Table of contents :

• e-voting : the debate centres on the use of electronic voting equipment, ATM-like machines that register votes digitally after people make their selections on a touch-screen. Nearly 30% of voters will place their ballot using these 'e-voting' machines when choosing the US president at November 2004 elections. Many watchdog groups are warning that tests conducted on e-voting hardware and software are insufficient, and that faulty machines could cause votes to be missed or registered incorrectly. It's not yet clear how serious these problems will be; early voting in a dozen or so states so far has thrown up only minor glitches. However, there is a more fundamental concern about the technology, which is that without a printed confirmation of each vote, no option is available for a reliable recount if there are technical glitches or if the result is very close, as it may well be in the upcoming election. Critics are also concerned that it offers no protection against fraud, either by somebody who might be associated with one of the companies programming the machines, or from a clever hacker off the street. Makers of e-voting machines are reluctant to incorporate technology that would produce a printed confirmation of each vote, but whether or not hard copies are generated depends mainly on the decision of each individual state. Nevada  required that all e-voting machines come with a paper trail, for example, but Maryland and Georgia remain staunch defenders of paperless elections. The most common e-voting difficulty reported as the election got under way involved cases where voters claimed that the final summary screen indicated a candidate different from the one for whom they had voted. The problem raises significant concerns because it appeared across a variety of types of touch-screen voting machine. Voters that found the summary screen displayed an inaccurate selection could go back and fix their electronic ballot. Other types of problems reported involved machines that indicated a candidate before the voter had made a choice. People also claimed to be unable to complete the voting process because the machine screens went dark. New Orleans wins the award for the worst voting situation in the country when it comes to electronic voting machines : a significant number of the city's machines did not boot up on time for a variety of reasons. It was a problem that cropped up elsewhere as well, but the difference between New Orleans and some of the other counties is that New Orleans hadn't prepared any back-up plan : as a result they didn't have paper ballots or, frankly, anything to offer to voters when their machines didn't work, and they had to turn people away. By the time polling began to wrap up on the East Coast, the Election Protection coalition says it had received over 600 reports of e-voting problems from across the country. The number of reports is very low compared with the total number of voters who used the machines, but not everyone who experiences a problem will make a complaint.

Web resources :
• Electionline.org briefing
• Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)
• Diebold Election Systems
• How Stuff Works: E-voting
• the 2004 second win for George W. Bush as USA President means that current US policies on a range of contentious scientific issues are likely to remain unchanged. On the subject of global climate change, Bush had emphasized the scientific uncertainties involved, whereas Kerry had called for an immediate return to international negotiations on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Bush's victory means that the country will probably continue its wait-and-see approach, pushing for more scientific results before enacting specific policies or regulations. His victory will also mean continued support for a national nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Kerry had hoped to win that state by vowing to kill the programme, which is unpopular with most Nevadans, but Bush won by a slight, 2% margin. The Bush win means that a federal ban on funding for embryonic stem-cell research is likely to remain in place. The Republican party's gains in the nation's 2 houses of Congress suggest there will be a renewed push to pass a national energy bill that has languished in committees for the past 2 years. In its present form, this bill would fund just over a billion dollars' worth of research into new types of nuclear reactor. The Republicans' victory could also lead to revised calls to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling of oil and natural gas. The Bush administration may seek to reform the Endangered Species Act of 1973, to avoid what it sees as unnecessary economic burdens on landowners and industry
• psephology : the science of voting prediction. Public polling and questionnaires are notoriously difficult to assess. It seems that, when there is no objectively correct answer to a question, people are likely to be biased by what they think others will say. For example, they are more likely to give an answer that agrees with what they perceive to be the majority or 'accepted' view than an answer that truly reflects their own belief. A new method manages to give high scores to people for a truthful answer by adding a second question. This query simply asks the person what they think other people will say. A comparison of this with the average answer can reveal how truthful they are being: if people lie, their score is reduced, even though no one else would ever know that they lied. Respondents are rewarded for a high score, in whatever way is deemed appropriate. The method takes advantage of the fact that holding an opinion is a valuable clue to how common that particular opinion is likely to be in a population. It is well established that people who hold an opinion are likely to give higher estimates of the popularity of that opinion than people who do not: because they think it is a valid belief, they think that other people will hold it. Given the limited information you have (that is, you know your own opinion, but not that of anyone else), you always have reason to believe that your opinion will prove more popular than others expect. That is, you realize that you are likely to give a high