In March 1988, Saddam Hussein unloaded some of his Pandora"™s box of chemical weapons on the Kurdish village of Halabja. As many as 5,000 were killed by nerve agents believed to have included VX, a poison so deadly that a single drop the size of a pinhead can cause death minutes after touching the skin.
By forcing all the body"™s nerves to fire continuously, causing all of a victim"™s involuntary muscles to contract, VX leads to racing heart, drooling, vomiting, gut spasms and, finally, death by asphyxiation.
Fifteen years later, in 2003, that attack was still cited as a reason to force Iraq to get rid of its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, then believed to additionally include giant fermentors used to grow deadly bacteria such as anthrax and botulinum. Civilized countries, including the United States, had sworn off such weapons a generation earlier and were busy dismantling Cold War-era chemical and biological weapons factories.
Much of the job of destroying America"™s WMD stockpile took place in Utah"™s west desert at the Deseret Chemical Depot, 12 miles south of Tooele. In March 2005, the depot celebrated its milestone destruction of the millionth VX-filled munition. The date of the announcement coincided nicely with a worldwide celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, when more than 150 countries pledged to never again make weapons of mass destruction.
But something else was going on that March in the west desert that has some questioning the United States"™ dedication to nonproliferation. Over at the U.S. Army"™s Dugway Proving Grounds"”the chemical depot"™s Tooele County neighbor"”procurement officers quietly placed orders for a system of bacteria-growing fermentors that would have made Saddam salivate.
According to government solicitation, the order called for four fermentors with a total capacity of producing nearly 3,500 liters of bacteria and the possibility of another five fermentors in the future. That is enough bacteria-making equipment to cook up about three-fourths the 8,400 liters of anthrax Iraq admitted to having produced for Saddam"™s biowar program.
The order didn"™t detail what Dugway wanted to grow, but at the same time, the secretive Army base put out feelers for a second set of fermentors and contractors willing to make 1,500-liter batches of a benign strain of anthrax called Sterne.
The request sent shockwaves through the community of government watchdogs and scientists dedicated to ensuring the biowar genie stays in its bottle. For, while the fermentors were ostensibly ordered for production of a nonlethal strain of anthrax, they could easily be used to produce vast quantities of the lethal strain as well.
http://www.slweekly.com/article.cfm/justtesting
Is the U.S. Government making anthrax bombs in Utah?
