Iraqi Biological Weapons Capabilities Require New US Debate On ‘Assured Vulnerability’

The Center for Security Policy today welcomed official confirmation of its earlier warnings that Saddam Hussein was capable of engaging in genocidal attacks with a dreadful new form of weaponry — biological weapons.

Articles in today’s Washington Post and New York Times report that Central Intelligence Agency Director William Webster and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-WI) have confirmed the substance of an editorial by Center director Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. published on 6 September 1990 by the Wall Street Journal: Iraq has the potential to use deadly viruses and toxin agents against U.S. military and non-combatant personnel. As Gaffney noted:

The United States is at the brink of war with an adversary armed with a terrifyingly lethal weapon — one capable of inflicting massive casualties against both military and civilian populations. So frightening is this weapon that its possession has been globally banned by international agreement. As a result, the U.S. does not possess an in-kind deterrent to the use of such a weapon against its forces or people; worse yet, it lacks virtually any capability to minimize the devastation the enemy might inflict by that use.

 

The Center believes that the U.S. government’s past policy of benign neglect — while never responsible — is now transparently reckless and unacceptable. As Gaffney observed:

If the United States chooses for moral or other reasons to remain bound by the [1972 Biological Warfare] Convention’s prohibition on possessing offensive biological weapons — effectively denying itself on a unilateral basis an in-kind deterrent — it must at the very least now undertake a crash program of research into technologies associated with detecting, typing and defending against biological warfare. (Emphasis added.)

 

The Center also believes that the real possibility that Iraqi biological or chemical weaponsreassessment of the wisdom of a policy that would keep the American public permanently vulnerable to such attack. capabilities might be employed against U.S. forces — or even through terrorist attacks — against the people of the United States demands an urgent

In a related editorial published by the Washington Times on 20 September 1990, Gaffney urged:

[Today,] in the event of attack on the United States involving chemical weapons (or for that matter nuclear, biological or any other means of mass destruction), it would be every American for himself. Much of the impetus for this absurd situation — the strategic equivalent of "a thousand points of light" or "voluntarism" — arises from a notion of deterrence enshrined in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This notion holds that the only certain means of preventing nuclear war is to ensure that the American people are utterly vulnerable to its consequences….

 

Unfortunately, there is no evident basis for assuming that the esoteric, and in any event dubious, theory of mutual vulnerability will serve to deter emerging threats like that posed by Iraqi-sponsored terrorists armed with Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons….If the American people are to be given an alternative to their present, involuntary and absolute exposure to the gamut of weaponry of mass destruction, they must begin at once to demand of their government…a commitment to public survival and investment in a variety of defensive technologies and equipment needed to honor that commitment.

 

The presence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal has been of profound concern to the Center for Security Policy long before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Accordingly, the Center reiterates its view that there can be no satisfactory resolution of the present crisis that leaves intact such menacing capabilities and the ability of Iraq’s leadership to employ them against U.S. and allied targets.

Copies of the full texts of these editorials are attached.