Chemical Warfare

Combating Such an Attack Would Prove Equally Difficult

Making Chemical Weapons Is No Easy Task
by Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer

Source: The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19900-2001Feb2.html

With U.S. intelligence fixated on Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden and the chilling possibility that he has been testing chemical weapons on animals, policymakers in the Bush administration and members of Congress would do well to consider the true difficulties involved in making chemical weapons.

The theoretical possibility of mass casualties from a chemical or biological attack makes figuring out how to respond - and how much to spend - exceedingly difficult.

"It's very hard to make risk-management decisions because you're talking about highly improbable events with catastrophic results," Richard A. Clarke, counterterrorist czar at the National Security Council, acknowledged in an interview late last year.

"How do you know when you've done enough?" Clarke asked, shortly before the Bush administration asked him to remain in place for an indefinite transition period.

"It's very, very difficult."

But Amy E. Smithson, a researcher on chemical and biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, makes a persuasive argument in a recent study that many terrorist "experts" have consistently hyped the threat of chemical or biological terrorist attacks.

Far more than most, Smithson appreciates the lethality of such weapons. Indeed, Smithson said last week, bin Laden's suspected experimentation with chemical weapons on animals would mean that he's interested is knowing whether his nerve gas cocktails really work.

"I take that pretty seriously - don't get me wrong - given his stated interest and the [violent] path he's taken," Smithson said in an interview. "But will he acquire the capacity to kill dozens, hundreds or thousands? There are orders of magnitudes between the scales."

When all is said and done, Smithson said, a huge gulf remains between the "theoretical possibility" of mass casualties resulting from a chemical or biological attack and the "operational reality" of terrorist organizations.

Terrorists, she writes in "Ataxia: The Chemical and Biological Terrorism Threat and the US Response," "are likely to find it quite difficult to obtain and use biological and chemical weapons effectively."

A Case in Point: Aum Shinrikyo

To make her case, Smithson dissects the capabilities of Aum Shinrikyo, the apocalyptic Japanese cult that killed a dozen commuters on the subway in Tokyo with a sarin gas attack in 1995.

"Aum Shinrikyo, it is fair to say, changed the way the world thinks about terrorism," Smithson writes.

Unfortunately, most of the doomsday lessons drawn from the group's sarin attack, Smithson contends, have been the wrong ones, emphasizing "theoretical possibility" over "operational reality."

And the "operational reality" of Aum Shinrikyo, Smithson writes, is an object lesson is just how difficult it was for this well-funded, highly motivated and well-educated terrorist organization to pull off either a biological or a chemical attack.

"In short, Aum has often been portrayed as a beacon for terrorists to follow, but it could be just the opposite," Smithson writes. "If the past is any predictor of the future, weapons of choice for terrorists will remain truck bombs and other conventional tools that are markedly less technically demanding, resource-intensive, and dangerous for the perpetrators."

A Terrorist Nightmare

Whatever bin Laden's chemical capabilities may be at remote camps in the mountains of Afghanistan, Aum Shinrikyo's were most likely far greater.

The cult operated in and around modern Tokyo, spent an estimated $30 million on its chemical weapons program, targeted the recruitment of graduate students and other well-trained scientists, and still managed to kill fewer people on the Tokyo subway with sarin than the terrorists who bombed the USS Cole in October did with conventional explosives.

"By almost any standard, Aum was a terrorist nightmare - a cult flush with money and technical skills led by a con-man guru with an apocalyptic vision, an obsession with chemical and biological weaponry, and no qualms about killing," Smithson writes.

But by almost any standard, Aum Shinrikyo's chemical weapons program, and an earlier attempt to develop biological agents, failed to produce anything close to the killing power the group desired.

The cult started off by trying to simply acquire chemical weapons from a rogue U.S. operation peddling nerve gas on the black market - but found itself dealing with a front for the U.S. Customs Service.

For terrorists, the lesson here is plain: Worldwide law enforcement and intelligence agencies represent no small obstacle.

When Aum Shinrikyo then turned to producing its own stockpiles of chemicals in 1993, it soon ran into complex problems involved in dispersing nerve gas in ways that kill lots of people.

