Gold9472
02-22-2006, 07:13 PM
Is the U.S. Government making anthrax bombs in Utah?
http://www.slweekly.com/article.cfm/justtesting
by Ted McDonough
2/23/2006
In March 1988, Saddam Hussein unloaded some of his Pandora’s box of chemical weapons on the Kurdish village of Halabja. As many as 5,000 were killed by nerve agents believed to have included VX, a poison so deadly that a single drop the size of a pinhead can cause death minutes after touching the skin.
By forcing all the body’s nerves to fire continuously, causing all of a victim’s involuntary muscles to contract, VX leads to racing heart, drooling, vomiting, gut spasms and, finally, death by asphyxiation.
Fifteen years later, in 2003, that attack was still cited as a reason to force Iraq to get rid of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, then believed to additionally include giant fermentors used to grow deadly bacteria such as anthrax and botulinum. Civilized countries, including the United States, had sworn off such weapons a generation earlier and were busy dismantling Cold War-era chemical and biological weapons factories.
Much of the job of destroying America’s WMD stockpile took place in Utah’s west desert at the Deseret Chemical Depot, 12 miles south of Tooele. In March 2005, the depot celebrated its milestone destruction of the millionth VX-filled munition. The date of the announcement coincided nicely with a worldwide celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, when more than 150 countries pledged to never again make weapons of mass destruction.
But something else was going on that March in the west desert that has some questioning the United States’ dedication to nonproliferation. Over at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds—the chemical depot’s Tooele County neighbor—procurement officers quietly placed orders for a system of bacteria-growing fermentors that would have made Saddam salivate.
According to government solicitation, the order called for four fermentors with a total capacity of producing nearly 3,500 liters of bacteria and the possibility of another five fermentors in the future. That is enough bacteria-making equipment to cook up about three-fourths the 8,400 liters of anthrax Iraq admitted to having produced for Saddam’s biowar program.
The order didn’t detail what Dugway wanted to grow, but at the same time, the secretive Army base put out feelers for a second set of fermentors and contractors willing to make 1,500-liter batches of a benign strain of anthrax called Sterne.
The request sent shockwaves through the community of government watchdogs and scientists dedicated to ensuring the biowar genie stays in its bottle. For, while the fermentors were ostensibly ordered for production of a nonlethal strain of anthrax, they could easily be used to produce vast quantities of the lethal strain as well.
Dugway had long been known to experiment with deadly agents. In spring 2003, for example, the base advertised for help brewing up paralysis-inducing botulinum toxin, as well as Ricin, plague, rabbit fever, food poisoning, the horse disease glanders and all manner of nerve agents including the Nazi-invented tabun and soman.
But as far as anyone knew, Dugway only used small amounts of the agents inside sealed laboratories.
“To anybody’s knowledge, there was no fermentation capacity anywhere near that size at Dugway until this decision to build it,” said Edward Hammond, who keeps an eye on bioweapons research from his Texas-based Sunshine Project. “A few years ago, if somebody did that it would be viewed as possibly a smoking gun of an offensive program. It would probably get the Iranians bombed if they did that at one of their facilities.”
The requests for fermentors were the clearest sign yet that a huge build-up of U.S. biowar research, begun after 9/11, was coming to Utah. Dugway, long home to the nation’s biodefense testing, reports a 60 percent increase in its workload since the attacks on the World Trade Center and, late last year, readied plans for construction to double testing again.
All of the testing is done in the name of protecting the country from terrorist attack with biological or chemical weapons. But the direction in which some of the testing is headed—including all but making WMDs ourselves—is troubling an increasingly vocal group of scientists. Even if America’s motives are pure, they worry, the work could spark a new WMD arms race.
For Utah watchdogs, the prospect of increased testing at Dugway resurrects memories of a time before 1969, when outdoor testing with biological and chemical weapons was stopped. One chilling, unexplained request from Dugway last year asked for batches of dead, frozen sheep for testing a mobile crematorium, resurrecting the specter of 6,000 sheep found dead in Utah’s Skull Valley following the accidental release of VX from Dugway in 1968. Some worry the likelihood of accidents will increase as more tests are performed at a supposedly secure Army base where nine illegal workers from Mexico were found working for a subcontractor in February, hard at work building a new hotel.