estimate of your opinion's popularity and you think the rest of the population will underestimate the actual proportion of people that share it. Thus, an average of people's belief about the population will come out with a comparatively low estimate, and your (truthful) answer will be surprisingly common. For example, to find out whether people think Picasso is a great artist, you ask people whether they like Picasso, and also how many people in the population they think are likely to answer yes or no to that question. Respondents are rewarded if the answer they give to the first question turns out to be unexpectedly common compared with the overall prediction made by the group about how people are likely to answer. Obviously everyone can't be right all the time. But given the information you have about your own opinion, you are more likely to get the highest score if you answer truthfully. This method is just as effective whether the group in question is poorly informed or well informed. The technique does not just provide more accurate polls, however. It should also help to find more accurate consensus answers. That could enable companies to make better business forecasts (where managers are encouraged not to worry about whether their opinion differs greatly from those of others), better estimates of risk, better legal judgements, and perhaps even better assessments of art. For political polling, the method would work best when there is not already a lot of public information about what others think. So it would be a good way of gauging public reaction in the immediate aftermath of some event^ref. The problem with asking people what they think about art, or any other subjective question, is that whether through lack of confidence or the wish for acceptance, we tend to fall in line with what others say. Our aesthetic judgements are corrupted by other people's judgements. This can suppress unusual views, or it can also encourage them, out of a reactive impulse to 'be different'. Neither response is authentic. Every individual has the right to disagree with the consensus, and they can change it by convincing others that their evaluation is more consistent with the evidence available
• despite the age-old admonition not to “judge a book by its cover,” we routinely make important judgments about human traits based on instant, superficial impressions of peoples’ faces. Such “blink of an eye” decision-making predicted the outcome of about 70% of recent U.S. Senate races. Candidates who looked “competent” prevailed in congressional elections > 66% of the time. The outcomes were likely due to differences in the opponents’ “babyfacedness". Although the study doesn’t tell us exactly what competence is – there are many kinds, including physical strength, social dominance and intellectual shrewdness – babyfaced people are perceived to be lacking in all these qualities. What facial qualities make someone look more babyfaced and less competent? Both babies and babyfaced adults share such features as a round face, large eyes, small nose, high forehead and small chin. Competency, on the other hand, is associated with facial maturity.  The association between facial maturity and perceived competence is ubiquitous: babyfaced individuals within various demographic groups are perceived as less competent…Its impact can be seen even for famous politicians: in another study, when images of U.S presidents Reagan and Kennedy were morphed to increase babyfacedness, their perceived dominance, strength and cunning decreased significantly. Evolutionary importance of detecting attributes such as emotion, age and health is probably responsible for our strong tendency to respond to facial qualities that reveal these characteristics. With this built-in predisposition, we tend to overgeneralize facial impressions to adults whose faces, in this case, merely resemble a baby’s in certain features. The result: we often conclude that babyfaced adults are naïve, submissive and weak. In fact, babyfaced men are actually more intelligent, better educated, more assertive and apt to win more military medals than their mature-looking counterparts^{ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8}. Research in the area of facial impressions has implications for political marketing, social decision-making and even the democratic process : the data we have suggest that we’re not necessarily electing better leaders – people who are actually more competent, though we are electing people who look the part. Zebrowitz called for better understanding of appearance biases as a first step toward identifying electoral reforms that could increase the chances of electing leaders qualified by skill and experience, rather than appearance^ref.
• In 1946, the geneticist Lionel Penrose (father of physicist Roger Penrose) considered that countries with larger populations should have more votes because individual citizens in bigger countries have less say in the election of their country's representative. But Penrose showed that increasing the number of votes in proportion to the population size is over-compensating. He calculated that a citizen's say in such an election diminishes in proportion to the square root of the population size. So the best way to design a fair system is to give each country a number of votes that is proportional to the square root of its population. The present weightings used by the EU were assigned by the Treaty of Nice in 2001. They were determined rather arbitrarily by long negotiations, without any mathematical basis to them. By good fortune, they turn out to be not vastly different from those corresponding to the Penrose square-root rule. The effect the changes will have using another of Penrose's suggestions: that a country's "voting power" can be quantified by counting the number of ways a given country can form coalitions with other countries in order to secure a majority. Lawyer John Banzhaf proposed the same idea independently in 1965, so this measure is now called the Banzhaf index. The quota, or size of majority, needed to carry a vote should be altered from the present level of 71% to 62% : this is the value that makes each country's voting weight translate most directly into actual voting power^ref.

