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To this day I fail to understand this insistence, given our position, which was fairly flexible.
—Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the U.S. policy of withdrawing from, rather than modifying, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to cut the Russian nuclear arsenal to a range of 1,500 to 2,200 warheads in response to a similar U.S. offer, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday...Full Story 
By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire
The crude chemical weapons used by Hamas during two recent suicide bombings in Israel caused few casualties, but the psychological impact and the threat of state sponsorship may still make chemical weapons dangerous in the hands of terrorists, sources told Global Security Newswire last week...Full Story
The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles led the United States to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, U.S. officials said in a diplomatic note...Full Story
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Monday, December 17, 2001 |  | | |  |
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U.S. investigators discovered “significant” documents at Tarnak Farms near Kandahar, Afghanistan, while searching former al-Qaeda sites for evidence that the organization was building weapons of mass destruction, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday (Agence France-Presse I, Dec. 16).
U.S. officials will test items from the Tarnak Farms camp for traces of chemical, biological and radioactive material, Rumsfeld said. Investigators had visited about 30 sites to test for such materials (see GSN, Dec. 14), U.S. General Tommy Franks said yesterday. He said that the list of sites to be inspected has grown to 50 sites partly based on information gleaned from Taliban and suspected al-Qaeda detainees.
“It is frightening,” Franks said, “Some of the information that we have gained would allude to perhaps—I don’t want to call them science projects—but would make reference to things like poisons, the building of explosives, some of these cookbooks that we have talked about before that talk about terrorist approaches to problems and how buildings can be destroyed, and so forth.”
Some pieces of evidence “suggest that [al-Qaeda was] trying, at least, to acquire these weapons of mass destruction, and that’s no surprise,” said U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (Kenneth Bazinet, New York Daily News, Dec. 17).
There is no confirmation yet that al-Qaeda had the means to create weapons of mass destruction, Franks said, adding he could not confirm reports that al-Qaeda had planned to detonate a bomb in London (Agence France-Presse II, Dec. 16).
In a former al-Qaeda house near Kandahar, a Portuguese journalist discovered a hand-written plan to detonate a car bomb weighing more than 1,000 pounds in the Moorgate area of London, the London Independent reported yesterday. It was unclear whether al-Qaeda planned to execute the attack or whether the notes were only for training purposes, and there was no evidence of when the organization would have implemented the plan, the Independent said (Justin Huggler, London Independent, Dec. 16).
Two Pakistani former nuclear scientists under investigation for their ties to al-Qaeda were released Saturday in time for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, although reports conflicted on the details of their release.
Muhammad Asim Mehmood, son of Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood, one of the detained scientists, said yesterday that Mehmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid, another scientist, had been released and declared innocent, the New York Times reported today. According to previous reports, Pakistani authorities had already released the scientists once after their original detention and then detained them again for further questioning last month (see GSN, Nov. 26).
Pakistani authorities were unavailable for comment, according to the Times, and Muhammad Asim Mehmood said he did not know if U.S. authorities had been involved in the release and could not comment on any U.S. involvement in the scientists’ interrogation. The scientists must report any of their movements outside Islamabad and are not allowed to speak to the media, the son said.
Mehmood said his father had met with Osama bin Laden in August (see GSN, Dec. 12) but only to ask bin Laden for funding for a university in Kabul.
“It’s true that he met with Osama,” he said, “but my father wanted to discuss setting up a polytechnic university. He thought Osama might be the financier for it.” U.S. authorities have said no evidence existed (see GSN, Dec. 10) to indicate the scientists provided useful nuclear weapons information to bin Laden (Douglas Frantz, New York Times, Dec. 17).
The Washington Post reported the release slightly differently. Pakistani officials said the two scientists were released to spend Eid al-Fitr with their families, according to the Post. “They have promised to return back to us soon after the Eid holidays,” said a Pakistani official. They were not allowed to leave Islamabad, the Post reported.
The scientists said last month they had answered bin Laden’s technical questions about constructing weapons of mass destruction, Pakistani officials said, adding that the scientists’ information did not help advance any al-Qaeda weapons programs. “The probe against these scientists is by no means over, but we are satisfied that their contact with bin Laden didn’t result in any improvement in al-Qaeda’s firepower,” said a Pakistani intelligence official (Kamran Khan, Washington Post, Dec. 16).
