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medpundit |
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Thursday, January 09, 2003Regarding the availability of smallpox outside of protected stocks in the United States and Russia, I think Richard Preston makes a good case to the contrary in his recent book "Demon in the Freezer." Iraq had its last smallpox outbreak in 1972; it launched its covert bioweapons program the following year, a fact which has been documented by UN weapons inspectors. To assume that Iraq would have destroyed its own stocks of smallpox just as it began developing biological weapons is dubious, to say the least. To be sure, we don't have a smoking gun. But not even a court of law requires absolute proof of guilt to convict a suspect; circumstantial evidence is often quite sufficient even to convict for murder. And there is plenty of circumstantial evidence where Iraq is concerned. I’m reading The Demon in the Freezer now, and it does make a persuasive case that we shouldn’t be complacent about Iraq. Then, there’s this quote from the head of the Army’s biological defense laboratory: The U.S. military assumes that North Korea, as well as Iraq, has samples of the smallpox virus, and it's possible the two countries have exchanged information on that and other biological weapons, Henchal said. He said "it's a bit of a fantasy" to assume that the only smallpox samples in the world are the two publicly declared samples in the United States and Russia. "It's clear from intelligence that the genie is out of the bottle," Henchal said. posted by Sydney on 1/09/2003 12:54:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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