• military devices
• space wars : Galileo, a satellite system being developed by the European Space Agency, is due to reach full operational capacity in 2008 : it will provide a global navigation system that, unlike the US-run Global Positioning System (GPS) or the Russian GLONASS network, will be under civilian rather than military control. It should help ships, aircraft and land-based transport systems to navigate and will operate a 'search and rescue' function for distress signals. The United States has done everything it can to kill the project because Galileo threatens to disrupt US dominance of space. The GPS makes no guarantee of uninterrupted service for its non-military users: the US government can jam the civilian channel at will. The prospect of a European satellite-positioning network led the US deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to write to European defence ministers in December 2001, telling them in no uncertain terms how he disapproved of ESA's bid for independence. No one could claim to be surprised by Wolfowitz's position. This was the man who, in 2000, helped to prepare the report "Rebuilding America's Defenses", published by the Project for the New American Century, a right-wing think-tank that aims "to promote American global leadership". The report argued that: "For the US armed forces to continue to assert military pre-eminence, control of space must be an essential element of our military strategy." And in case anyone were to imagine that this meant simply the continued pursuit of missile defence systems, that is, Ronald Reagan's ill-fated Star Wars project, the report spelled out that "control of space" would mean thinking beyond purely defensive measures. Instead, it recommended "the application of force ... including but not limited to antimissile defenses and defensive systems". It asserted: "No system of missile defenses can be fully effective without placing sensors and weapons in space." This is not mere sabre-rattling. "Rebuilding America's Defenses" was heavily influenced not just by Wolfowitz but also by the current vice-president Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary. Rumsfeld has invoked fears of a "space Pearl Harbor", if the United States does not take steps to "negate the hostile use of space against US interests". According to a report^ref by the British think-tank Demos: "Several commentators have interpreted the US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty in December 2001 as a first step towards the development and testing of a new generation of space weapons". That attitude is spelled out in chilling terms in a US Air Force 'doctrine document' released in August 2004, entitled "Counterspace Operations". This states that space superiority means the "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack". Air Force undersecretary Peter Teets asks: "What will we do 10 years from now when American lives are put at risk because an adversary chooses to leverage the Global Positioning System or perhaps the Galileo constellation to attack American forces with precision?" "Controlling the high ground of space," says Teets, "will require us to think about denying the high ground to our adversaries. One begins to wonder who these adversaries are. The counterspace operations report gives the impression that they could include anyone who dares to put a device of any sort into space. The document seems to argue that it is legitimate to undermine the space programme of any nation deemed to be an adversary of the United States. Satellites that provide essential weather-forecasting capability or communication with emergency services are all considered fair game. Indeed, you don't need to be an enemy for your space resources to become a target. So if a stiff letter from Paul Wolfowitz fails to scupper Galileo, there are other measures... What would this space-based weaponry look like? Another Air Force document, the "Transformation Flight Plan", released in November 2003, lays out the proposed technology. Weapons may include items such as lasers guided by space-based mirrors "to achieve a broad range of effects from illumination to destruction" or bizarre "hypervelocity rod bundles" that have the capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world. Almost every element of this plan violates the spirit, and sometimes the letter, of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, signed by the United States, which states that space operations should have "peaceful purposes". "The exploration and use of outer space", it continues, "shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind... Outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of occupation, or by any other means. Quite aside from violations of international agreements, scientists should be outraged by proposals to put weapons in space. Not only would such projects disrupt genuine space science (and probably deflect funding away from it), but they would turn a natural commons into a territorial battlefield. We need voices to succeed that of Carl Sagan, who was vehemently opposed to the military domination of space. NASA must resist becoming the research and development arm of the US military. The European Space Agency must stand fast to its peaceful objectives. Of course, military interests have always played a part in motivating and funding scientific research, but it seems the right moment for the scientific community to consider a professional code of conduct that will say when enough is enough. In 1985, an appeal put forward by the Union of Concerned Scientists stated that "Outer space must remain free of any weapons," and should be preserved for "peaceful cooperation, exploration, and scientific discovery among all nations". Wouldn't this be a good time for that position to be adopted by all scientific bodies? Galileo has, intentionally and inescapably, a military function. And it is being bankrolled by nations, such as China, whose strategic objectives are transparently at odds with declared US strategy. In 2001 it became apparent that Galileo might plan to use frequencies that would impinge on those already used by the GPS system. Wolfowitz wrote to EU defence ministers of his " concerns about security ramifications". He explained that the US military, which governs the GPS, were planning "spectral separation of the GPS military signals from civil signals" and that the addition of any Galileo service in the same region would make it difficult to ensure the "availability of critical GPS services in time of crisis or conflict". One can only sympathize with Wolfowitz's frustration: whereas the GPS is controlled by a small and flexible panel in the US military, the proposed administration of Galileo has all the hallmarks