"Weaponizing" chemical agents requires munitions that disperse the substances in droplets, which can kill on skin contact, or vapor, which can be lethal if inhaled. But most explosive devices within the technological reach of terrorists would either destroy most of the chemical agents upon detonation or fail to effectively disperse them.

Spraying also can effectively disperse chemical agents. But most experts believe that 90 percent of any agent sprayed outdoors will not reach its intended targets in lethal form, given the vagaries of temperature, sunlight, wind and rain. Pumping chemical or biological agents into a building's indoor ventilation system is no easy task either, requiring detailed knowledge of how air is distributed from floor to floor.

In Aum Shinrikyo's first attempt to attack a rival group by spraying sarin gas from a moving van, Smithson notes, "the sprayer completely malfunctioned and sprayed backwards." The second attempt ended up exposing the group's security chief to the toxic nerve agent.

When the cult finally executed its climactic subway attack, its dispersal method of choice was poking holes in plastic bags with sharpened umbrella points. Noxious fumes then seeped from the bags into the subway cars.

The resulting chaos and death shocked the world. "Rescue crews found pandemonium, with scores of commuters stumbling about, vision-impaired and struggling to breathe," Smithson writes. "Casualties littered the sidewalks and subway station exits. Some foaming at the mouth, some vomiting and others prone and convulsing."

But in the final analysis, she notes, 85 percent of the 5,510 people treated at Tokyo hospitals and clinics were simply worried, not harmed. Twelve ultimately died from sarin exposure, about 40 others were seriously injured, and slightly less than 1,000 were "moderately ill."

Aum Shinrikyo and Bioware: Serial Flops

Aum Shinrikyo's attempts to produce biological weapons, meanwhile, were far more inept. The cult tried and failed to isolate deadly strains of botulinum toxin and anthrax. And isolating lethal strains is only the first hurdle that must be cleared in executing a biological attack.

Once isolated, biowarfare agents are "notoriously 'persnickety' to produce, such that slight mistakes with growth media, temperature, or other control parameters can result in failure," Smithson writes.

Assuming those production problems can be mastered, dispersing biological agents is even more difficult than dispersing chemical weapons.

Crude bombs end up killing a bioweapon, not effectively dispersing it. Crude spraying devices typically do not produce a small enough particle size to lodge in people's lungs.

In 1993, Aum Shinrikyo tried to spray anthrax from the top of an eight-story building in Tokyo. No one died, and people who lived near the building, Smithson notes, reported seeing "clots of jellyfish-like material in the street, a sign of clogging problems during the spraying of a slurry."

"Thus, despite the cult's investment of considerable money and time and the participation of graduate-level scientists in the effort, Aum's efforts to isolate, produce, and spread biological agents were, from start to finish, a serial of flops," Smithson concludes.

And most other chem-bio terrorists have been no more successful.

A Quarter-Century of Chem-Bio Terror: Zero U.S. Casualties Since 1975, according to statistics quoted by Smithson from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, there have been 154 fatalities from "chemical terrorism" - and none in the United States from either chemical or biological attacks.

In 342 cases of chemical or biological terrorism worldwide over the past quarter-century, three or fewer people were killed or injured 96 percent of the time, according to the Monterey database. Sixty percent of the time, no one was killed or injured.

"Terrorists have not even approached inflicting harm commensurate with the ten thousand- and 100,000-casualty scenarios that were bandied about in the late 1990s," Smithson writes. ". . . [A]nalysis of terrorist behavior with chemical or biological substances does not provide much backing for the not-if-but-when catastrophic terrorism school of thought. From 1980 to 1999, the State Department reports 9,255 terrorist attacks worldwide. The 16 cases in the Monterey database involving five or more injuries over a 25-year period become a statistical drop in the ocean.

"Conventional terrorism was far more prevalent, far more harmful, and far more deadly than chemical or biological terrorism. Therefore, if the past is any predictor of the future, terrorist incidents involving chemical and biological substances will continue to be small in scale and far less harmful than conventional terrorist attacks."