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Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to cut the Russian nuclear arsenal to a range of 1,500 to 2,200 warheads in response to a similar U.S. offer, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday.
“President Putin has now responded to [U.S. President George W. Bush’s] Washington-Crawford statement of reducing our strategic offensive inventory down to a range of 1,700 to 2,200 operationally deployed warheads,” Powell said (Elaine Monaghan, Reuters/Yahoo.com, Dec. 13).
The announced U.S. reduction (see GSN, Nov. 14) is a “pretty firm number,” Powell said, but the United States welcomed discussion on the issue. “We want to hear why [Russia] feels that particular number is appropriate,” Powell said. “Obviously our range fits within their range. So there’s a way to square this circle. I don’t know that it’s a problem” (Federal News Service transcript, Dec. 13).
The United States and Russia will continue work on a new arms control framework in order to bring everything into “some legal form” that the two presidents could sign when Bush travels to Moscow next year, Powell said (see GSN, Dec. 11).
Powell said that the recent U.S. decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty had not triggered a new arms race with Russia (see related GSN story, today).
“Quite the contrary,” he said. “The Russians have said they don’t see this as a threat to their national security and secondly they are going to go ahead with very deep cuts in their strategic offensive forces” (Monaghan, Reuters/Yahoo.com).
Putin Wants Cuts Codified
Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed Russia’s support for a legally binding treaty to codify the strategic nuclear reductions.
“I believe these agreements should have legal treaty form,” Putin said in an interview Thursday. “I think without that, it could so happen that partners would have suspicions and misgivings about what was happening with the other party’s weapons—whether they had actually been reduced, what were the actual numbers, where the weapons were, had they been destroyed or had they just been dismantled and put in storage somewhere. If they are stored they constitute so-called ‘reconstitution potential.’ In other words, the possibility would remain that those weapons could be put back on missiles,” Putin said.
“In other words, if we do have such a legal treaty, legal agreement, a transparent one with proper verification measures, the entire world could be safer and feel calmer,” Putin said.
Russian Nuclear Plans
Although Russia reserved the right to deploy more multiple-warhead ICBMs, Putin said Russia had no reason to do so at this time. Russia’s deterrence capability would be secure even if the United States deployed a limited missile defense system, he said (Financial Times, Dec. 14).
U.S.-Chinese discussions about strategic nuclear weapons would differ from U.S.-Russian discussions, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday. U.S. President George W. Bush had offered new, high-level talks to China (see GSN, Dec. 14) when he telephoned Chinese President Jiang Zemin to inform him of the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (see GSN, Dec. 13).
Boucher said the new talks will not be “a formal negotiation with the Chinese on missiles. It’s not the same, say, as the kind of discussions we will have with the Russians about offensive cuts and bringing forward provisions of arms control.”
“Our discussions with the Chinese have been ongoing consultations and discussions about strategic issues, about our missile defense plans, seeking to gain their understanding, seeking to make sure that they knew what we were thinking, where we were going, and to hear back their views from them. So that is a process that has been ongoing that we will continue,” Boucher said (U.S. State Department release, Dec. 14).
A delegation of 20 North Korean officials arrived in South Korea yesterday to begin a two-week visit to observe South Korean nuclear power plants, South Korean officials said. The group included officials involved in the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea (see GSN, Dec. 11).
“The North Koreans are scheduled to look at nuclear power stations which have light-water reactors and plants that are producing parts to be used in the North Korean reactor construction,” said an official for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization. KEDO is an international consortium that helps build the reactors in exchange for freezing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program (Korea Herald, Dec. 17).
The North Korean delegation is scheduled to visit nuclear power plants in Ulchin on the east coast and Kori on the southeast coast, and Doosan Heavy Industries Company on the south coast, where reactors for the North Korean plants are under construction, according to the Associated Press.
KEDO is responsible for training hundreds of North Koreans to operate the two reactors once they are installed in North Korea. In addition to this month’s delegates, the organization expects to train 290 more North Koreans in South Korea by the end of next year (Associated Press/South China Morning Post, Dec. 17).