of EU obfuscation, inefficiency and waste. Getting the EU to agree to a split-second frequency change in a time of crisis, such as the United States might demand in time of war, would be as frustrating as trying to nail jelly to the ceiling. Put in this light, Wolfowitz's letter shows extraordinary restraint, and certainly doesn't convey any kind of threat. His letter sent the EU into a tailspin. But in 2004, the EU and the United States agreed to work together to resolve technical issues such as frequency use. Far from shooting Galileo out of the sky, the United States simply seems keen to ensure that Galileo does not impinge on its own system. But the conclusion of Ball's with which I disagree most strongly is that space is a domain of peace, which the United States alone is intent on shattering. It seems clear that the EU is playing exactly the same game. Indeed, in March 2003, the EU's Directorate-General of Energy and Transport explicitly stated that Galileo would give the Europe a military capability. This military dimension leads one to wonder why the project is run by the seemingly innocuous transport department. It is as if the EU is trying to hide its intentions. Writing on the website of the Bruges Group^ref, a right-wing Eurosceptic think-tank, Richard North notes that the most worrying aspect of the Galileo project "is the almost wilful refusal to accept publicly that there are military implications". The EU is planning to release its Public Regulated Service signal to a large number of players, without any realistic chance of controlling access or affording the USA an easy means of blocking it. This constitutes a potent weapon that could be used by enemies of EU member states, the USA and its allies. More worrying still is the fact that non-EU states whose strategic aims are at variance with those of the United States, notably China, are bankrolling Galileo. "It can only be self-deception on a colossal scale if the EU believes that China will not employ Galileo for military purposes," writes North, who goes on to depict a worrying scenario. "Since the US is a committed ally of Taiwan, and has guaranteed the security and independence of the island," writes North, "in a conflict situation the US could find itself at the receiving end of weapons or systems which utilize Galileo signals." And it might find itself compelled to take "direct action". This scenario is at least as worrying as any painted by Ball. In contrast to the nightmares of Chicken Little, it could be this kind of geopolitical nightmare that Mr Wolfowitz was keen, not to promote, but to avoid.
• the Grand Challenge, a 350-kilometre race over rough terrain from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The event is organized by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which hopes it will aid the development of unmanned military vehicles for use in combat. The winner must complete the journey in less than 10 hours to claim the prize. The driverless vehicles, which travel at speeds of more than 45 kilometres per hour, will sense their way along an off-road route. The course remains a secret until 2 hours before the start to ensure that the teams cannot pre-program their droids with anything more than basic details.
• Navigator
• Terramax is a 2-tonne truck
• Cliff
• CyberRider
• Phantasm
• Sandstorm, created by professional robot designer William 'Red' Whittaker of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh
• GhostRider, the world's first autonomous motorbike is impressively stable, albeit only for about 20 m
Environmentalists are concerned that the race will disturb endangered desert tortoises and other wildlife. In response, DARPA has agreed to erect fences around tortoise burrows before the race to stop them wandering into the path of the vehicles. It has also employed tortoise marshals to comb the desert an hour before the competitors arrive and move any stragglers that are in the way.
• missile defenses : a test, which lasted just a fraction of a second, took place in a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base in California on Wed 10 November 2004. The laser (built by Northrop Grumman Space Technology, based in Redondo Beach, California, for the Airborne Laser team at Boeing Integrated Defense Systems in St Louis, Missouri) produces a beam of infrared light that is more powerful than 10,000 domestic lightbulbs and can be focused on a spot the size of a basketball, generating an intense heat that could punch through a missile's fuselage from hundreds of kilometres away. The weapon is ready to be mounted on board a modified Boeing 747 aeroplane as part of a US air defence fleet, which would make it the world's most powerful airborne laser. The laser will eventually undergo in-flight testing that includes shooting down a dummy missile over the Pacific Ocean. No date has been set for this test. The airborne laser is meant to intercept hostile missiles immediately after launch, automatically detecting and tracking them from high altitude. However, targeting missiles in this early 'boost phase' is not an effective approach for defending the USA against missile attacks. Although hitting the missiles early would prevent them from separating into multiple warheads, it requires striking them within minutes of launch. This is only feasible for extremely short-range attacks. Even if an airborne laser were already in the sky, its range would be insufficient to disable an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile used in a long-range strike against the USA.

Web resources :
• Boeing Missile Defense
• Northrop Grumman Space Technology
• Singapore defence scientists are doing genetic research to improve the eyesight of soldiers. It is estimated that > 80% of enlisted men in Singapore suffer from varying degrees of myopia. Taking aim at the enemy, even with the best weapons available, is pointless if a soldier has poor eyesight. Among the prime candidates are pilots, divers, commandos, guardsmen and armoured personnel. The problem is so serious that the SAF is even conducting trials to correct myopia, including eye surgery. The SAF is even trying a new treatment called NeuroVision where the mind is re-programmed to see through myopic eyes. The real challenge for scientists is finding the gene that causes myopia
• health consequences : medical and scientific knowledge both arise from war and influence it. Recognition of the danger of sepsis and importance of public health measures halved the death rate from infection between the American Civil War and World War I, although infectious disease remains challenging. Antibiotics slashed the risk further. And continuing analysis of health problems in Gulf War veterans is revealing potential dangers in current conflicts.
