How real is threat of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction? Sum of all fears doesn't always add up
By Charles J. Hanley
ASSOCIATED PRESS
After the warehouse raid in northern Jordan, the word from authorities horrified the people of Amman. Terrorists linked to al Qaeda had assembled a fearsome array of chemicals and planned a bombing that would send a 2-mile-wide "poison cloud" over the Jordanian capital, killing as many as 80,000 people, military prosecutors said.
Osama bin Laden's foot soldiers had finally concocted a weapon of mass destruction.
A year later, in the hard light of scientific scrutiny, that sinister scenario looks more fictional than factual. International experts checking the suspects' supposed list of chemicals — from the industrial compound ammonium to the explosive nitroglycerin — say either the defendants or the Jordanian authorities, or both, had little inkling about the makings of a chemical weapon.
The compounds "may generate some toxic byproducts, but they're unlikely to result in significant deaths by poisoning," said Ron Manley of Britain, a former senior U.N. adviser on chemical weapons.
Concerns that terrorists would acquire weapons of mass destruction emerged in the 1990s when the Soviet Union's collapse left nuclear and other arms vulnerable to theft. Worries grew as "recipes" for mass-casualty weapons flashed around the Internet. In 1998, bin Laden told Time magazine that acquiring such arms to defend Muslims "is a religious duty." Three years later in Afghanistan, the U.S. military found al Qaeda documents, crude equipment and other evidence of chemical and biological experimentation.
Al Qaeda's intent is clear, says a key U.S. intelligence analyst. "The intent is there and you can see it in the 'fatwas' justifying the use" of WMD, Donald Van Duyn of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division said.
One fatwa, or Muslim religious decree, issued by radical Saudi cleric Nasser al-Fahd in 2003 at bin Laden's request, "authorized" the use of ultimate weapons "if the infidels can be repelled from the Muslims only by using such weapons."
"It may be only a matter of time before al Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons," CIA Director Porter Goss advised U.S. senators this year.
The story of the terrorist quest for doomsday arms is a dark vision that has become an axiom of today's counterterrorist strategy. Amid all the warnings, boasts and chilling tales, however, the daunting difficulties of constructing and fielding such weapons usually go unmentioned, along with al Qaeda's glaring lack of expertise and stable home base, the unreliability of Internet "formulas," and the progress made worldwide in locking down the raw materials of the most destructive arms.
Chemical terrorism
On March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyo cult members punctured plastic bags of sarin in the Tokyo subway system, unleashing nerve-agent vapor. The cult, including scientists, is believed to have spent millions of dollars on the demanding, dangerous production process, but came up with only impure sarin. Although thousands of commuters were sickened, the sarin gas killed only 12 people — a significant act, but hardly a mass-fatality terror attack, specialists point out.
"Regardless of what people say, this is very difficult to do, to inflict mass casualties with chemical or biological weapons," said Jonathan Tucker, an authority on unconventional arms with California's Monterey Institute of International Studies. "One really needs large quantities."
Oregon toxicologist Dr. Robert Hendrickson calculates that terrorists would need more than 200 gallons of sarin to kill half the people in a typical open-air baseball stadium. So much liquid, with dispersal devices, would be extremely difficult to conceal and to produce, probably taking 10 years in a basement-size operation, experts say.
Thousands of tons of sarin and VX nerve agent already exist, in old American, Russian and other military arsenals. But those weapons' potency has degraded and they're being destroyed under a 1997 treaty banning them. Security around the storage sites has been tightened since the Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. terror attacks.
If true chemical weapons prove beyond their reach, experts say, terrorists may turn to far less lethal but more available pesticides and caustic compounds. Large amounts of sulfuric acid, the "battery acid" for sale at $2 a gallon on the Internet, were among the Jordanian group's chemicals.
"Terrorists are opportunistic," Tucker said of the Jordanian group's motley collection. "They apparently figured it would produce some toxic mess that would do some harm."
