And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

 From http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Sep/13/front_page/AGRO13.htm
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Plant scientists sound the alarm on agroterrorism.
A deadly crop of economic weapons

By Steve Goldstein

INQUIRER WASHINGTON BUREAU

FORT DETRICK, Md. - In the rolling hills east of the Catoctin Mountains, at the dead 
end of a lane on this sprawling U.S. Army installation, American scientists once 
stockpiled a fungus designed to destroy the Soviet wheat crop. Here they developed the 
"feather bomb," an aerial weapon loaded with turkey feathers carrying killer spores of 
stem rust of wheat.

"I'm sure," said Charles Kingsolver, 85, one of the few surviving researchers on the 
program, "we could have caused considerable damage."

Now, 30 years after the United States ended its biological weapons program, scientists 
are preparing to counter the potential threat to U.S. crops and food supplies from the 
deliberate introduction of deadly organisms.

The horror of biowarfare has traditionally meant the use against humans of fatal 
agents such as anthrax, smallpox or plague. But agroterror is simpler and less 
expensive, and devastating to the target's way of life.

If bioweapons are the poor man's nuclear weapon, then anti-crop agents are time bombs 
designed to implode a nation's economy.

"Plant pathogens could be much easier to use than other weapons of mass destruction, 
and they would cause more damage to the food supply and the economy," said Norman 
Schaad, a research plant pathologist at the U.S. Agriculture Department's lab at Fort 
Detrick.

A United Nations working paper, subject to intense debate, has named 10 international 
crop diseases that have weapons potential.

More significantly, most - if not all - countries with biowarfare programs have 
created weapons specifically for attacking crops and animals, said Thomas Frazier, an 
agroterror expert who consults for the USDA.

Recent revelations about the Soviet anti-crop program, designed to destroy wheat, 
corn, rye and rice, have raised new concerns. Ken Alibek, former deputy chief of the 
Soviet biological weapons program who defected in 1992, has publicly stated his doubts 
that Russian stockpiles of agents have been eliminated.

Iraq had an anti-crop program that featured wheat smut, and planned to use it in the 
1980s against Iran, where wheat is an important staple. Called "agent D," it reduces 
crop yields and produces a flammable gas that may blow up harvesting equipment that 
has collected diseased grain.

The Iraqis also produced T-2-mycotoxin from a fungus that grows in plants and is 
harmful to humans. The fungus that produces T-2 mycotoxin can infect wheat, peanuts 
and other grains. Grain contaminated with T-2 is believed to have killed one of every 
10 people in the Russian town of Orenburg in the 1940s, according to a book recently 
published by the National Academy of Sciences.

Experts believe that since UNSCOM weapons inspections ended last December, Iraq has 
continued work on its biowarfare program.

"If they haven't been, they're crazier than I think they are," said Dick Spertzel, a 
former UNSCOM bioweapons inspector now consulting with the agency. "They are doing 
something, even if it's just research and development."

The threat is not limited to rogue nations, state-supported terrorists or Osama bin 
Laden's al-Qaeda organization. Economic motives apply as well.

"The threat [of these weapons] hasn't changed in 50 years, but it could be used in 
certain circumstances," said Raymond Zilinskas, a microbiologist at the University of 
Maryland. "Antismoking fanatics could release tobacco blue-mold disease in the 
Carolinas. An agricultural conglomerate could wipe out a competitor."

A crop attack might look like a natural epidemic, which would divert attention from 
the perpetrators.

The consequences would be disastrous for a poor nation if, for example, rice blast - a 
fungus - were used to wipe out its staple crop. Such a country, wrote British plant 
pathologist Paul Rogers, "could well experience famine that would be at least as 
costly, in human terms, as an anthrax attack on a city."

"I think that some group that wants to introduce plant pathogens could do so rather 
easily without being detected," said Larry Madden, an Ohio State University plant 
pathologist.

Madden, who spoke at a recent symposium on agroterror in Montreal, described a 
scenario in which infected wheat seed is brought into the United States. Only a small 
amount would be needed to damage a wheat crop, and the chances of its being caught by 
a dwindling number of inspectors is quite small.