• public health consequences : in the first official government survey of Iraq's health since a number of countries, known as the coalition forces, invaded in March 2003, a detailed report reveals a crumbling health service unable to deal with an epidemic of typhoid, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. Disruption to water supplies during the conflict means that roughly 20% of urban households now have no access to safe drinking water. This has led to 5,460 cases of typhoid in the first quarter of 2004. In rural areas, > 50% of households are without fresh water or adequate sanitation. More Iraqis may have died as a result of ... neglect of the health sector over the past 15 years than from wars and violence. Measles and mumps are infecting thousands of children, partly because 33% of them are chronically malnourished. There were 8,253 cases of measles reported in the first half of 2004, with Basra particularly badly hit. In 2003, there were just 454 cases. Likewise, the first 4 months of 2004 saw 11,821 cases of mumps, nearly 5,000 more cases than there were in the whole of the previous year. Although Iraq has enormously valuable oil reserves, an estimated 27% of the population live now on less than $2 a day. Life expectancy has fallen to below 60 years of age for both men and women. In the aftermath of the coalition invasion, 33% of Iraq's health centres were looted of vital equipment, with 1 in 8 hospitals suffering the same fate. The health service is being strained further by staff shortages, an unreliable electricity supply and the ongoing violence in Iraq, leaving it unable to stem the growth in infections.The violence that still rocks Iraq is also an important factor : people are afraid to go out and get health care. Currently, the emphasis in Iraq is on training clinicians in emergency care. Basic public health concerns - clean water, food and so on - are low on the priority list. Iraq's health is now comparable with countries like Sudan and Afghanistan; 15 years ago it rivalled that of rich nations such as Jordan and Kuwait. Despite the rise in infectious diseases, cardiovascular disease still ranks as the number-one killer in Iraq. This is largely owing to poor diet and a very high prevalence of smoking, but it is exacerbated by a lack of public health initiatives to change the population's lifestyle. In September 2004, scientists started assessing the environmental situation in the aftermath of the war. And on 11 October, additional concerns about security in Iraq were raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The agency said equipment and materials that could be used to build nuclear weapons had been lost from the country. It presented satellite photographs showing that sites relevant to Iraq's nuclear programme had been systematically dismantled, even though the Iraqi government had reported no such activity. The risk of civil death went up by 2.5 times after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This gives an estimate of at least 100,000 more deaths since the invasion, and possibly many more. Most of the dead were women and children killed in military activity, particularly air strikes. 2/3 of the deaths were recorded in the exceptionally violent city of Falluja : Falluja may not be representative of the rest of the country, and excluded those figures in their estimate. Including them gives a significantly higher death toll^{ref1, ref2}. The results demand a re-evaluation of the consequences of weaponry now used by coalition forces in populated areas. This result requires an urgent political and military response if the confidence of ordinary Iraqis in the mostly American-British occupation is to be restored^ref. Previous estimates of the Iraqi death toll, such as those based on collating news reports, vary from around 13,000 to more than 30,000. There were periods of mass killing before the recent Iraq war, such as during the Iran-Iraq war or in Saddam Hussein's attacks on the Kurds. It is difficult to predict whether the current conflict might have prevented similar incidents. A a necessary first step is for the occupying forces to carry out systematic body counts : it seems difficult to understand how a military force could monitor the extent to which civilians are protected against violence without systematically doing body counts or at least looking at the kinds of casualties they induce

Web resources :
• Iraqi Ministry of Health
• Iraq Body Count
• WHO on Iraq
• International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq
• MEDACT
• Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
• soldiers' health consequences : new ways to predict when soldiers or pilots are mentally or physically fatigued and need to be helped, pulled off a mission or provided with back-up : a number of biological markers that could serve as indicators of hydration, salt and sugar levels, inflammation, muscle fatigue, bone health and stress could be adapted for military use (perhaps as a wristwatch device). Sports doctors gauge athlete's capacity using near-infrared light, which penetrates deep into tissue : the light can reveal oxygen levels in blood, because haemoglobin absorbs it differently when loaded with oxygen. Sweat and tears, which presumably flow on the battle-field, might also be valuable sources of biological information but they may have to be individually calibrated to each soldier's body. There are already prototype devices for gauging sleep deprivation, such as strap-on actigraphs whose microchips measure when the wearer is moving or lying still, asleep, heart rate, eye movement and EEGs : one hurdle is designing a computer algorithm that can draw such measures together to accurately assess sleep deprivation. In difficult cases, officials might use basic physiological data, like heart rate, to find out if soldiers have been injured or killed, and help them decide whether to send in rescue troops. Also long-distance truck drivers, doctors working night shifts or medical rescue teams in gruelling conditions could all benefit from biomonitors. Anyway training people to rate their own physical state often creates a far better gauge of future performance than heart rate or blood pressure^ref. Tools embedded in soldiers' clothing and watch-like meters to monitor vital signs and exposures will allow us to know what an exposure is with much more certainty than in 1991, when we had to rely on soldiers' reports on what they think they might have seen. Record keeping also applies to the environment, as evidenced by a disaster in the Gulf War, with air so foul that matching symptom to pollutant was nearly impossible. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the darkness following the "shock-and-awe" attack echoed conditions in the first Gulf War, but with more building materials than burning oil. As the dust settled, particulates and sand emerged as the biggest threat to respiratory health, as in Afghanistan^ref. Yet the air quality problem in both places is eclipsed by contaminated food and water supplies and temperature extremes. The US Army's Warfighter Physiological Status Monitoring (WPSM) system is a wearable, lightweight suite of sensors, currently being tested in a variety of settings, will send physiological data to commanders and medics, communicating danger instantaneously. Devices track skin and core temperature, heart and respiratory rate, sleep, cognitive state, hydration, body orientation, and wartime acoustics, such as bullet impact. Data from the WPSM project are generating predictive models that will guide implementation^ref. For example, hydration data for males and females are documented for mountain climbing, arctic field training, and reconnaissance and surveillance missions. Heart rate and temperature changes in response to heat come from studies at Fort Benning, Ga. A 58-day stint at Army Ranger School in the desert, mountains, and swamps of the southeast United States tracked effects of extreme sleep deprivation.