“There is a very blurry line between offense and defense when it comes to germ warfare,” said Salt Lake City Dugway watchdog Steve Erickson, director of the Citizens Education Project.
“When they start doing stuff like ordering up fermentors, there is just no knowing what they are going to do,” said Erickson. “It’s not just unsettling for us locally, it is an international cause for concern. A lot of these other countries that are signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention—what will they think? Perception in this arena is critical.”
Dugway isn’t saying why it wanted large volumes of the nonlethal Sterne anthrax, except that it was acting on orders from the U.S. Army Developmental Test Command. The particular solicitation that alarmed watchdogs was canceled when no contractor responded, said Dugway spokeswoman Paula Nicholson. Base commanders did not respond to questions about whether the order had been filled in another way. Dugway has been growing small amounts of its own Sterne-strain anthrax since 2002, according to Nicholson. It’s used as a substitute for the real thing when testing battlefield detectors that sniff out biowar agents and other defense equipment.
Hammond thinks the only explanation for the Army’s need for thousands of liters of non-lethal anthrax would be outdoor testing. In such a case, faux anthrax would be grown in fermentors, dried out and turned into an aerosol to be released as a cloud above a Dugway training range to test detectors or to train troops.
Critics say the problem is that such experiments look a lot like what a country would do if it wanted to make biological weapons.
Because biological weapons don’t keep well, a biological weapons program looks like a bunch of fermentors ready to be turned on in case of war. When the Bush administration went to the United Nations with its case for war with Iraq, it noted reports that Saddam could produce 25,000 liters of anthrax. The administration didn’t claim Saddam had that much anthrax, just that it “had biological weapons sufficient to produce” that much. In other words, fermentors and equipment enough to turn the resulting death soup into a powder that will float on the wind.
The best defense is a good offense, goes the old sports analogy. The question many are asking is, when it comes to military research, how do you tell the difference?
Equipment used to grow large amounts of the type of anthrax given to soldiers to vaccinate them against the disease could just as easily grow the disease that causes black, crater-like swelling on the skin and that suffocates a victim in three days, said Hammond. And the real anthrax is also stored at Dugway, inside biological laboratories newly expanded in 2003 as part of the national biodefense build-up.
End Part I
http://www.slweekly.com/article.cfm/justtesting
by Ted McDonough
2/23/2006
In March 1988, Saddam Hussein unloaded some of his Pandora’s box of chemical weapons on the Kurdish village of Halabja. As many as 5,000 were killed by nerve agents believed to have included VX, a poison so deadly that a single drop the size of a pinhead can cause death minutes after touching the skin.
By forcing all the body’s nerves to fire continuously, causing all of a victim’s involuntary muscles to contract, VX leads to racing heart, drooling, vomiting, gut spasms and, finally, death by asphyxiation.
Fifteen years later, in 2003, that attack was still cited as a reason to force Iraq to get rid of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, then believed to additionally include giant fermentors used to grow deadly bacteria such as anthrax and botulinum. Civilized countries, including the United States, had sworn off such weapons a generation earlier and were busy dismantling Cold War-era chemical and biological weapons factories.
Much of the job of destroying America’s WMD stockpile took place in Utah’s west desert at the Deseret Chemical Depot, 12 miles south of Tooele. In March 2005, the depot celebrated its milestone destruction of the millionth VX-filled munition. The date of the announcement coincided nicely with a worldwide celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, when more than 150 countries pledged to never again make weapons of mass destruction.
But something else was going on that March in the west desert that has some questioning the United States’ dedication to nonproliferation. Over at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds—the chemical depot’s Tooele County neighbor—procurement officers quietly placed orders for a system of bacteria-growing fermentors that would have made Saddam salivate.
According to government solicitation, the order called for four fermentors with a total capacity of producing nearly 3,500 liters of bacteria and the possibility of another five fermentors in the future. That is enough bacteria-making equipment to cook up about three-fourths the 8,400 liters of anthrax Iraq admitted to having produced for Saddam’s biowar program.
The order didn’t detail what Dugway wanted to grow, but at the same time, the secretive Army base put out feelers for a second set of fermentors and contractors willing to make 1,500-liter batches of a benign strain of anthrax called Sterne.
