Clinton Legacy Watch # 18: Assured U.S. Vulnerability In The Face of a Burgeoning Biological Warfare Threat
(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday’s news flash from Las Vegas should be a wake-up call for the
American people. The fact that two men were arrested by the FBI and charged with “pos[ing] a
chemical and biological threat to our community” literally brings home the implications of the
danger posed by Saddam Hussein: The burgeoning threat of biological warfare (BW)
can no
longer be ignored or regarded as a problem only for those unlucky enough to live in or near
Iraq.
To be sure, the latter danger is also becoming more evident day-by-day. For example, this
morning’s Washington Times features a report by national security correspondent Bill
Gertz
which says, in part: “Iraq has developed two types of short-range missiles that are permitted
under United Nations sanctions and could be equipped with hidden chemical or biological
warheads.” Mr. Gertz goes on to note that “[A U.S. intelligence report released by the White
House on Tuesday] states that the Iraqis have not accounted for as many as 75 chemical
and
biological missile warheads and up to 25,000 artillery rockets filled with germ and chemical
agents.” (Emphasis added throughout.)
Did We Already Miss One Wake-Up Call — From
Saddam?
There is reason to believe that the United States has already had one warning that weapons
of
mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s hands may pose a threat to the American homeland, as
well. As the Center for Security Policy reported on 11 April 1995:
- “Dr. Laurie Mylroie — a renowned Middle East expert, best-selling author and
- ‘Sometime in June 1992, Iraqi intelligence learned of a bush-league campaign of twelve
pipe-bombings being plotted by followers of the New Jersey-based Islamic radical, Sheik
Omar. Saddam’s operatives took over, targeting the very symbol of U.S. capitalism and urban
civilization — New York’s twin-towered, skyscraping World Trade Center (WTC) — for a far
more devastating attack. - ‘The act was planned, moreover, in such a way as to deceive the American people and their
government into holding the original plotters — and their presumed sponsors in Iran —
responsible for the bombing, not Iraq. In this way, Saddam could satisfy his culture’s tradition
of exacting revenge against an enemy. Better still, from his point of view, that enemy would be
induced to retaliate against Iraq’s most dangerous regional foe, Iran. - ‘The bomb used in the World Trade Center was intended to employ metal additives
dramatically to boost its explosive power. Had it been properly positioned and detonated
according to plan, it could have toppled one of the World Trade Center’s towers into the
other, killing tens of thousands of people and causing incalculable damage in lower Manhattan. - ‘The bomb also apparently was designed to vaporize cyanide gas — which, if distributed
through the tower’s ventilation system, would have assured massive casualties throughout the
bombed structure.'”(1)
distinguished member of the Center’s Board of Advisors — has concluded that the
attack on the World Trade Center may have been perpetrated by Saddam Hussein as an
act of revenge for his defeat in the Gulf war. Highlights of Dr. Mylroie’s findings
include the following:
Now, with the discovery of an alleged home-grown anthrax threat, the lessons
that should
have been learned from the World Trade Center incident can no longer be ignored.
These
include the following:
Item: Arms Control Can’t Address the BW Problem
The Clinton Administration’s reflexive response to the proliferation of biological weaponry —
and
indeed, most other forms of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation — has been to
seek arms control “solutions” to the problem. Despite the abject failure in Iraq of the most
comprehensive monitoring scheme ever undertaken to find, limit and destroy such weapons,
President Clinton announced in his 27 January State of the Union address that he would dispatch
a team to negotiate amendments to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) intended to
“strengthen the enforcement provisions of the BWC.”
As the Center warned earlier in the year,(2) however:
- “Some of the Clinton Administration’s most zealous proponents of the [defective]
Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) are seeking to clone its verification provisions,
and affix them to the completely unverifiable 1972 BWC. They are being resisted,
however, by other officials who recognize the folly that would occur if the CWC’s
errors were to be compounded by, in effect, expanding its scope explicitly to cover
America’s cutting-edge biotech and pharmaceutical firms.”