• short-term consequences
• infection may be the greatest weapon of mass destruction.
• in 1519, 600 Spaniards unintentionally brought smallpox to the Aztecs in Mexico. The disease helped in decimating a population of 20 million down to 1.6 million. The invisible weapon must have seemed to target the natives, since the Europeans, long exposed to the virus through livestock, were immune.
• globalization has continued to fuel infection. Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, for example, spread from prostitutes in Vietnam to US servicemen and beyond.
Wartime infection works 2 ways: invaders
• introduce pathogens
• succumb to unfamiliar ones.
A soldier with hepatitis E moves to a new zone. If he doesn't observe strict hygiene practices or the new zone has poor sanitation facilities, the infection can be transmitted where it was nonexistent. In contrast, a soldier arriving in a malaria-endemic region who has not previously lived there is prone to contracting severe forms. Adults from the community are much less likely to develop severe malaria due to the buildup of immunity over time. Chronic effects of infection linger long after troops depart. Endemic conditions appear and epidemics rage out of control where infrastructure has collapsed. Wonder drugs are only part of the equation in infectious disease control.
• Acinetobacter baumannii was the 2nd most common cause of infection of missile-related head wounds in an Iranian report from data collected during the Iran-Iraq conflict^ref. In the 2003 Iraq conflict it was acquired in the field as well as in nosocomial settings in USA soldiers evacuated from Iraq to the USS Comfort (a hospital ship) or Landstuhl Army Medical Center (in Germany)) : the numbers were noteworthy, since the infection was not noted in the 1991 Gulf War and exceeded historical experience of the centers. Reported cases were Walter Reed Army Medical Center (Washington, DC)14, Landstuhl Army Medical Center 11, National Naval Medical Center (Bethesda, MD) 6, and Brooke Army Medical Center (TX) 3, for a total of 34. 55% of the isolates were from wounds, 20% from sputum, 10% from tissue, 7% from blood, 4% from urine and 2% each from catheter tips and drains.  97% of the cases were from action in Iraq, primarily involving the forward troops. The antimicrobial resistance pattern reported was 2% sensitive to no antimicrobials, 41% sensitive to only carbapenems, 26% sensitive to carbapenems and one other antimicrobial class, and 31% another pattern of sensitivity. There was an increasing number of A. baumannii bloodstream infections (102 from 1 Jan 2002 to 31 Aug 2004) in patients at military medical facilities in which service members injured in the Iraq/Kuwait region during Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) and in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) were treated.
• acute eosinophilic pneumonia (AEP)  was diagnosed in 18 US military personnel among 183,000 deployed to Iraq between Mar 2003 and Mar 2004, yielding an AEP incidence of 9.1 per 100 000 person-years and resulted in 2 deaths^ref . The study covered only that time period and there was no indication whether cases have continued to show up since then. The 18 victims studied ranged in age from 19 to 47 and all used tobacco, with 75% recently taking up the habit. All but one reported "significant exposure to fine airborne sand or dust" while in Iraq. Inhalation of fungal glucans (made airborne by desert winds and other military maneuvers in the theater) may have been the precipitating factor, rather than new-onset smoking, a link which the authors seem to favor.