Military prosecutors, who wouldn't discuss the Jordanian case on the record, claim a toxic cloud killed rabbits in the desert in a test explosion of the purported chemical cache. A Jordanian army chemical expert recently testified, however, that only considerable expertise and equipment could produce a mass killer from the mix.
Some analysts say the facts of chemistry may mean little in the end for those who want to terrorize populations, as long as the word "chemical" is heard on air or seen in headlines.
"One needs only to look at the adjectives used by the media to describe chemicals to understand why the general public is frightened: toxic, killer, lethal, deadly," Hendrickson said.
Whether Internet "recipes" work or not, Van Duyn said, "I'm not sure they need to be very effective."
Biological terrorism
Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks, terrorist use of disease agents to inflict mass casualties looms more and more as the bottom line of America's sum of all fears. Tom Ridge, former homeland security secretary, has said authorities don't believe terror groups can build nuclear bombs, and so bioweapons become the greater threat.
"Anthrax is a concern," the FBI's Van Duyn said. "You could do as much damage with anthrax and other substances" as with a nuclear bomb.
One attack scenario now used in U.S. planning sees more than 300,000 people in an American city exposed to aerosolized anthrax bacteria spread by terrorists via a truck sprayer, with more than 13,000 dying.
The fear is reflected in the U.S. budget's bottom line as well: Spending on civilian "biodefense" has leaped 18-fold since 2001, to $7.6 billion this year. Project Bioshield, to develop bioterrorism countermeasures, awarded its first contract last November, $877 million for 75 million doses of a new anthrax vaccine.
The anthrax scare began when someone mailed anthrax powder through the U.S. postal system in late 2001 and five people died. Because of the high quality of those 2001 anthrax spores, experts believe the perpetrator, still at large, was not linked to foreign terrorists, but possibly to the U.S. government's own anthrax program.
Al Qaeda pursued anthrax in Afghanistan, captured documents showed. It turned the job over to a Malaysian with a mere bachelor's degree in biology, U.S. investigators found. He apparently failed to find a virulent strain, let alone a workable way to "weaponize" anthrax, before being arrested in 2001 after returning to Malaysia.
Drying and refining anthrax spores into particles readily inhaled, and then engineering equipment to spread them extensively, is a formidable challenge, U.S. congressional researchers noted in a 2004 study. "Even a Ph.D. microbiologist doesn't know the dark arts of putting microbes into weapons," Tucker said.
Forty-nine microbes are on the U.S. list of "select agents" considered potential "severe threats." The list's length, from the common bacterium clostridia perfringens, a cause of food poisoning, to the plague bacterium yersinia pestis, tells some analysts that billions of U.S. dollars won't go far, since only three on the list — anthrax, smallpox and botulinum toxin — are being addressed so far in stepped-up biodefense research programs. And that's not counting any new genetically re-engineered microbes.
"What's going to come at you is impossible to predict," molecular biologist Roger Brent told a U.S. House panel in July.
Others question whether anything will come, in view of what Tucker calls al Qaeda's "gap in technical sophistication." Milton Leitenberg, a bioweapons authority at the University of Maryland, contends the threat has been "systematically exaggerated."
Few question the need, however, to tighten security at microbe collections worldwide. Only 500 of the estimated 1,500 major repositories, which maintain, exchange and sell samples for research and diagnostics, subscribe to the World Federation for Culture Collections' voluntary security guidelines.
Internationally, "the problem is the ones you don't know about," said Barry Kellman, director of the International Weapons Control Center at Chicago's DePaul University. Perhaps one-third of the world's microbe collections are poorly protected, he estimated.
Kellman agrees, however, with those who doubt that al Qaeda, "in a cave in Afghanistan," poses a bioterrorism threat. He worries more about a homegrown menace, asking, "What if Ted Kaczynski" — America's notorious Unabomber — "had been a biology professor instead of a math professor?"
Radiological threat
A "dirty bomb," the pairing of ordinary explosives with radioactive material, is seen as the likeliest weapon of mass destruction terrorists might use, topping the list in a U.S. Senate survey in June of 85 government officials and other U.S. and international experts. From Siberia to the U.S. heartland, teams are busy locking down potential sources of dirty-bomb material, such as disused radiation therapy equipment.