The unalterable facts of life are that there is no way to make the BWC
verifiable or
enforceable. As Alan P. Zelicoff, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratory who has
participated
in the U.S. government’s interagency deliberations on “enhancing” the BWC recently wrote in the
Washington Post:
- “Equipment for pharmaceutical production is identical to that used for bio-weapons
processing, and even the most toxic of biological materials are used in medical
therapeutics and research … [Furthermore,] in just a few days or weeks, biological
weapons can be manufactured in militarily significant quantities in a site no
larger than a small house.” (Emphasis added.)
While reworking the BWC will not improve that treaty, it will add enormously
to its
costs. The initiatives the President unveiled in his State of the Union speech would have
a
particularly devastating effect on some of the Nation’s most dynamic and productive companies —
the American biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Some of these companies
could
literally be destroyed by the loss of billions of dollars worth of proprietary information
compromised in the course of an inspection or the besmirching of a business reputation by
competitors willing groundlessly to charge that a U.S. concern is now or has been engaged in
biological warfare programs.
Less tangible but no less insidious is the placebo effect that efforts to
“enhance” the BWC will
have on an American public that has, at least until now, been altogether too inattentive to the
dangers of biological terrorism and/or warfare. As has been the case with the Chemical Weapons
Convention, the false sense of security inspired by such phony arms control “solutions” serves to
encourage the diversion of attention and resources from aggressive work in the areas of active
and passive defenses.
Item: There is an Urgent Need for New, Effective Export
Controls
Even as it has chased arms control will-of-the-whisps in response to the BW threat,
the Clinton
Administration has engaged in a wrecking operation on another regime that has, in
the
past, contributed much to the effort to resist the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction and dual-use technologies that could be used to make and/or deliver them:
export
controls. As Dr. Peter Leitner, a career civil servant who is a Senior Strategic Trade Analyst in
the Clinton Defense Department, told the Joint Economic Committee on 17 June 1997, that —
thanks to a deliberate Clinton Administration policy aimed at eviscerating the “national security
export controls that we came to know and rely upon” during the Cold War — all there is to show
for Mr. Clinton’s self-styled “more intelligent export control policy” is: “a handful of
weak,
ineffectual regimes which are little more than cardboard cut-outs designed to maintain the
facade of an international technology security system, but [that] offer virtually no
protection from nations seeking to develop advanced conventional weapons or weapons of
mass destruction.“(3)
Matters are made considerably worse when nations the Clinton Administration has trusted to
be
“partners for peace” — notably, Russia and China — turn out to be contributing directly to the
proliferation problem. As the Washington Post reported on 12 February 1998,
“United Nations
inspectors in Iraq last fall uncovered what they considered highly unsettling evidence of a 1995
agreement by the Russian government to sell Iraq sophisticated fermentation equipment that could
be used to develop biological weapons, according to sources.”
There is an urgent need to strengthen U.S. and, to the extent possible, multilateral controls on
dual-use technologies as part of an effort to reconstitute an effective multilateral export control
regime on the model of the Coordinating Committee on Export Controls (COCOM). Rogue
states and potential suppliers alike must be convinced that there will be real costs imposed on
governments and companies that engage in the unauthorized and reckless transfer of such
strategic technology.
Item: Domestic Criminal Penalties Need to Be
Strengthened
Last year during the Senate’s consideration of the Chemical Weapons Convention, legislation
was
introduced by Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) to provide practical
approaches to deal with the threat
posed by chemical and biological weapons — as opposed to the phony approach embodied in the
CWC. This bill, known as the “Chemical and Biological Weapons Threat Reduction Act
of
1997″ (S. 495), would, among other things, impose stiff civil and criminal penalties on
the
acquisition, possession, transfer or use of chemical and biological weapons, and control the export
of such items. For example, the bill would require a sentence of life imprisonment or the death
penalty in the event such use causes any loss of life.
Regrettably, in the aftermath of the CWC’s ratification, S. 495 was not adopted by the House
of
Representatives. The Las Vegas incident underscores the urgent need to enact this legislation.
Item: The Present U.S. Posture of ‘Assured Vulnerability’ Must Be
Corrected At Once
The most troublesome aspect of the threat posed by biological and chemical weapons is the
fact
that the United States lacks any defenses, passive or active, against these weapons.
Incredibly,
President Clinton and to an even greater extent Vice President Al Gore are opposed to active
defenses (i.e., weapons that counter attacking weapons) for the American homeland. They have
also eschewed to date measures that would provide appreciable passive defenses (e.g., civil
defense measures) for the American people.