• each Tuesday, the U.S. DoD provides an online update of American military casualties (the number of wounded or dead) from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom^ref. According to this update, as of November 16, 2004, a total of 10,726 service members had suffered war injuries. Of these, 1361 died, 1004 of them killed in action; 5174 were wounded in action and could not return to duty; and 4191 were less severely wounded and returned to duty within 72 hours. No reliable estimates of the number of Iraqis, Afghanis, or American civilians injured are available. Nonetheless, these figures represent, by a considerable margin, the largest burden of casualties our military medical personnel have had to cope with since the Vietnam War. When U.S. combat deaths in Iraq reached the 1000 mark in September, the event captured worldwide attention. Combat deaths are seen as a measure of the magnitude and dangerousness of war, just as murder rates are seen as a measure of the magnitude and dangerousness of violence in our communities. Both, however, are weak proxies. Little recognized is how fundamentally important the medical system is — and not just the enemy's weaponry — in determining whether or not someone dies. U.S. homicide rates, for example, have dropped in recent years to levels unseen since the mid-1960s. Yet aggravated assaults, particularly with firearms, have more than tripled during that period. The difference appears to be our trauma care system: mortality from gun assaults has fallen from 16% in 1964 to 5% today. We have seen a similar evolution in war. Though firepower has increased, lethality has decreased. In World War II, 30% of the Americans injured in combat died^ref. In Vietnam, the proportion dropped to 24%. In the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 10% of those injured have died. At least as many U.S. soldiers have been injured in combat in this war as in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, or the first 5 years of the Vietnam conflict, from 1961 through 1965.


This can no longer be described as a small or contained conflict. But a far larger proportion of soldiers are surviving their injuries. It is too early to make a definitive pronouncement that medical care is responsible for this difference. With the war ongoing and still intense, data on the severity of injuries, the care provided, and the outcomes are necessarily fragmentary. But from the data made available for this report and discussions with surgical teams that have returned home, a suggestive picture has emerged. It depicts a military medical system that has made fundamental — and apparently effective — changes in the strategies and systems of battle care, even since the Persian Gulf War. One key constraint for planners has been the limited number of medical personnel available in a voluntary force to support the 130,000 to 150,000 troops fighting in Iraq. The Army is estimated to have only 120 general surgeons on active duty and a similar number in the reserves. It has therefore sought to keep no more than 30 to 50 general surgeons and 10 to 15 orthopedic surgeons in Iraq. Most have served in Forward Surgical Teams (FSTs) — small teams, consisting of just 20 people: 3 general surgeons, 1 orthopedic surgeon, 2 nurse anesthetists, 3 nurses, plus medics and other support personnel. In Vietnam, only 2.6% of the wounded soldiers who arrived at a surgical field hospital died, which meant that, despite helicopter evacuation, most deaths occurred before the injured made it to surgical care^ref. The recent emphasis on leaner, faster-moving military units added to the imperative to push surgical teams farther forward, closer to battle. So they, too, were made leaner and more mobile — and that is their fundamental departure from previous wars. Each FST is equipped to move directly behind troops and establish a functioning hospital with four ventilator-equipped beds and two operating tables within a difficult-to-fathom 60 minutes. The team travels in six Humvees. They carry three lightweight, Deployable Rapid Assembly Shelter ("drash") tents that can be attached to one another to form a 900-ft2 facility. Supplies to immediately resuscitate and operate on the wounded arrive in five backpacks: an ICU pack, a surgical-technician pack, an anesthesia pack, a general-surgery pack, and an orthopedic pack. They hold sterile instruments, anesthesia equipment, medicines, drapes, gowns, catheters, and a handheld unit allowing clinicians to obtain a hemogram and measure electrolytes or blood gases with a drop of blood. FSTs also carry a small ultrasound machine, portable monitors, transport ventilators, an oxygen concentrator providing up to 50% oxygen, 20 units of packed red cells, and six roll-up stretchers with their litter stands. Teams have forgone angiography and radiography equipment. (Orthopedic surgeons detect fractures by feel and apply external fixators.) But they have sufficient supplies to evaluate, and perform surgery on, as many as 30 wounded soldiers. They are not equipped, however, for more than six hours of postoperative intensive care. The 274th FST is led by a 42-year-old surgical oncologist who was my chief resident when I was a surgical intern. He went to West Point, Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston for surgical residency, and then M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for a fellowship. He was known in training for three things: his unflappability, his intellect (he'd already published 17 papers on work toward a breast-cancer vaccine), and the five children he and his wife had during residency. He owed the Army 18 years of service when he finally finished his training, and neither I nor anyone I know ever heard him bemoan that commitment. In 1998, he was assigned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he practiced surgical oncology. Then, in October 2001, after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he and his team were sent with the first troops into Afghanistan. He returned after service there only to be sent to