But how serious is the threat?
Only 40 percent in that Senate survey thought such an attack likely in the next 10 years. Many experts note that, unlike a nuclear bomb, a radiological device wouldn't cause tens of thousands of casualties or "mass destruction." Some complain the news media overplay the potential and underplay the difficulty of assembling such a weapon.
An example from Russia's rebellious Chechnya illustrates that difficulty: In 1999 three looters tried to steal rods of highly radioactive cobalt-60 from an abandoned chemical factory. All three died of radiation exposure, one reportedly within 30 minutes.
"It's not a trivial thing to do, build a dirty bomb. It's not simply a matter of tying a rod of cesium to a couple of sticks of dynamite and running away," said physicist Benn Tannenbaum, who has studied the question for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The rods, powders and pellets of cesium-137, cobalt-60 and other radioactive isotopes are housed in tens of thousands of heavily shielded pieces of equipment worldwide, for cancer radiation therapy, in industrial gauges, in food irradiators, and in portable Soviet generators.
If a cache of, say, strontium-90 from one of these "orphan" sources does fall into the wrong hands, U.S.-bound smugglers would have to evade almost 500 radiation monitors installed at U.S. land crossings, seaports and mail facilities in recent years. Washington also is working to extend that line of defense abroad, to container ports of origin. Thus far only Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Piraeus, Greece, participate.
The greatest deterrent, though, to would-be bombers remains the radiation itself. How would novices extract, handle, transport such material?
"Very quickly," Tannenbaum said dryly. "You'd wear lead underwear and a lead apron. You'd use tongs to keep yourself separated from it." Some experts even theorize, improbably, that relay teams of "suicide technicians" would be needed.
But is a highly lethal load of radioactivity necessary? A dirty bomber possibly could achieve his goal, terrorizing a population, with a small amount of low-level radioactivity, posing little threat — as long as Geiger counters go off in New York, Washington or whichever city.
The International Atomic Energy Agency urges governments to plan carefully to keep the public well informed in such an emergency. Then, said Carolyn MacKenzie, an IAEA radiation source specialist, "it is up to the press not to inspire fear."
Nuclear terrorism
After years of warnings and hard work, the "loose nukes" of Russia and other nations are coming under tighter control. Since 1994, Russian work crews and U.S. money — some $6 billion thus far — have been hardening walls, installing surveillance cameras and radiation detectors, and otherwise "locking down" 600 tons of Russian bomb-grade material that isn't inside warheads. Nuclear smuggling cases have fallen sharply, international and U.S. agencies report.
Despite the good news, the potential nightmare of nuclear terrorism still haunts those charged with preventing it.
"There's still so much to be done," said Jerry Paul, whose U.S. Energy Department office aims to complete work by late 2008 upgrading security at Russian nuclear sites, two years ahead of the original schedule.
The IAEA says a dozen incidents of uranium or plutonium trafficking were reported worldwide in 2004, down from an average of about 30 a year in the mid-1990s. Only one trafficking case reported last year involved bomb-grade material, and that was a minor amount.
In a nuclear world of too many unknowns, experts say, no one should expect al Qaeda's leadership to abandon its longtime goal of a doomsday weapon. More than a decade after it first showed a nuclear bent, however, there's no evidence the terror group has found anything but dead ends. And a crude "superbomb" drawing and related writings found at an al Qaeda location in 2001 in Afghanistan by U.S. forces displayed more nuclear ignorance than know-how.
Since the late 1990s, sensational, thinly supported reports in the Arab and Western news media have claimed that al Qaeda had obtained enriched uranium or even complete atom bombs, from the Russian mafia, from Ukrainians in Afghanistan, or from Kazakhs, or Chechens. Among the more than 730 cases of trafficking or loss confirmed by the IAEA since 1993, however, no terrorist connection was ever established, and almost all involved non-bomb material.
