>From The Salt Lake Tribune,
http://www.sltrib.com/04202000/utah/42724.htm
-
International Ban on Bioweapons Is Failing, Scientist Says
Thursday, April 20, 2000
BY LEE SIEGEL
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
A 25-year-old treaty has failed to halt proliferation of biological
weapons, and the United States has little defense against germ or
toxin warfare by terrorists or rogue nations, an expert told Utah
researchers.
"If there were a bioweapons attack, we wouldn't know about it
until many people were exposed or sick," said physician-physicist Al
Zelicoff, a
senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
Until last year, Zelicoff spent nine years advising the U.S.
negotiators seeking better enforcement of the Biological Weapons Convention.
He
said the 145-nation treaty to ban biological weapons took effect in 1975.
Enforcing the treaty "probably is pretty hopeless," Zelicoff told
150 people Tuesday at the University of Utah's Eccles Institute of Human
Genetics. "It's frightening. It keeps me up at night a lot."
He added: "On a dollar-per-death basis, there's nothing cheaper
than biological weapons," which are easy to make, store and hide.
Zelicoff said the best hope for stopping proliferation of
bioweapons is to improve international monitoring of unusual disease
outbreaks so
doctors also detect accidents, tests or attacks with microbes or
germ-produced
toxins.
"You detect it in the developmental stages of a biological weapons
program . . . then you punish the offender" by retaliating with
sanctions or military attacks, Zelicoff said.
In a successful U.S.-funded test of cooperative disease
monitoring, doctors at three New Mexico hospitals and a Russian nuclear lab
hospital tracked cases of the liver disease hepatitis C during 1996-1999, he
said.
Similar tracking of influenza and hepatitis C is planned between
U.S. researchers and former bioweapons facilities in Kazakhstan and Russia.
Zelicoff said New Mexico, San Francisco and Russian doctors are
establishing a real-time system for reporting six syndromes -- such as
flu-like
illness or skin rashes with fever --to determine normal levels and thus
detect
increases due to bioweapons attacks.
Although smallpox was eradicated from humans in 1980, Zelicoff
supported the Clinton administration's 1999 decision to maintain remaining
U.S.
smallpox cultures so antiviral drugs or vaccines can be developed if
someone ever uses the virus as a weapon.
"We have absolutely no defense against this," Zelicoff said. "The
most stupid single thing we could do is destroy existing stocks."
U. geneticist David Grunwald replied that if nations maintain
germ-warfare agents for defense purposes, "they can easily be used
for an offensive capability," and the result could be "mutual destruction,"
not deterrence.
The United States and Russia have the only known smallpox
cultures. The U.S. and Russian stance for retaining smallpox cultures defied
the
World Health Organization, which wants them eliminated to prevent smallpox
from getting into the environment or falling into evil hands -- such as
terrorists aiming at Salt Lake City's 2002 Winter Games.
"One cannister of smallpox in Olympic Village would be a complete
disaster," said Merle Sande, internal medicine chairman at the U.
Nations believed to have bioweapons include North Korea, Libya,
Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel, China, Taiwan and Cuba, Zelicoff said.
The former Soviet Union made smallpox its main bioweapon and also
produced tons of anthrax, leading to a deadly 1979 outbreak the
Soviets initially blamed on tainted meat, he said.
Difficulty enforcing the treaty is illustrated by the existence of
around 4,000 sites in Russia that "could brew up enough anthrax or
staphylococcal enterotoxin to create a bad day in any big city," said
Zelicoff.
He said that before the treaty, the favorite U.S. bioweapon was
staphylococcal enterotoxin B. Distributed in spray tanks and artillery
shells, the poison was meant to sicken soldiers, not kill. "It just
makes you wish you were dead," Zelicoff said.
He believes all U.S. offensive bioweapons were buried in 1969.
"Until 1974, the CIA maintained a small cache of biological
weapons for assassination purposes," he added. "Those are supposed to be
gone."
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