Over the last seven years, since the end of the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm, and the beginning of the United Nations’ action against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) has spent thousands of hours and nearly a quarter of a billion dollars investigating and identifying Iraqi stores of biological and chemical agents that can be used as weapons of mass destruction. Even by the kindest analysis, the UNSCOM effort has been ineffective in locating even the materials that Iraq has admitted possessing. Possession of such materials for use as weapons of mass destruction by Iraq is one of the most serious international problems of this decade because of the fact that Iraq has been power-hungry and unpredictable and repeatedly has used such weapons both in wars with others and against its own people. This paper will review both the nature of the biological and chemical materials believed to be possessed by Iraq and the nature of the peculiar threat that Iraq poses to the peace the world is presently enjoying.

Over the last ten years, as the influence of the formerly great powers diminishes around the world, and as the danger of nuclear holocaust has become less likely, smaller nations wishing to establish regional power or influence world affairs have begun to develop biological and chemical weapons as tools of control, terror, and military might.

While chemical weapons kill through exposure to poisons, usually

toxic gas, biological weapons spread death through infectious

disease. These deadly organisms are inexpensive to make with

simple equipment and easy to conceal.

Different forms of biological and chemical weapons have been used for centuries, from the time that Roman soldiers put dead animals in enemy water supplies . A great variety of biological and chemical weapons are available today.

The primary chemical weapons widely available today are mustard gas, VX, and Sarin. Mustard gas was the first widely used chemical weapon, employed by both sides in the First World War. It is a colorless, odorless liquid that is used as a vapor. When inhaled, mustard gas causes painful, long-lasting blisters which can lead to long-term illnesses such as cancer and diseases of the respiratory track . VX is also a colorless and odorless liquid that turns into a gas when brought into contact with oxygen. It can be spread either in the air or in water and causes death by being absorbed through the skin or by being inhaled. It acts on the nervous system and causes convulsions, respiratory failure and death . Sarin is the gas that was used recently by Japanese terrorists in the Tokyo subway system. It attacks the central nervous system and, in high enough doses, causes death through suffocation .

All three chemical weapons can be delivered as an aerosol, sprayed into the air. VX can be spread in water as well. Since a very small amount, approximately one drop, is lethal, delivery by water may be a practical way to cause death in a large number of people .

Biological weapons are generally more toxic than chemical weapons because they can grow and proliferate in human and animal hosts and because they can be harder to detect, seeming to be a natural outbreak of a disease . In addition, some biological agents can survive for long periods of time in the soil and elsewhere. Finally, it can take some time for the symptoms of the disease to appear and so biological agents can be harder to trace to their source .

The most widely known and used biological warfare agent is anthrax. It represents such a threat that the United States recently started to inoculate all of its troops against the disease . Anthrax is a bacteria with spore-forming rods which thrives in the soil. A human can be infected either by inhaling spores or having them come into contact with skin. Once inside the human, the spore produces a potentially fatal toxin. All that is needed to cause an infection is an amount the size of a speck of dust . The first symptoms of infection are fever and fatigue. Thereafter, the patient’s condition may improve before the onset of severe respiratory problems leading to death with three to five days of the onset of symptoms .

Clearly, anthrax does not have as rapid an effect as a chemical agent like Sarin, where symptoms appear on contact. However, in some ways the effects of Anthrax are more frightening. An enemy or terrorist can salt fields with Anthrax bacteria and expect that the first symptoms of the disease will not appear for another week, the incubation period, and the first deaths will occur almost ten days after the application of the agent. As a result it would be difficult to trace who spread the disease. Moreover, the bacteria potentially could continue to live in the soil and be spread for years into the future. If terrorists wish to cause general anxiety among the population and a fear that government cannot provide protection, anthrax is their ideal weapon.

Other biological agents include the bacteria that causes bubonic plague, the virus that causes Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and the toxin that causes botulism. All of these agents cause disease that can result in death. None of them cause an instant onset of disease or death and so they are all difficult to trace to their source .

With the development of genetic research and the creation of new life-forms, some scientists have become concerned that either governments or terrorist groups could engineer designer diseases which would be even harder to detect and more deadly than the naturally occurring biological agents . There does not seem to be evidence of such agents having been developed to date.

The primary weapon of mass destruction that has been a cause of fear over the past fifty years has been nuclear weapons. For many years nuclear technology was only available to the richest and most advanced nations. It is still a technology that is difficult to develop and hard to use. Biological and chemical weapons, however, are both easy to make and cheap by comparison. Even a Japanese doomsday sect was able to produce Sarin. In addition, since small quantities of biological and chemical agents can cause large numbers of deaths, transporting the weapons becomes easy for anyone who has access to unrestricted air travel .

Iraq either had developed or was close to developing operational nuclear weapons at the time that the Gulf War started . Iraq is proven to have developed, produced and stockpiled extensive reserves of biological and chemical weapons and the means to deliver them .

The volume of CBW [chemical and biological weapon] weapons and

production capacity that was found in Iraq far exceeded Western

estimates. For example, the U.N. inspectors found in Iraq 26,000 CW

munitions that contained 550 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas. At

least thirteen different types kinds of CW weapons were in Iraq’s arsenal,

including aerial bombs, artillery shells, mortars, rockets, aerial sprays,

and thirty Scud warheads that were converted to carry CW agent .