“It is the first time for North Korea to get access to the facilities,” said a senior KEDO official, according to Agence France-Presse (Jun Kwan-Woo, Agence France-Presse, Dec. 17).
North Korean officials visited nuclear power plants in Spain and Sweden last month (Korea Herald, Dec. 18).
The U.N. General Assembly Friday urged all member states to support International Atomic Energy Agency efforts to prevent terrorist attacks involving nuclear and other radioactive materials. Assembly members adopted a resolution calling on states to strengthen the safety of their nuclear installations, to implement and enhance safeguard agreements on nuclear materials and to assist the IAEA’s work. The resolution also urged states to work with the IAEA to strengthen technical assistance for developing countries.
The assembly called on North Korea to comply with its safeguard agreements and to allow the IAEA to verify the country's compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (see GSN, Dec. 3). The assembly said it could not conclude whether nuclear material had been diverted from North Korea.
The resolution also addressed nuclear issues in Middle Eastern states. It requested that those states comply with IAEA safeguards on all nuclear activities, adhere to international nonproliferation regimes and establish a nuclear weapon-free zone.
The resolution received 150 votes in favor with only North Korea voting against it. Cote d'Ivoire and Laos abstained (U.N. release, Dec. 14).
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As the “Amerithrax” investigation continued, officials and experts debated whether the spores sent to members of the U.S. Senate came from a U.S. program (see GSN, Dec. 14), according to reports yesterday.
The spores in the tainted letter mailed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) are identical to those kept by the U.S. Army, scientists familiar with the genetic testing said. Only five laboratories have stocks of anthrax spores with genetic matches to those in the tainted Senate letters, the scientists said. Those spores are kept at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the Porton Down military laboratory in the United Kingdom and microbial depositories at Louisiana State University and Northern Arizona University.
All of the other four laboratories can trace their stockpiles of anthrax spores back to USAMRIID, according to the Washington Post. “That means the original source [of the spores used in the letters] had to have been USAMRIID,” a scientist said.
It is still unknown which, if any, of the laboratories might have lost control of some of its anthrax stock, according to the Post. Investigators know little about the security at the Porton Down facility, but have no reason to suspect it is inadequate, one of the two scientists familiar with the genetic testing said. Among the U.S. facilities, the FBI has focused on Dugway, the scientist said. Dugway is the only facility known to have produced the weaponized form of anthrax in recent years.
Experts said it is possible, however, that the exact subtype of the Ames strain might have originated somewhere else, such as a dead animal or soil. “It’s an important finding, but it’s not one of those things that says ‘Aha!’” said Richard Spertzel, former director of the U.N. biological weapons inspection teams in Iraq.
Researchers are still planning to conduct tests on anthrax samples from the Canadian Defense Research Establishment Suffield, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, according the Post. Those three facilities are the only other ones to have received samples of the Ames strain from USAMRIID, the Post reported.
Scientists also plan to examine other characteristics of the anthrax samples, such as proteins and carbohydrates, the Post reported. “If there’s also a telltale piece or trace of nutrients or chemicals that show the process, that’s even better,” said University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute President Jennie Hunter-Cevera. “You start adding the pieces and go from tentative to confirmative” (Weiss/Schmidt, Washington Post, Dec. 16).
U.S. Army Response
The findings of the genetic tests on the spores sent to Daschle and Leahy will not necessarily indicate who was responsible, a U.S. Army spokesman said.
The USAMRIID received its samples of the Ames strain from the U.S. Agriculture Department and then shared it with five other laboratories, USAMRIID spokesman Chuck Dasey said.
“I’m not sure it tells us anything about who the perpetrator is,” Dasey said. “You can’t say it all came from USAMRIID,” he said. “We got it from another lab in the first place and so presumably USAMRIID is not the only lab that got it from the Department of Agriculture” (John Heilprin, Associated Press/Salon.com, Dec. 16).
The genetic test findings could mean a domestic source, rather than a foreign one, is responsible for the anthrax attacks, according to the Wall Street Journal. FBI agents are heavily investigating military personnel, civilians, and academics that had access to the Army programs. FBI officials said agents have investigated scientists at Dugway, USAMRIID and Louisiana State University since late October.