"You'd be looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack," he said.

Adding to concerns about new plant pathogens is the fact that an increasingly large 
percentage of seeds used in the United States is grown overseas.

The USDA's Schaad, who once worked for a seed company, said that America "is very lax" 
in its seed control, and simply doesn't have the manpower - or motivation - to inspect 
seeds coming into the country.

"The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has a mandate to [test] seeds for 
these pathogens, but they do not," said Schaad, who has been developing detection 
methods. "They visually inspect for insects."

Infected seed was responsible for an epidemic of watermelon fruit blotch in the 1980s 
that destroyed nearly one-third of the crop in Georgia, South Carolina and Florida. 
The germ plasm for the seed originally came from Iran in the 1960s, Schaad said, but 
there was no deliberate sabotage attempt.

The list of deliberate crop attacks is growing, however.

In 1977, rebels in Uganda threatened to poison that nation's coffee and tea crops. 
From 1977 to 1979, Palestinian terrorists or their sympathizers contaminated Israeli 
oranges with liquid mercury, which caused Israel to cut back its exports to Europe by 
40 percent.

In 1989, fruit imports from Chile were suspended by the United States and other 
nations after tiny traces of cyanide were discovered in two grapes in Philadelphia - 
following telephoned threats that the grapes had been sabotaged.

This summer, a scandal involving dioxin contamination of chicken feed in Belgium 
triggered the resignation of key political leaders and the governing party's loss at 
the polls shortly thereafter.

Despite these incidents, a presidential directive titled "Critical Infrastructure 
Protection" issued by the White House two years ago did not list agriculture as 
requiring enhanced security.

"I'm not convinced that the government has fully embraced it [the threat] yet," said 
Randall Murch, the FBI's deputy lab director, who is responsible for detecting an 
agroterror attack. "The public understands a terrorist attack on the Olympics, but not 
on someone's farm."

Murch, who studied plant pathology, said crop- and food-supply attacks posed a problem 
because the United States had relatively open borders and would-be terrorists did not 
need much technical expertise.

"There's a lot of information on plant pathogens in open-source literature," he said.

The consequences, he noted, could include havoc in the import-export market as crops 
are quarantined and a loss of public confidence in the nation's food supply. However, 
because pathogens work slowly, would-be terrorists might not be patient enough to use 
them.

"It would be very possible to cause real problems if you were willing to wait," 
Kingsolver said.

Kingsolver was recruited by thenCamp Detrick in 1951, eight years after the United 
States began developing ways to attack enemies with biological weapons. He joined 20 
other scientists in the crops division in Building 321, and worked on diseases that 
attack wheat and rye.

"We understood completely that our job was to develop a biological weapon to destroy 
crops," said Kingsolver, an avuncular, professorial man who still lives near Fort 
Detrick.

Scientists also understood that their mission was highly secret. Kingsolver could not 
confide in his wife, which complicated matters when he went off to study plant 
pathogens in South America.

Kingsolver said he still didn't know how close the group came to deploying stem rust 
in the Soviets' wheat crop, a decision that rested with former President Dwight D. 
Eisenhower.

One delivery system used unmanned, hydrogen-filled balloons carrying dispensers to 
release anti-crop agents. Another used fighter aircraft to spray pathogens, a system 
later employed in Vietnam to dispense chemical herbicides.

The most novel innovation was the feather bomb, which featured a 500-pound aerial bomb 
ordinarily used to spread propaganda leaflets. The bomb was packed with turkey 
feathers infused with the dust of fungal spores. The feathers were released at high 
altitudes, drifting over a wide area and coating leaves with spores.

"When I came to Detrick, the feather bomb was already considered the weapon," 
Kingsolver said, although it was later abandoned as not reliable.

Kingsolver was not privy to such secrets when he arrived for his job interview at Fort 
Detrick. He wore his best suit and a favorite necktie, one with a feather motif.

"Where the hell," the interviewer asked, "did you get that tie?"

Not until months later, when he received his security clearance, did Kingsolver 
understand the question.

--
Dan S


Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine 
of international copyright law.
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