What the found senate powder really means
by Jack Kelly
Analysis has confirmed that the suspicious white powder
found in a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Bill
Frist (R-Tenn) contained the deadly poison ricin. In
January of 2003, British police found traces of ricin
in an apartment used by Algerians who were linked to
the al-Qa'eda cell run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, who was
operating out of Baghdad at the time. Iraq was working
to weaponize ricin up until the U.S. invasion last
March, David Kay's investigators in the Iraq Survey
Group found.
Coincidence? Perhaps.
Ricin is made from the waste produced when castor beans
are processed into castor oil. It is technically a
chemical weapon, because ricin is not "alive," as an
anthrax spore is. A dose as small as 500 micrograms -
which can fit on the head of a pin - can be fatal.
There is no antidote for it. Because ricin is not
contagious (only the exposed person dies), and because
it is harder to spread in aerosol form than anthrax is,
ricin is a better assassination weapon than a weapon of
mass terror.
But ricin is attractive to terrorists because it is
easier to make and much safer to transport than
biological agents are, and all but impossible to
detect. The measure we take to protect the mail from
anthrax - irradiation - is useless against ricin.
If ways could be found to make ricin in aerosol form
more deadly, and to disperse it more widely, it could
be a superb terror weapon. This, presumably, is what
the Iraqi scientists were working on.
I could store in my garage enough ricin or anthrax to
kill every person in the United States. It's important
to keep this in mind as we ponder the significance of
the failure of the Iraq Survey Group to find large
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The only kind of WMD for which massive quantities are
required are battlefield chemicals like those Saddam
used against the Iranians and the Kurds. Because wind
and weather rapidly dilute their effectiveness, large
quantities of nerve agents and blister agents are
necessary even for attacks on the unprotected.
Though we in the West have a moral objection to
chemical weapons, the primary reason why they haven't
been used much in war is because they aren't very
effective against protected troops. And since chemical
weapons deteriorate over time, it doesn't make much
sense to maintain large stockpiles of them.
What is important about battlefield chemicals is to
retain the capacity to produce them. David Kay made it
clear that Saddam's regime had.
The kind of WMD Saddam failed to account for at the end
of the first Gulf War would be of little use to
terrorists. While a terrorist could smuggle in an
aspirin bottle enough ricin or anthrax to kill
thousands, not many are clever enough to get boxcars
full of sarin or mustard past Customs.
If all Iraq were producing were battlefield chemicals,
large stockpiles of them wouldn't be much more
dangerous to us than large stockpiles of muskets and
crossbows. The great danger to us would be if Saddam's
scientists were producing terror weapons. And for
these, large stockpiles are not necessary.
It wouldn't be hard to disperse the contents of my
garage throughout a state the size of California, and
it would be all but impossible for investigators to
find them unless they knew precisely where to look. And
since biological agents, like chemical agents,
deteriorate over time, having stockpiles are less
important than having the capacity to produce more, and
more deadly, weapons.
Iraq had the capacity to produce more, David Kay made
clear. "What everyone has skated over, both in the
chemical and biological area, is what we indeed have
found," Kay told CNN last fall. "We found a vast
network of undeclared labs engaged in prohibited
activity in both of those areas."
Though he didn't find the stockpiles he'd expected to
find, Kay concluded Iraq was more dangerous than he'd
realized, precisely because of the types of WMD Iraq
was working on, and the ease of access terrorists had
to it. We shouldn't let domestic politics blind us to
the real threat Saddam's WMD programs posed.
Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a
deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the
Reagan administration.
--
LP
In politics, moderation is the best policy.
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