Word: anthrax
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...Iraqis proved how simple it was, beginning in 1989 with the production of anthrax--bacteria that cause deadly hemorrhaging in the brain and chest--at the Al Hakam Single Cell Protein Production Plant. In the mid-1980s, before the U.S. belatedly banned such dangerous exports, Iraq's Education Ministry ordered 70 packages of microbes and toxins from the American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit outfit in Rockville, Md. Included were flasks of freeze-dried anthrax spores. Iraqi labs reconstituted the spores in soy broth and put them into a small fermenter filled with a growth medium. The medium, Zilinskas says...
After they multiplied--one bacterium can explode into a billion copies in 10 hours--technicians in gas masks and coveralls transferred them to a large production fermenter, where they bloomed into huge quantities. Iraq now admits to brewing more than 2,000 gal. of anthrax, but American experts think the true amount was three times that. A fatal dose is, says a U.S. Defense official, "smaller than a speck of dust, something you wouldn't even see." In a final step, the Iraqis refrigerated the muddy mixture; it could be loaded into a warhead shortly before launch...
...produced using a recipe found on the Internet, a beer fermenter, a culture and a gas mask, with a total investment of about $10,000. "If you buy commercial equipment," he says, "and put it in a very small room, you can be producing kilogram quantities of anthrax within a month." And each kilo "has millions and millions of potential deaths in it." A study by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment estimated that 100 kilos of anthrax spread by a crop duster over Washington could cause 2 million deaths...
...course, getting 100 kilos of anthrax and a crop duster over Washington would not be easy. "Dispersal is the real challenge," says Zilinskas. "You've got to get these bugs to the people." But if Iraq shipped toxins out by diplomatic pouch and handed them over to some cooperative terrorists, it might not be impossible. Iraq has also been tinkering with other methods. Before the Gulf War it had several hundred Italian-made pesticide dispensers fitted with spray nozzles for spitting out bioweapons in droplet size. In 1990 the Iraqis flight-tested a remote-controlled MiG-21 fighter mounted with...
...Distance; a variety show with Beck as host; a parody of Kung Fu movies called Kung Pow; a pilot by John Woo; and Band of Spies, a comedy about CIA agents who go deep cover in a rock band. Hey, it could work, in a weird James-Bond-meets-anthrax, teenage-boy kind of way. Though more videos might be a safer way to shut Bart up for a while...