The reason: Such programs run counter to the theology of “assured vulnerability”
codified
in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Unbeknownst to most Americans, this accord
effectively prohibits the United States from having effective missile defenses. In practice, though,
the Clinton Administration has rationalized the assured vulnerability to missile attack dictated by
this so-called “cornerstone of strategic stability” as an excuse for leaving the U.S. exposed to
all
other forms of homeland defense.
Mitigation of this posture of vulnerability must be an urgent priority for the United States.
For
starters, the Nation must urgently field effective, global defenses against missile attack
(both
ballistic and cruise missiles). As the Center for Security Policy recently observed
- “In the horrible event that ballistic missiles are indeed used [in the words of
Ambassador Richard Butler, UNSCOM’s chairman] to ‘blow away’ Tel Aviv — or a
European capital or American city — it is a safe bet that the United States will promptly
field an effective, global missile defense system. It will almost certainly involve, at a
minimum, a system recommended three years ago by a blue-ribbon committee
sponsored by the Heritage Foundation.(6) This
program could be rapidly and highly
cost-effectively brought on-line thanks to the nearly $50 billion investment
already made to date in the Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense system. According to
the Heritage ‘Team B’ study, within two-to-three years for a further investment of as
little as $2-3 billion, the United States could begin to deploy effective, mobile,
world-wide defenses against shorter- and longer-range missiles.
“Of course, it will then be too late for those who were needlessly sacrificed as a
result of the failure first and foremost of President Clinton to field the AEGIS
option and the inability of the Congress to muster the majorities necessary to
overcome his opposition. The blame will probably be widely shared, however —
unless the Messrs. Gingrich and Lott take steps now to translate their welcome
rhetoric into the required action.”
The United States must also act on the passive defense front. The
congressionally-chartered National Defense Panel recommended several specific steps that must
be taken as a
matter of the utmost urgency. While hardly sufficient, the NDP’s recommendations laid out in
“Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century,” are certainly
necessary.
Specifically, this blue-ribbon panel recommends that the National Guard and the Army Reserve be
prepared to:
- “Train local authorities in chemical and biological weapons detection, defense, and
decontamination; - “Assist in casualty treatment and evacuation;
- “Quarantine, if necessary, affected areas and people; and
- “Assist in restoration of infrastructure and services.“
An urgent national debate needs to take place about how best to implement even these
daunting tasks, and then to consider what steps beyond these should be taken to
secure more
comprehensive protection against WMD attack for the American people and their representative
form of government.
The Bottom Line
Yesterday’s events in Las Vegas and the prospect of conflict with Iraq which may lead to the
deliberate or accidental release of lethal chemical agents and/or toxic viruses vividly underscores
the Center for Security Policy’s recent assessment that: “The record of the Clinton
Administration with respect to the threat of proliferation of chemical and biological weapons —
which President Clinton has declared in successive Executive Orders to be ‘an unusual and
extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United
States’ —
is nothing less than a recklessly irresponsible one.”(7)
This is a record with which the American people — and their national polity — literally cannot
live.
Every effort must now be made, at both the policy and programmatic levels, to take corrective
action.
– 30 –
1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
If Saddam Hussein Is Building Biological Weapons,
Is the United States the Likely Target? (No.
95-D 23, 11 April 1995).
2. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
C.W.C Watch #3: U.S. Underestimating the Cost of
One Ineffective Ban; Will It Repeat Them In Another? (
3. See the Center’s Press Release entitled Profile in
Courage: Peter Leitner Blows the Whistle
on Clinton’s Dangerous Export Decontrol Policies (
4. See “Did Russia Sell Iraq Germ Warfare Equipment?” by R. Jeffrey
Smith, p. A1.
5. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Hill Leadership Endorses Prompt Deployment of
Missile Defenses: Will Tel Aviv ‘Burn’ While Clinton Fiddles? (
1998).
6. The Heritage Foundation’s blue-ribbon study can be accessed via the World Wide Web at
the following address:
you will leave the Center for Security Policy’s World Wide Web site.
7. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
C.W.C Watch #3: U.S. Underestimating the Cost of
One Ineffective Ban; Will It Repeat Them In Another? (
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