Federal officials said, however, the genetic tests remain incomplete. “These are important leads,” said Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “But if, in fact, the organization that originally developed the anthrax strain sent it to others, or if it could have been stolen, there are still a wide array of possibilities out there.”
CIA Connection
Investigators have also looked at a CIA program that maintained small supplies of the Ames strain for use in comparisons with other samples, the Journal reported. A CIA spokesman said he did not know the source of the program’s Ames samples. “We are quite confident that whatever the source, it did not come from our supply,” he said (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 17).
Army’s Admission Angers Some
The Army’s earlier admission that it produced small amounts of weaponized anthrax at the Dugway Proving Ground angered some experts, who said the admission could hurt the credibility of the anthrax investigation, according to the Financial Times. The Army’s previous silence, even as it conducted chemical analyses on the tainted letters for the FBI, could be a potential conflict of interest, critics said (Gwen Robinson, Financial Times, Dec.14).
Vaccine Could be Available for Civilians
The United States is debating whether or not to make the anthrax vaccine available to civilians at high risk, such as postal workers (see GSN, Dec. 13), federal health officials said Saturday.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson could make a decision on the matter next week, officials said after a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention forum.
The first candidates for the anthrax vaccine would be those with possible exposure to heavy amounts of anthrax spores, said D.A. Henderson, director of the HHS Office of Public Health Preparedness. “We are concerned with people who may have had a very heavy dose,” Henderson said, and added that this group may number close to 3,000 people (Warren Leary, New York Times, Dec. 16).
Also at the CDC forum, state and local health department officials said that the U.S. public health system was unprepared for a larger outbreak.
Officials said they were concerned over the idea that a more massive bioterrorism attack may happen than the 18 cases of anthrax seen since early October. “This was not the big one,” said Lou Turner, director of the North Carolina Laboratory of Public Health. “The big one is still out there,” Turner said.
It was difficult to come up with a definition of a large outbreak, said Ross Brechner, of the Maryland State Health Department. A 100 cases might be large, “but 1,000 would be a monster,” Brechner said.
Laboratories were unprepared to handle the mass amounts of anthrax tests needed soon after the incidents began, forum participants said. Public health workers also had difficulties in collecting specimens, maintaining a proper chain of command and in communications, they added.
Health officials said the anthrax attacks were a test that the U.S. public health system had passed in some ways, and failed in others. “What we did right, and did a lot of, was learn an incredible amount” during the progression of an outbreak of a disease few U.S. doctors had seen before, Brechner said (Lawrence Altman, New York Times, Dec. 15).
Anthrax Still in Hart Building
Trace amounts of anthrax are still present in the Hart Senate Office Building, despite fumigation with chlorine dioxide gas (see GSN, Dec. 12), officials said Friday.
Out of 380 samples taken from Daschle’s office, nine came back positive, according to the Los Angeles Times. The result was “encouraging,” said U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials.
“That means there is still some live anthrax there,” EPA spokeswoman Bonnie Piper said Friday. “We still have a ways to go to clean the building, but the use of the gas was so effective we are actually tonight going to fumigate a small portion of the ventilation system to see how well [the gas] performs there,” Piper said. The goal of the Hart building cleanup, she said, is “zero contamination” (Megan Garvey, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 15).
Supreme Court Recovering from Scare
The anthrax scare that closed the Supreme Court briefly in mid-October (see GSN, Oct. 29) placed a strain on proceedings through mail delivery delays and the taxing of the Court’s traditional paper-based methods due to new security measures, according to lawyers familiar with the situation.
The court may have difficulty finding enough cases to fill its oral argument calendar for the current term, which began Oct. 1, the lawyers said. No permanent damage is apparent, according to the Washington Post. Court rules allowed automatic extensions of filing deadlines during the weeklong shutdown.
The Supreme Court took the nearly unprecedented step of allowing e-mailed or faxed backup copies of filings, the Post reported. The move prompted discussions on whether the court should make it a permanent practice. “Even before Sept. 11, there were very compelling reasons for any court, including the Supreme Court, to move that way,” said Representative David Vitter (R-La.). “After Sept. 11, with the anthrax scare and stoppage of the mail, it doubles the reasons to move aggressively,” Vitter said (Charles Lane, Washington Post, Dec. 16).
