Just how dangerous is Saddam

14/02/1998

Chemical and biological weapons are a terrible threat to the world?s future. They are potentially more devastating than a nuclear bomb, easy to create and easy to hide. That is why Saddam Hussein?s obstruction of the work of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq cannot be ignored, as this article by the senior fellow at the science policy research unit of Sussex University shows. But how will a bombing campaign help? The United States and Britain are determined to prevent Saddam Hussein from threatening the world with weapons of mass destruction. So said the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in his joint radio broadcast with President Clinton from Washington last Saturday. Both leaders have made it clear that this would be the purpose of military action against Iraq. No doubt other war aims have been considered as well, such as razing Baghdad or killing Saddam. They now stand rejected.

The United Nations, in 1947, introduced the term weapons of mass destruction to differentiate nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons from conventional weapons, so as to meet Article 26 of the United Nations Charter which requires plans for a system for the regulation of armaments. Iraq has worked on all of them, but it is the chemical and biological ones which are the chief concern in the present crisis.

The outside world knows, to its shame, about Saddam?s chemical weapons. It stood by unprotesting during much of the 1980s while Iraq used blister and nerve gases against the forces of Iran, and then broke Iranian morale by threatening to fire chemical-warfare missiles into Tehran. In Kurdistan those same Iraqi poison gases killed thousands of Iraqis, not least in the attacks on Halabjah 10 years ago. Their effects are reported to be still manifest in the condition of the health of the surviving populace.

Saddam?s biological weapons, however, have been altogether less visible. They have never, so far as is known, actually been used outside laboratories or proving grounds. Whether they even work is not certain, at least not in the minds of people without access to the secret sources that might possibly be better informed. Yet, for all that, they are portrayed as a huge menace. When the Daily Mail declared last week that Saddam had enough anthrax germs to wipe out the world twice, it was not reality that was being reported but fearful perception.

On the evidence available, Saddam is no more capable of destroying the world with his germs than would be the possessor of 50,000 tons of lead bullets. Scare-mongering is a familiar precursor of war, but to do the Mail justice this concept of Iraqi germ-warfare power had already been hyped-up by senior politicians, not least the United States Defence Secretary, William Cohen, waving a bag of sugar on American television last November: were it a bag of anthrax germs, he said, it could kill half the population of Washington.

Much of what is most easily read about Iraqi biological weapons is only loosely rooted in fact. There is speculation, alarmism and ? who knows ? disinformation there as well. Yet it would be a bad mistake to reject it all as hype, as self-interested posturing by those who want to go to war or, alternatively, by those who wish to portray Iraq as too dangerous to trifle with. For biological weapons could indeed prove to be weapons of mass destruction.

To appreciate their potential one has only to recall the 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk in what was then the Soviet Union. What could not have been more than a small fraction of a gram of anthrax spores seeping out from a military laboratory in airborne form produced death and disease in man and animals along a swathe 50 kilometres downwind of the laboratory. Mr Cohen?s sugar bag could have held 10,000 times the Sverdlovsk quantity of spores.

Nevertheless, it is not easy to make biological weapons in a practicable form that exploits their potential. During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States spent the best part of a billion dollars on developing reliable biological weapons of predictable effect. British and Canadian scientists contributed much. But all that entered the operational inventory were a few different types of dirty-tricks weapon, armament for United States clandestine and special forces. Not one of the mass-destruction biological weapons devised through all that technological prowess proved acceptable for use by the service that had stated requirements for them. So it was that, when President Nixon halted the programme in 1969 and set the world on track for the biological disarmament treaty of 1972 (which Iraq joined in 1991), there was no biological weapon qualified for the inventory of the United States Air Force.

Several factors could have been responsible for that, such as the Air Force?s preference for nuclear weapons. One obstacle, however, was the technological difficulty of producing an evidently dependable and logistics-friendly weapon. Germs have a life of their own, requiring sustenance, a life-supporting habitat and an absence of lethal stress. These basic requirements are not always simple to provide. They become exceedingly difficult during the period between the launch of a biological weapon towards its target and the entry of its payload of germs into the lungs of its victims.

