- Anthrax of the grade involved in the Senate attack could
not have been manufactured by terrorist organisations without some form
of state-level help, leading biological weapons experts said last night.
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- Scientists believe that the enormous complexities involved
in producing the sort of "military grade" material US official
say was found in senator Tom Daschle's office offer compelling evidence
that the attack was state sponsored.
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- The term "military grade" means that the spores
had been dried and milled down to a size of between one and five microns
- the crucial range for anthrax to become an effective weapon.
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- Any bigger than five microns, and the spores get stuck
in the victim's nasal passages and are not capable of being suspended in
the air; any smaller than one micron and the intended victims would exhale
it.
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- Jonathan Ban, a research associate at the Chemical and
Biological Arms Control Institute in Washington, said: "If the anthrax
is between one and five microns, then that is the traditional route which
states have gone down to develop anthrax as a militarily efficient biological
weapon.
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- "That raises the possibility of some state sponsorship,
perhaps not in the normal sense of a government allowing the transfer of
biological agents, but maybe by individuals within government or weapons
programmes leaking the material."
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- Producing weapons-grade anthrax is incredibly difficult,
according to Mr Ban, the author of a report on bioterrorism for the US
centre for disease control in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
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- First, the would-be users would have to acquire a suitably
virulent strain of anthrax to use as the agent. This would have not only
have to be potent enough to infect people and reproduce in their systems,
it would also have to be stable enough to stand up to the manufacturing
process.
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- Next, they would have to create the right conditions
for growing the spores. Normally, they are grown in a wet slurry form,
and it is extremely difficult to get the concentrations right. Even then,
the manufacturers would need specialist equipment, such as bioregulators
and formentors, to regulate oxygen levels, temperature and ph. Most of
these are commercially available, although the supply of some is restricted.
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- After growth, the next hurdle would be to remove the
agent from the wet slurry using a freeze drying process. Again the equipment
is commercially available, but the process would require some expertise
to avoid damaging the agent.
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- It is the next step, however, that is most important
and most difficult: milling the dried spores down to the right size for
inhalation infection to occur. The same equipment used in the manufacture
of powdered drinks and flavourings could be utilised at this stage. They
would also have to establish an airflow system to ensure that the spores
cannot escape while being milled, or wear bulky protective suits which
in turn would make the manufacturing process more tricky.
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- "Only a handful of countries have successfully weaponised
anthrax and that was with hundreds of millions of dollars, the very best
scientists, years of expertise and unlimited access to anthrax agents,"
Mr Ban said. "It took the state weapons programmes decades to figure
this out and that is why I do not believe that terrorists have the capability
to produce it themselves."
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- Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq,
agreed. "If this is anthrax which has been milled down to the one
to five micron size... then we have a problem because this shows that this
is more than just people accessing routine stocks of vaccine quality or
laboratory research quality anthrax and mailing it about," he told
BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday.
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- Investigators face an uphill struggle in establishing
which state the anthrax may have originated from. More than a dozen other
countries are believed to have had anthrax biological weapons programmes.
These include Syria, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Egypt, China, India, North and
South Korea, Bulgaria and Russia.
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- The conventional wisdom in Washington is that it must
have been Iraq, but Mr Ritter dismissed that as wild speculation. "By
1998, it was a well known fact that while we were not able to verify the
totality of the disarmament of Iraq's bioweapons programme, we were able
to establish in no uncertain terms that Iraq had no capability of producing
chemical weapons. We covered Iraq up and down and all around, every square
inch and there was nothing there."
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