Anthrax in Austria
The U.S. Embassy in Vienna mailed back to the United States 10 mailbags that were tainted with anthrax for further tests, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. The amount of anthrax spores on the mailbag was so small, it required several tests to detect them, Boucher said (U.S. State Department release, Dec. 14).
Americans should be able to choose to receive a smallpox vaccination, said Paul Ewald in a column in the New York Times today (see GSN, Dec. 6). Ewald, a biology professor at Amherst College and author of Evolution of Infectious Disease and Plague Time, said voluntary vaccination might prevent a smallpox attack, because if part of the population was immune to smallpox, “the bang for the terrorist’s buck could be drastically curtailed.”
Offering the option of vaccination could also help prevent difficult decisions that would occur if terrorists released smallpox on a vulnerable population, Ewald said. For example, a woman who intended to become pregnant could choose to receive a smallpox vaccine before pregnancy rather than being forced to choose between the risks to the fetus of a smallpox vaccine and acquiring smallpox itself if an epidemic occurred.
A partly vaccinated population would also reduce the stress on medical resources if an outbreak occurred, Ewald said (Paul Ewald, New York Times, Dec. 17).
Greece has ordered 150,000 doses of smallpox vaccine, the Financial Times reported Saturday. The vaccine is to be part of a strategic reserve against a biological weapons attack, Greek officials said, but they did not say who would be inoculated.
“We are not sure as to what extent Muslim elements in the Balkans could be used by extremists,” said the Greek Embassy in London. “Like any other government in the coalition, we must be thinking of taking precautions.”
Greece’s announcement followed a meeting of European health ministers on ways to better coordinate bioterrorism responses. European Commission officials said they were aware that some countries had begun to build vaccine stockpiles, especially of anthrax and smallpox vaccines.
“We are getting together all the information we can get on what kind of vaccines people have in stock and asking ourselves whether there is need for strategies for pooling our resources,” said a Commission official (Financial Times, Dec. 15).
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By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire
The crude chemical weapons used by Hamas during two recent suicide bombings in Israel caused few casualties, but the psychological impact and the threat of state sponsorship may still make chemical weapons dangerous in the hands of terrorists, sources told Global Security Newswire last week.
The two bombings, one in Jerusalem and one in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, are thought to have involved a crude attempt at chemical weapons, Israeli officials said last week. Tests conducted on bomb remnants detected traces of chemicals, which led officials to believe the bombs had been dipped in pesticides before they were used (see GSN, Dec. 10).
Crude chemical bombs would likely not be any more effective than bombs made simply with conventional explosives, said Van Blackwood, a spokesman for the Federation of American Scientists Working Group on Biological Weapons Verification in Washington. “If this is the end of their technology, then there isn’t much concern,” he said.
The heat from an explosion would likely neutralize any of the chemical weapons in a laced bomb, said Ian Lesser, a policy researcher for the think tank RAND in Arlington, Va.
Blackwood said the failure of the Hamas attack to inflict additional casualties through the use of chemicals illustrates the difficulties for terrorist groups to make a biological or chemical weapon. “It’s not easy even for large terrorist groups [such as Hamas],” Blackwood said.
Not Just Lack of Casualties
The relative ineffectiveness of crude chemical weapons is not the only disincentive against using such indiscriminate weapons, Lesser said. For example, the close proximity of Arabs and Israelis living together makes the weapons less attractive. “An Arab trying to hit Israelis may not hit who you want,” Lesser said.
Additionally, Israel might respond to the use of a weapon of mass destruction with more radical measures than it would use against conventional weapons, according to Lesser. He added that international support for such a reaction is also more likely.
Lesser said these drawbacks may make the use of any more advanced chemical weapons unattractive to terrorist groups like Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Although there are fewer constraints on these groups than in the past, Lesser said, the two groups “don’t seem to have an apocalyptic agenda.”
Fear Factor
The more damaging effect of such crude chemical attacks may be psychological, experts said. “Terrorist groups understand that fear is as important as casualties,” Blackwood said. Lesser agreed that there was “no question” that the thought of chemical weapons scares people.
The fear caused among the U.S. population by the recent crude anthrax attacks may have helped to inspire Hamas, an Israeli official in Washington said. “If anthrax was driving Americans crazy, the extremists see it as a good idea,” the official said.
