| http://www.capitolhillblue.com/Article.asp?ID=22380
Secret Nevada lab used off-the-shelf products to create anthrax Wednesday, October 31, 2001 By JOAN LOWY Scripps Howard News Service Last year, scientists at a secretly constructed laboratory in the Nevada desert manufactured simulated anthrax germs using off-the-shelf technology and over-the-counter equipment - a project that seems eerily prescient in light of the current germ attacks. What they discovered is not encouraging: For about $1.6 million, a small group of microbiologists and engineers could grow enough anthrax to kill or injure thousands of people without detection by U.S. law-enforcement or intelligence agencies. Although defense officials said the project did not take the production process to its final conclusion and "weaponize'' the germ, its results tend to lend credence to arguments that the anthrax germs in the current attacks may have been produced domestically. Last week, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the anthrax involved in the letter attacks could have been produced by a "Ph.D. microbiologist ... in a small, well-equipped microbiology lab,'' although some bioterrorism experts said that was understating the complexity of such an effort. The desert program, parts of which remain classified, was officially named Biotechnology Activity Characterization by Unconventional Signatures, or Project BACUS for short. It was run primarily by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which was created by the Defense Department in 1998 to address biological, chemical and nuclear weapons proliferation issues. Beginning in late 1999, scientists constructed a laboratory in the desert at the old Nevada Test Site, which had closed seven years earlier after an underground nuclear weapons testing moratorium went into effect. No germ warfare experts were involved in the experiment - only microbiologists and engineers with the kind of experience that might be commonly found in the pharmaceutical or pesticide industry. Using equipment bought at hardware stores, through catalogues or from commercial suppliers - pipes, filters, a fermenter to grow the germs, an electric boiler to maintain the water supply and to sterilize the fermenter, and a biosafety box to control air flow - project participants set up a laboratory in an old recreation hall and barbershop. Within weeks, they were able to produce significant quantities of bacillus thuringiensis and bacillus globigii, two germs that are closely related to anthrax, but are not harmful. For test purposes, it was effectively the same thing as producing anthrax for weaponization. "We were growing simulants, but a terrorist could easily grow anthrax in a facility like this and produce enough quantity in covert delivery to kill, say, 10,000 people in a large city,'' said Jay Davis, the former head of the threat reduction agency who oversaw the project and is now a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Project BACUS did not mill the germs to particles of one to three microns - the size necessary to cause inhalation anthrax, the most dangerous form of the disease - or coat the germ spores with a material to help them stay airborne and keep them from clumping, which would be the normal procedure in a state-sponsored biological weapons program and which appears to be the case in the current anthrax attacks. The reason for not fully weaponizing the anthrax was that defense officials did not want to violate the international treaty banning biological weapons production, Davis said. The project also did not attempt to develop a means to widely disperse anthrax spores - a key hurdle if terrorists were to try to kill large numbers of people with the bacteria, Davis said. "The real question is not the amount, but how well they disperse it,'' Davis said. "The current anthrax going through the mail is the perfect example. People talk about grams killing thousands of people. Maybe a gram went through the mail, but it only made a few people sick. ... Hypothetically, the same amount that has caused the problem in Washington, if you had optimally dispersed it over a football game, would have caused a lot more infection simply because you would have had more people you could get at better.'' A key finding of the project was that the simulated anthrax laboratory didn't have any significant "signature'' - a sign that law-enforcement or intelligence agencies could look for to try to spot terrorists at work. Sensors were placed around and away from the facilities. The project looked for similar kinds of things law-enforcement agencies look for when they are trying to find illegal drug dealers making methamphetamine - key purchases of materials or equipment and the presence of certain chemicals, sounds, odors or amounts of heat. Germ batches were produced in the winter of 1999 and the summer of 2000 to test for differences between seasons. "What came out of it is that by the determinations that they were making (using sensors) it didn't have a significant signature that would send off alarms or surveillance of something like that,'' said Dr. Craig Smith, a member of the bioterrorism working group for the Infectious Disease Society of America and a former instructor at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, the military's lead laboratory for medical aspects of biowarfare defense. Project BACUS showed that it is "pretty easy to hide something if you were smart enough to get all the parts and the pieces and put it together,'' Smith said. The threat reduction agency went public with Project BACUS on Sept. 4, exactly one week before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. "We wish we had done it (the project) sooner, as always,'' Davis said. "You are caught in this dilemma of how do you invest against relatively rare, high-consequence events. We would be happiest if this investment had been a waste of money, but that is not the way it came out.'' On the Net: Defense Threat Reduction Agency - http://www.dtra.mil/ |
