An additional 33,000 pounds of biological agents were placed into bombs to be dropped from airplanes, or held in reserve for other weapons. If Saddam had used those devices successfully–and his Scud missiles later proved capable of reaching all the way to Tel Aviv with conventional war-heads-the result could have been as horrifying as Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
That it didn’t happen was probably due to blunt and forceful warnings from Washington. In January 1991, just before the allies began to bomb Iraq, President George Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, passed messages to the Iraqis warning that the most extreme measures would be taken if Baghdad resorted to weapons of mass destruction. The clear implication was that the United States might go nuclear–that “Iraq would become a glass parking lot,” as a current U.S. official puts it.
At the time, Washington was most concerned about Iraq’s stockpile of chemical weapons, such as mustard gas and nerve gas, which had already been used against Iranian troops and Kurdish rebels. But it turns out that even deadlier biological weapons were available to Saddam–and may still be in his arsenal. The Iraqis, who lied about their germ-warfare program in the first place, now insist that all of the weapons have been eliminated. “They said they emptied the missiles and the bombs and destroyed the [biological] agents,” says Ekeus. “But so far, they have offered no convincing proof.”
Anthrax and botulism were not the only germ weapons at Saddam’s disposal. Ekeusand his aides said seven principal biological agents were actively tested for possible use, including viruses. The poisons were produced in a factory at Al-Hakim, about 50 miles southeast of Baghdad. and at four other sites. “It was a crash program to weaponize,” Ekeus said. Because the deadly agents are difficult to handle, he added, the Iraqis “didn’t fill [the warheads] until it was time to use them.”
For maximum effect, the bombs and miss fie warheads had to disperse the germs by exploding in the air. Iraq had been working on the difficult problem of above ground detonation, and a member of Ekeus’s staff says Saddam’s scientists were “confident–more confident than we are” that they had solved the problems. If the weapons had worked properly, the results could have been devastating. A 1993 study by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment concluded that 220 pounds of anthrax spores released from an airplane over Washington on a calm night might kill as many as 3 million people. That’s haft the amount of anthrax one Iraqi Scud can carry.
No hurry: Iraq’s germ-warfare program finally came to light because of the defection on Aug. 8 of Saddam’s son-in-law Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid, whom Ekeus describes as “the mastermind of the whole biological-weapons program.” With Kamel prepared to spill Saddam’s secrets, the Iraqis suddenly provided Ekeus with reams of information on their outlawed program. The defection will apparently not lead to Saddam’s downfall in the near future. Once again, the dictator was crushing any potential challengers at home. And given the lack of an acceptable successor to Saddam, even U.S. allies in the Middle East were in no hurry to see him fall, as long as he remains politically and militarily weakened.
But the forced revelations have deprived Saddam of his most potent secret weapon. “They kept biology as the prize,” Ekeus told NEWSWEEK. He said the Iraqi strategy was to get economic sanctions lifted without revealing the secret of the biological weapons. Germ warfare could have given Saddam “an ideal strategic weapon,” Ekeus said, assuming he had an effective long-range delivery method. Delivered secretly, it also could have been “the ideal terrorism weapon.” Now if Iraq wants to escape from the economic sanctions that are choking it, Baghdad will have to prove that it has given up its doomsday weapons.
Iraq now concedes its program to make weapons of mass destruction was far more advanced than it admitted before.
Biological: Outsiders learned for the first time that anthrax germs and botulism poisons were actually loaded into Iraqi missile warheads and bombs. If inhaled, both agents kill by destroying the ability to breathe. Iraq also loaded a little-known fungal poison called aflatoxin, which may cause cancer, and it experimented with infectious viruses.
Nuclear: Baghdad also provided new information showing that its nuclear program was more advanced than the allies knew. In August 1990, the month it invaded Kuwait, Iraq reportedly began a crash program to produce a nuclear weapon within a year. It failed.
Chemical: Iraq’s supply of mustard gas and nerve agents such as sarin was well known, having been used in combat against Iran and Kurdish rebels. Mustard burns skin and lungs but is much less lethal than satin, which paralyzes.