Lesser said, however, that the group may have looked further back for inspiration, to the Gulf War. While the Iraqi Scud attacks on Israel caused few casualties, he said, the idea that the missiles might have been equipped with weapons of mass destruction inspired fear, and fear of weapons of mass destruction has lasted in Israel.
“If [terrorists] are looking for any kind of echo, it would be an echo of that,” Lesser said.
The experience with Iraqi Scuds has prepared Israelis for nonconventional attacks, the Israeli official said. Every Israeli citizen has a kit that contains a gas mask and various medications effective against chemical and biological agents, he said. Still, he added, security professionals in Israel took the recent Hamas attacks very seriously.
“It’s a transformation and we have to transform as well,” the official said.
State Backing?
A group wishing to conduct a more powerful chemical attack would likely need backing from countries such as Iraq or Iran, experts said. Even though the Hamas bombers acted alone, there was an organization behind them, Lesser said. “Logistical support would be needed.”
State sponsors may be reluctant to give terrorists more powerful warfare agents, Lesser said. Weapons of mass destruction are a “symbol of power” for many states, he said, and added that the concept of deterrence is more of an issue for states than it is for terrorists.
The prospect that groups like Hamas could receive state support for attacks with weapons of mass destruction still has officials worried. “The combination of a state sponsor, weapons of mass destruction and terrorists is a very dangerous equation,” the Israeli official said.
U.S. officials have been concerned since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks about the potential dangers to chemical and hazardous materials plants, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
There are at least 123 U.S. chemical plants that store toxic chemicals, which if released, would put more than 1 million people in harm’s way, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analysis. More than 700 plants store chemicals that could harm at least 100,000 people and more than 3,000 plants have at least 10,000 people living nearby.
A review of EPA documents included the following worst-case scenarios:
* A California plant has enough chlorine to poison up to 4 million people in Orange and Los Angeles Counties.
* A plant in Philadelphia stores 400,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride that could asphyxiate close to 4 million nearby people.
* A West Virginia sister plant of the Union Carbide Chemical plant in Bhopal, India, stores up to 200,000 pounds of methyl isocyanate, which could turn into a toxic cloud over 600,000 people near Charleston.
The Justice Department said last year that the threat to chemical plants was “both real and credible” and could be more dangerous than an attack on a nuclear power plant. “The ubiquitousness of industrial facilities possessing toxic chemicals and their proximity to population centers also make them attractive targets,” the Justice Department concluded.
Industry Safety Measures
There is no federal counterterrorism security standard, however, for chemical plants, according to the Post. Instead, the EPA is relying on the chemical industry to improve security voluntarily. “Certainly the industry has a very powerful incentive to do the right thing,” said Bob Bostock, assistant EPA administrator for homeland security. “It ought to be their worst nightmare that their facility would be target of a terrorist act because they did not meet their responsibility to the community.”
The American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group based in Virginia, said its members have increased security at plants since Sept. 11. “Our industry has gotten the message and is working hard to make sure that our facilities are safer than ever before,” said council President Fred Webber.
Many plants have increased identification checks, hired additional security guards and improved perimeter security since the attacks, according to the council. The council has also published voluntary site security guidelines.
The council is opposed, however, to recently introduced legislation that would require plants to assess risks and propose remedies. “Additional regulations, stronger enforcement—that isn’t going to do the trick,” Webber said. “What you need is the industry stepping up on its own, preventing the worst from happening.”
The EPA has met with industry officials since Sept. 11 and urged them to improve safety, according to the Post. The EPA is evaluating if its enforcement powers give it jurisdiction over plant security, the Post reported. “There is quite a bit of work to do,” said Jim Mackris, chief of the EPA’s Chemical Emergency Preparedness and Prevention Office. There are limits, however, on what the EPA can do and much depends on the companies, Mackris said.
“If you blow up, you probably are going to lose some customers, going to lose some workers and going to lose some reputation,” Mackris said.
Critics’ Response
Chemical industry critics, such as labor unions and citizen groups, have said the new security measures are superficial and inconsistent. “The line was that voluntary initiatives were enough,” said Paul Orum, coordinator of the Working Group on Community Right-to-Know. “The line I heard was that a worst-case release or explosion was so unlikely that it wasn’t worth planning for,” Orum said. “After Sept. 11, it’s clear that it is.”