No good if the germs are by then dead from ultraviolet irradiation, air pollutants, intolerable humidity, heat shock or further consequences of the payload having to be comminuted into the tiny particles needed to keep the germs airborne. All of this can be done, but much know-how, training and special technology are needed.

The basic principles became understood during that Anglo-American programme, and no doubt during the French, Russian and other ones also; but important technical secrets seem to have been kept. Saddam?s weaponeers may have been able to put containers of anthrax-spore slurry into the warhead sections of Scud missiles, but in so doing were they building effective biological weapons? It is not absurdly optimistic to doubt that they were.

It is possible, nevertheless, that they succeeded. This is why the work of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, UNSCOM, is so important. The fact that its effective continuation may be both dependent on and vulnerable to the current military preparations is perhaps the most acute of the dilemmas now confronting the responsible leaders.

UNSCOM originates in the April 1991 ceasefire agreement which terminated the hostilities of the last Gulf War. Iraq accepted terms which required the elimination of all of its chemical and biological weapons, as well as all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities for them. Iraq also had to renounce any future effort in this area and to accept on-going verification of compliance.

It was one of UNSCOM?s tasks, under the authority of the United Nations Security Council, to ascertain through intrusive investigation of the Iraqi programmes exactly what had to be done, and then to supervise the destruction of whatever had to be destroyed. The intention was that, once all this was complete with the compliance-monitoring system up and running, UNSCOM would report as much to the Security Council, which would then decide on whether to lift the economic sanctions against Iraq. Because these were ceasefire terms, the implication was that military action would be resumed if Iraq did not comply with them.

UNSCOM has been discharging its mandate these past six years, and has in the process destroyed many hundreds of tons of chemical weapons, as well as factories for making both chemical and biological weapons. From information supplied by Governments, including detailed data on exports to Iraq, and from information gathered during hundreds of site inspections and overflights, UNSCOM has formed a rather clear idea of what Iraq has been doing and, no less important, of where it remains in ignorance.

UNSCOM has now concluded that Iraq is not only concealing certain prized residual elements of its proscribed weapons programmes but has also instituted active measures to deceive UNSCOM and the outside world. Iraq?s present action in repeatedly blocking the access of inspectors to certain sites is making the outside world believe that UNSCOM has come close to the final secrets.

What exactly those secrets might be is the subject of conflicting speculation. If they were actual stocks of usable weapons or factories for them, as is suggested in current press-reporting of possible bomb-target lists, they could only be small. The Foreign Office has put out a paper to MPs suggesting that Iraq has hidden special chemicals sufficient to make 200 tons of a nerve gas known as VX, and also that it has capacity to produce more than 20 tons of anthrax germs. It is not at all clear what these numbers mean, if anything, in war-fighting terms, but they certainly sound bad. MPs will presumably be seeking clarification. They may be sceptical about whether such concealed capabilities are worth going to war over. It is not so long ago, after all, that the Americans were describing their now-removed stockpile of nerve gas on the European mainland as being too small to have more than token military significance. That was a 400-plus ton stockpile, much of it VX.

Saddam has already forgone well over $100 billion in oil revenues in order, apparently, to protect the secrets of these programmes. So a rather more plausible theory is that what remains hidden is not ageing hardware or stocks of germs, but is instead the knowledge from which some future weapons capability might draw if access to it could be protected against the depredations of UNSCOM: experimental data from agent-processing or weapon-evaluation studies perhaps, or details of past and present contacts with that outside nexus of greedy companies, evil professors and financially desperate brokers that has buttressed Iraq?s indigenous scientific and manufacturing capacities for germ warfare. Much of this knowledge could well be preserved on the floppy disks that might so easily find safekeeping in the presidential palaces and intelligence facilities from which UNSCOM is being excluded.

Are the United States and Britain then really to go to war over a few floppy disks? It is hard to imagine people being prepared to pay such a price for them. Yet on those disks could reside the very essence of what UNSCOM has been seeking and has still to learn before it is permitted by its mandate to report completion of its work. Perhaps those disks, if in fact they exist, show how close Iraq has actually come to discovering the secrets of mass-destruction germ warfare. In the interests of preserving and extending the international regime against biological weapons, this we really do need to know, and we should give all the support to UNSCOM that might help its quest. It is not obvious, however, that dropping bombs is the way to do this.