In the last known case of smuggling of bomb material, confirmed last year, an individual was arrested in June 2003 trying to cross from Georgia into Armenia with 6 ounces of highly enriched uranium, a tiny fraction of what's needed for a nuclear bomb. Its origin hasn't been determined, and further details weren't released.
Physicists debate whether nonspecialists could readily build a basic, Hiroshima-style weapon, in which two loads of highly enriched uranium are slammed together to create a critical mass, a fission reaction and a blast.
The IAEA's Jacques Baute, a former French weaponeer, is skeptical. "You would get a critical accident. You would kill people around it. But it would not be the same as a Hiroshima." Much more goes into true bomb design, Baute said.
He worries instead about terrorists acquiring a readymade bomb along with people who know how to use it. Other experts note, however, that Aum Shinrikyo, with millions of dollars and thousands of adherents in Russia, failed to acquire a nuclear weapon there in the early '90s despite years of effort.
If they're proficient in conventional bombings, terror groups may be unwilling or unable to invest the time and resources to develop — with unpredictable results — chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear arms, congressional researchers argued in a 2004 study.
But the "odds" on worst cases will always be discussed, as in an official U.S. report to the U.N. Security Council that warned of "a high probability" al Qaeda would attempt a WMD attack "within the next two years" — a report issued two years and five months ago.
The chemical threat
VX: Even in small amounts, this potentially lethal nerve agent, developed as a chemical weapon, can affect large numbers of people through inhalation or skin contact. But obtaining its precursor chemicals and manufacturing the compound would be very difficult.
Sarin: This potentially lethal nerve agent is difficult to make, though somewhat less so than VX. It must be inhaled, and its victims would be more readily treatable than those of VX.
Chlorine: This industrial chemical would be easy to acquire and can cause serious lung damage. But it is rarely lethal, and large volumes of it must be inhaled to do harm.
The biological threat
Plague: These bacteria may be relatively easy to obtain and can be highly lethal if they infect the lungs. But plague can be treated with antibiotics, and it would be very difficult to spread the germs through aerosol devices.
Anthrax: These bacteria may be relatively easy to obtain and can be highly lethal if inhaled. But a vaccine and antibiotics work against it, and it's considered difficult to produce the very fine particle size needed to ensure inhalation.
Salmonella typhimurium: These bacteria, a common cause of food poisoning, are relatively easy to acquire. But they could be disseminated only through deliberate food contamination and would have relatively low impact, since the short-lived disease generally doesn't require hospitalization.
The radiological threat
Examples of where radioactive sources can be found:
Most radioactive: Irradiators for sterilization and food preservation (cobalt-60, cesium-137); portable generators for unmanned sites (strontium-90, plutonium-238); external radiation therapy equipment (cobalt-60, cesium-137).
Less radioactive: Gamma-ray imaging in industry (iridium-192, selenium-75); cancer therapy via implanted radiation sources (cobalt-60, cesium-137); calibrators (cobalt-60, cesium-137).
The nuclear threat
These materials can be used to make nuclear weapons:
Highly enriched uranium: Uranium in which the fissionable uranium-235 isotope is enriched while the nonfissile uranium-238 content is reduced. This is done via a complex, costly, lengthy process of separating isotopes in gas form.
Plutonium: The fissionable isotope plutonium-239 is created by the chain reactions in nuclear reactors. It can be extracted from spent nuclear fuel via chemical reprocessing.
On the Web:
* The 2004 Congressional Research Service report, 'Small-scale Terrorist Attacks Using Chemical and Biological Agents': http://www.fas.org/irp/crs/RL32391-062304.pdf
* The 'select agents' list of restricted microbes, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: http://www.cdc.gov/od/sap/docs/salist.pdf
* Proceedings of the 2003 IAEA conference 'Security of Radioactive Sources': http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1165_web.pdf
* Congressional Research Service 2005 report 'Nuclear Terrorism: A Brief Review of Threats and Responses': http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL32595.pdf
Source: 2004 U.S. Congressional Research Service report, 'Small-scale Terrorist Attacks Using Chemical and Biological Agents'; U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; International Atomic Energy Agency