Critics have previously warned that the chemical industry is not prepared for a terrorist attack, the Post reported. A 1999 report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found problems at more than two-dozen plants in two communities, which sources said were in Las Vegas and the Kanawha Valley in West Virginia.
“Security at chemical plants ranged from fair to very poor,” the agency said. “Most security gaps were the result of complacency and lack of awareness of the threat.”
Plant security officials were “very pessimistic about their ability to deter sabotage by employees, yet none of them had implemented simple background checks for key employees such as chemical process operators,’ the report said.
Security around shipping areas, such as loading docks, trains and trucks ranged from “poor to non-existent,” the report said. “Railcars containing cyanide compounds, flammable liquid pesticides, liquefied petroleum gases, chlorine, acids and butadiene were parked alongside residential areas.”
“Inherent Safety” may be Solution
One problem the new measures do not address is that of “inherent safety”—changing processes or using chemicals that are less dangerous to reduce the use of hazardous materials, according to critics. Supporters of inherent safety have said it is the best way to reduce risks.
“The week after Sept. 11, we had a meeting on plant security,” said Stuart Greenberg, of Environmental Health Watch, in Cleveland, Ohio. “We had a big regional wastewater treatment plant, and we said, ‘Isn’t it great, they don’t have to worry because they switched from chlorine to sodium hypochlorite [bleach] to purify their water?’” Greenberg said (Grimaldi/Gugliotta, Washington Post, Dec. 16).
The Czech Republic plans to send an anti-chemical unit to Kuwait to support the U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign in early January (see GSN, Nov. 2), the Mlada fronta Dnes reported, according to the Czech news agency CTK. Mlada fronta Dnes said troops could go to Afghanistan, Pakistan or Kuwait, according to CTK.
Military strategists said sending troops to Kuwait could be a sign that NATO would extend retaliatory attacks to Iraq, the paper said, but added that one military expert said deployment in Kuwait might be only a “stopover,” according to CTK.
The Czech Parliament was expected to vote on the deployment this week (Prague CTK, Dec. 13 in FBIS-EEU, Dec. 14).
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The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles led the United States to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, U.S. officials said in a diplomatic note. According to the treaty’s language, a withdrawing party must provide “a statement of the extraordinary events the notifying party regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.” The United States sent a note to Russia and other nations announcing its intention to withdraw from the treaty (see GSN, Dec. 13).
“Since the treaty entered into force in 1972, a number of state and non-state entities have acquired or are actively seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. It is clear, and has recently been demonstrated, that some of these entities are prepared to employ these weapons against the United States,” said the note.
“Moreover, a number of states are developing ballistic missiles, including long-range ballistic missiles, as a means of delivering weapons of mass destruction. These events pose a direct threat to the territory and security of the United States and jeopardize its supreme interests.”
The note was sent Dec. 13 to Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, the four states that signed a 1997 agreement with the United States naming them treaty successors to the Soviet Union (U.S. State Department release, Dec. 14).
More Russian Reaction
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the United States was never interested in modifying the ABM Treaty, only in leaving it behind.
“In principle, [Russia was] prepared for certain modifications of the treaty. We asked to be given specific parameters that stood in the way of U.S. desires to develop defensive systems and implement programs. We were fully prepared to discuss those parameters,” Putin said in an interview the same day as the U.S. announcement.
“But nothing specific was given to us, no specific parameters to be negotiated. We heard only insistent requests for bilateral withdrawal from the treaty,” Putin said.
“To this day I fail to understand this insistence, given our position, which was fairly flexible,” Putin added.
Despite the U.S.-Russian disagreement, Putin said the Bush administration’s views were clearly presented and argued. “Their position can be contested, one can disagree with that position, as I do. But one cannot say that in acting the way they did, they violated anything or did anything on the sly. On the contrary, they acted in a consistent way and quite openly. So there is a certain logic to that approach, we were aware of that logic, there was nothing surprising,” Putin said (Financial Times, Dec. 15).