The request sent shockwaves through the community of government watchdogs and scientists dedicated to ensuring the biowar genie stays in its bottle. For, while the fermentors were ostensibly ordered for production of a nonlethal strain of anthrax, they could easily be used to produce vast quantities of the lethal strain as well.
Dugway had long been known to experiment with deadly agents. In spring 2003, for example, the base advertised for help brewing up paralysis-inducing botulinum toxin, as well as Ricin, plague, rabbit fever, food poisoning, the horse disease glanders and all manner of nerve agents including the Nazi-invented tabun and soman.
But as far as anyone knew, Dugway only used small amounts of the agents inside sealed laboratories.
“To anybody’s knowledge, there was no fermentation capacity anywhere near that size at Dugway until this decision to build it,” said Edward Hammond, who keeps an eye on bioweapons research from his Texas-based Sunshine Project. “A few years ago, if somebody did that it would be viewed as possibly a smoking gun of an offensive program. It would probably get the Iranians bombed if they did that at one of their facilities.”
The requests for fermentors were the clearest sign yet that a huge build-up of U.S. biowar research, begun after 9/11, was coming to Utah. Dugway, long home to the nation’s biodefense testing, reports a 60 percent increase in its workload since the attacks on the World Trade Center and, late last year, readied plans for construction to double testing again.
All of the testing is done in the name of protecting the country from terrorist attack with biological or chemical weapons. But the direction in which some of the testing is headed—including all but making WMDs ourselves—is troubling an increasingly vocal group of scientists. Even if America’s motives are pure, they worry, the work could spark a new WMD arms race.
For Utah watchdogs, the prospect of increased testing at Dugway resurrects memories of a time before 1969, when outdoor testing with biological and chemical weapons was stopped. One chilling, unexplained request from Dugway last year asked for batches of dead, frozen sheep for testing a mobile crematorium, resurrecting the specter of 6,000 sheep found dead in Utah’s Skull Valley following the accidental release of VX from Dugway in 1968. Some worry the likelihood of accidents will increase as more tests are performed at a supposedly secure Army base where nine illegal workers from Mexico were found working for a subcontractor in February, hard at work building a new hotel.
“There is a very blurry line between offense and defense when it comes to germ warfare,” said Salt Lake City Dugway watchdog Steve Erickson, director of the Citizens Education Project.
“When they start doing stuff like ordering up fermentors, there is just no knowing what they are going to do,” said Erickson. “It’s not just unsettling for us locally, it is an international cause for concern. A lot of these other countries that are signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention—what will they think? Perception in this arena is critical.”
Dugway isn’t saying why it wanted large volumes of the nonlethal Sterne anthrax, except that it was acting on orders from the U.S. Army Developmental Test Command. The particular solicitation that alarmed watchdogs was canceled when no contractor responded, said Dugway spokeswoman Paula Nicholson. Base commanders did not respond to questions about whether the order had been filled in another way. Dugway has been growing small amounts of its own Sterne-strain anthrax since 2002, according to Nicholson. It’s used as a substitute for the real thing when testing battlefield detectors that sniff out biowar agents and other defense equipment.
Hammond thinks the only explanation for the Army’s need for thousands of liters of non-lethal anthrax would be outdoor testing. In such a case, faux anthrax would be grown in fermentors, dried out and turned into an aerosol to be released as a cloud above a Dugway training range to test detectors or to train troops.
Critics say the problem is that such experiments look a lot like what a country would do if it wanted to make biological weapons.
Because biological weapons don’t keep well, a biological weapons program looks like a bunch of fermentors ready to be turned on in case of war. When the Bush administration went to the United Nations with its case for war with Iraq, it noted reports that Saddam could produce 25,000 liters of anthrax. The administration didn’t claim Saddam had that much anthrax, just that it “had biological weapons sufficient to produce” that much. In other words, fermentors and equipment enough to turn the resulting death soup into a powder that will float on the wind.
The best defense is a good offense, goes the old sports analogy. The question many are asking is, when it comes to military research, how do you tell the difference?
Equipment used to grow large amounts of the type of anthrax given to soldiers to vaccinate them against the disease could just as easily grow the disease that causes black, crater-like swelling on the skin and that suffocates a victim in three days, said Hammond. And the real anthrax is also stored at Dugway, inside biological laboratories newly expanded in 2003 as part of the national biodefense build-up.
End Part I