operation, the Marine fell four feet to the ground, breaking his right leg in two places and prompting an immediate ground medevac.

“It sucks to lose a corporal, period,” said 1st Lt. Ty Yount, 26, executive officer for Battery M, 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines, whose Marine fell from the truck. “But to lose one like that, out here, that just makes it worse.”

The grunts have been wearing the MOPP gear pretty much non-stop since the invasion of Iraq began, nearly three weeks ago.

LEAFY, GREEN BIOSENSORS

First they brought in the chickens. Then came the pigeons. Now, Army-backed researchers are trying to turn plants into biological and chemical toxin sensors, Wired News reports.

Scientists at Penn State are working on a three-year, $3.5 million program to turn the mouse-ear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), a small flowering plant in the mustard family, into a green sentinel. The idea is to futz with the plant's proteins so that it makes a visual response when poisons are nearby.

But these researchers are hoping the cress will do more. Maybe the plant can be genetically engineered to react to explosive elements -- making the cress into a living mine-detector, as well.

Don't hold your breath for this one.

CHEMICAL DEFENSES COULD AWAIT U.S. TROOPS

Saddam may try to use his unconventional weapons in uncoventional ways. Armies have traditionally unleashed chemical attacks on an enemy, firing toxic bombs or artillery shells at opposing troops. But Saddam may these poisons as defenses, turning Baghdad neighborhoods so toxic that "few would want to venture, even in protective suits," reports the New York Times.

Mustard gas and the nerve agent VX "might linger on the battlefield like pools of motor oil on the ground," the paper speculates. The chemicals would maintain their potency for weeks.

"Iraq used a variation of that tactic in its final offensives in its war with Iran in 1988," the Times notes. "The Iraqis laid down mustard gas behind the Iranian forces, then bombarded the front lines with the short-lived but highly toxic sarin. The goal was to drive the retreating sarin-exposed troops into the mustard trap."

THERE'S MORE: "U.S. troops found thousands of boxes of white powder, nerve agent antidote and Arabic documents on how to engage in chemical warfare at an industrial site south of Baghdad," according to the Associated Press. "But a senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the materials were believed to be explosives."