No one is sure if UNSCOM has discovered all of the weapons that Iraq has developed. However, Iraq is known to have produced, and may still have, mustard gas, VX, botulinum (which causes food poisoning), anthrax, aflatoxin, and clostridium . "Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of available diseases includes ircin, hemorrhagic conjunctivitis (which causes the eyes to bleed), and clostridium perfringens, a bacteria common in food poisoning ." Because of Iraq’s political philosophy, its ability to produce and deliver biological and chemical weapons constitutes a danger to the entire world.

The present Iraqi regime came to power after a decade of political turmoil in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Saddam Hussein became President of Iraq in 1979 and has since developed an international reputation for repression, human rights abuses and international terrorism . He led Iraq into war with its neighbor Iran one year after he came to power and those two nations engaged in a war of attrition for nearly the entire decade of the 1980s. It was an enormously costly war for both countries. For example,

Within a four-week period between February and March 1984, the

Iraqis reportedly killed 40,000 Iranians and lost 9,000 of their own

men, but even this was deemed to be an unacceptable ratio, and in

February the Iraqi command ordered the use of chemical weapons.

Despite repeated Iraqi denials, between May 1981 and March 1984,

Iran charged Iraq with forty uses of chemical weapons .

Later, in 1986, the United Nations formally accused Iraq of using both mustard gas and nerve gas against the Iranians . After many years of war, a cease fire finally took effect in August 1988.

Just two years after the end of that costly war, Hussein took Iraq to war again, this time with its neighbor to the south, Kuwait. Iraq invaded Kuwait and set up a puppet government. The world community, including most Arab states, rose up in protest and, six months after Kuwait had been invaded, United Nations forces retook Kuwait in a battle lasting little more than a week . Even though Iraq had added biological weapons to artillery shells and Scud missiles at the outset of the Gulf War, it never used those weapons during the ensuing war. It is suspected that biological and chemical weapons were not used because both Israel and the United States warned that such use would be responded to with nuclear weapons .

The Gulf War wiped out a major portion of Iraq’s military might. Subsequent United Nations sanctions have made it impossible for Iraq to trade its oil to fund an economic recovery. Nevertheless, Hussein has continued to rule Iraq with an iron fist and has reestablished Iraq as one of the preeminent military powers in the Gulf Region . Included as an element of that renewed military might are chemical and biological weapons.

In order to bring an end to the Gulf War, the United Nations demanded that Iran accept Security Council Resolution 687 which required that Iraq declare and destroy its stockpile of weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. UNSCOM was formed to oversee and carry out the provisions of Resolution 687 .

To date, UNSCOM has identified and destroyed countless materials designed to be part of weapons of mass destruction.

The U.N. inspectors have destroyed dozens of factories and

confiscated millions of pages of records concerning Iraq’s nuclear,

chemical and biological warfare programs . . . They’ve installed

dozens of tagged video cameras to keep watch on ‘dual use’

industrial equipment that Iraq could one day convert to weapons

production.

However, the designated goal of UNSCOM, identifying and destroying all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, is far from complete . UNSCOM’s efforts have been blocked at every opportunity by Iraq’s cat and-mouse game of interference and outright prevention of a serious inspection effort. Iraq has repeatedly made final and complete declarations of all weapons of mass destruction in its possession. Each "final and complete" declaration has been proven incomplete. The most far-reaching proof of falseness came when Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, former head of a biological weapons plant, defected to the west in 1995. One month before his defection, Iraq had finally admitted the development of biological agents, but had said that such agents had not been weaponized. After Hussein’s son-in-law’s defection, 700,000 pages of documents related to the biological weapon program were found on Hussein Kamel’s chicken farm. They demonstrated a much higher understanding of biological warfare agents than had been admitted a month before. The chicken farm documents also showed that biological weapons had been made part of weapons that could be aimed at Iraq’s foes .

Not withstanding the thousands of tons of chemical and biological agents identified and destroyed by UNSCOM in Iraq, it seems clear that much more has not been found. In addition, it is clear that Iraq has the technical knowledge to allow it quickly to redevelop a stockpile of such weapons as soon as UNSCOM oversight has ended .

Chemical and biological weapons can be created with a minimal technological level of expertise, are inexpensive to produce, are deadly in small doses and therefore easy to transport, and can be difficult to trace. They are the ideal weapons for modern terrorists.

Iraq is one of the primary terrorist governments in the world. Attempts to discover, catalogue and destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have been partially successful but there is little doubt that Iraq could develop its capability to recreate such weapons within months of the end of international oversight. Thus, UNSCOM’s efforts to identify and destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction seem to be futile. Even if they are all destroyed, new production can be started immediately.

In this light, it appears that the continuing UNSCOM effort actually is part of a waiting game, keeping sanctions in place and controlling Iraq’s use of the weapons of mass destruction that it has hidden away until a more responsible government is in place, a government that can concentrate on rebuilding rather than on conquering neighboring countries or supporting world-wide terror organization.

The solution to the larger problem of biological and chemical weapons is harder to determine. Clearly, more education about the symptoms and effects of the use of such weapons would help counter the terror they are designed to create. However, other than controlling through the delaying tactics that are being used in Iraq, or on a case-by case approach as new problems arise, no long-term solution to the threat of biological and chemical weapons is immediately discernible.