U.N. Reaction
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan “noted with regret” the U.S. decision, in a statement issued Friday. Annan said the treaty “has served for many years as a cornerstone for maintaining global peace and security and strategic stability.”
In addition, Annan said the treaty’s annulment could “provoke an arms race, especially in the missile area, and further undermine disarmament and nonproliferation regimes” (U.N. release, Dec. 14).
The U.S. Defense Department Saturday canceled its Navy missile defense development program due to poor performance and budget overruns. “It’s unfortunate we’ve reached this point,” said Edward Aldridge, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief.
The cancellation of the program came one day after U.S. President George W. Bush announced the United States would leave the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to have greater freedom to conduct missile defense tests (see GSN, Dec. 13). The Bush administration had said one of the key reasons why the United States pulled out of the treaty was to be able to test a sea-based defense system.
The program, called Area Missile Defense, was designed to protect U.S. Navy ships and ports against attacks from missiles and manned aircraft, according to the Washington Post. The system, which was scheduled to be deployed in two years, has cost $2.8 billion since the early 1990s, the Post reported.
The Area Missile Defense system was one of the most advanced of the theater defense systems, according to Phil Coyle, former head of the Pentagon’s office of weapons testing and evaluation. He said development of theater defense systems, which are meant to defend against shorter-range missiles, was far ahead of plans for a national missile defense system, which would defend against long-range missiles.
“And so for one of the shortest-range systems to be canceled is not a good sign,” Coyle said.
“You have to consider this a very serious setback for missile defense programs, because it shows that even the simple stuff is difficult,” said Joseph Cirincione, missile defense expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Ricks/Mufson, Washington Post, Dec. 16).
A major technical flaw in the system was that its ship-based targeting computers did not work well with the Aegis radar systems on missile cruisers, according to the New York Times. The radars are designed to track aircraft, which are larger and slower than missiles. The Navy had been experimenting with new computer systems that could have enabled a ship to receive information from several different sensors, such as satellites and airplanes, the Times reported.
The only way the Pentagon could have salvaged the program, according to Congressional rules, was to have certified that it was essential to national security, that costs could be brought down and that there were no other alternatives, the Times reported. Senior Pentagon officials decided that they could not make that case.
The cancellation of the Area Missile Defense program will allow the Defense Department to spend more money on developing ship-based missile defenses against longer-range missiles, officials said. Such programs are designed to shoot down missiles soon after launch or while up in the atmosphere, according to the Times.
“This is a seriously flawed decision,” said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy. “Everybody understands we have to have missile protection for our carrier battle groups and marines and other forward elements,” Gaffney said. “This is not a way to find resources” (James Dao, New York Times, Dec. 16).
Taiwan plans to use a domestically developed missile defense shield instead of U.S. Patriot anti-missile systems, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 12).
The low-altitude missile defense system, called ATBM, is scheduled for installation by 2005, the Taiwanese newspaper Liberty Times reported, according to Agence France-Presse. The system, which will help defend central and southern Taiwan, will take 10 years to install and cost $8.7 billion, according to former Premier Tang Fei.
The ATBM system uses phased array radars similar to those installed on U.S. Navy Aegis-class destroyers, said Chao Yao-ming, an official at the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology, which has developed the ATBM system.
The ATBM system has been chosen over the U.S. Patriot III, which could have taken a long time to be integrated into Taiwan’s defenses, the Times reported. “That’s why the Patriot weaponry was not on the arms shopping list Taipei presented Washington this year,” said a Taiwanese military official (Agence France-Presse, Dec. 16).
Israel has begun developing unmanned aerial vehicles designed to destroy missile launch pads, according to Israeli Maj. Gen. Itzhak Ben-Israel, head of the Israel Defense Forces Authority for Weapons Research and Development. The aircraft would release a weapon to destroy a missile site prior to missile launch rather than try to intercept a missile shortly after launch, which past Israeli defense doctrine emphasized, Ben-Israel said.
Israel has requested $400 million in U.S. funding for the program, but the United States has so far deferred the request. The Bush administration was likely to approve the funding in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Ben-Israel said. Israel would continue developing the project even without U.S. funding, Ha’aretz reported.
Israel Aircraft Industries is the primary contractor for the project (Amnon Barzilai, Ha’aretz, Dec. 17).
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