Iraq, in March 2003, with ground forces invading from Kuwait through the desert to Baghdad. The 274th FST traveled 1100 miles with troops over the next four months, setting up in Nasiriyah, Najaf, Karbala, and points along the way in the southern desert, then in Mosul in the north, and finally in Baghdad. According to its logs, the unit cared for 132 U.S. and 74 Iraqi casualties during that time (22 of the Iraqis were combatants, 52 civilians). Some days were quiet. Others, overwhelming. On one day in Nasiriyah, the team received 10 critically wounded patients, among them 1 with right-lower-extremity shrapnel injuries; 1 with gunshot wounds to the stomach, jejunum, and liver; another with gunshot wounds to the liver, gallbladder, and transverse colon; 1 with shrapnel in the neck, chest, and back; 1 with a gunshot wound through the rectum; and 2 with extremity gunshot wounds. The next day, 14 more casualties arrived. On the arrival of the wounded, teams carry out the standard Advanced Trauma Life Support protocols that civilian trauma teams follow. However, because of the high incidence of penetrating wounds — 80% of casualties seen by the 274th FST had gunshot wounds, shrapnel injuries, or blast injuries — lifesaving operative management is required far more frequently than in civilian trauma centers. Today, military surgical strategy aims for damage control, not definitive repair, unless it can be done quickly. Teams pack off liver injuries, staple off perforated bowel, wash out dirty wounds — whatever is necessary to stop bleeding and control contamination without allowing the patient to lose body temperature or become coagulopathic. Surgeons seek to limit surgery to two hours or less, and then ship the patient off to a Combat Support Hospital (CSH), the next level of care. Abdomens can be left open, laparotomy pads left in, bowel unanastomosed, the patient paralyzed, sedated, and ventilated. For this approach to be successful, however, control of air space and major roadways and establishment of the next-level hospital (achieved early in Iraq but delayed in Afghanistan) are essential. 2 CSHs with 4 sites now exist in Iraq. These are 248-bed hospitals with six operating tables, some specialty surgery services, and radiology and laboratory facilities. Mobile hospitals, too, they arrive in modular units by air, tractor-trailer, or ship and can be fully functional in 24 to 48 hours. Even at the CSH level, the goal is not necessarily definitive repair. The maximal length of stay is intended to be three days. The policy is to transfer any American soldier who requires more to a level IV hospital — one was established in Kuwait, one in Rota, Spain, and one in Landstuhl, Germany. If expected to require more than 30 days of treatment, wounded soldiers are to be transferred home, mainly to Walter Reed or to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. (Iraqi prisoners and civilians, on the other hand, receive all their care in Iraq.) It is a system that took some getting used to. Surgeons at every level initially tended to hold on to their patients, either believing that they could provide definitive care themselves or not trusting that the next level could do so. According to statistics from Walter Reed, during the first few months of the war, it took an injured soldier an average of eight days to go from the battlefield to a U.S. facility. Gradually, however, surgeons have embraced the wisdom of the system. The average time from battlefield to arrival in the United States is now less than four days. (In Vietnam, it was 45 days.) One airman with devastating injuries from a mortar attack outside Balad on September 11, 2004, was on an operating table at Walter Reed just 36 hours later. In extremis from bilateral thigh injuries, abdominal wounds, shrapnel in the right hand, and facial injuries, he was taken from the field to the nearby 31st CSH in Balad. Bleeding was controlled, volume resuscitation begun, a guillotine amputation at the thigh performed. He underwent a laparotomy with diverting colostomy. His abdomen was left open, with a clear plastic bag as covering. He was then taken to Landstuhl by an Air Force Critical Care Transport team. When he arrived in Germany, Army surgeons determined that he would require more than 30 days' recovery, if he made it at all. Therefore, although resuscitation was continued and a further washout performed, he was sent on to Walter Reed. There, after weeks in intensive care and multiple operations, he did survive. This is itself remarkable. Injuries like his were unsurvivable in previous wars. The cost, however, can be high. The airman lost one leg above the knee, the other in a hip disarticulation, his right hand, and part of his face. How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question. As lifesaving as the new strategies have been, teams have been forced to confront numerous unanticipated circumstances. The war has gone on far longer than planned, the volume of wounded soldiers has increased, and the nature of the injuries has changed. Blast injuries from suicide bombs and land mines — improvised explosive devices (IEDs), in military lingo — have increased substantially and have proved particularly difficult to manage. They often combine penetrating, blunt, and burn injuries. The shrapnel include not only nails, bolts, and the like, but also dirt, clothing, even bone from assailants. Victims of IED attacks can exsanguinate from multiple seemingly small wounds, even those in the back. Teams have therefore learned to pack the bleeding sites before laparotomy or other interventions are performed. And they are now performing serial operative washouts to ensure adequate removal of infectious debris. Surgeons also discovered a dismayingly high incidence of blinding injuries. Soldiers had been directed to wear eye protection, but they evidently found the issued goggles too ugly. As some soldiers put it, "They look like something a Florida senior citizen would wear." So the military bowed to fashion and switched to cooler-looking Wiley-brand ballistic eyewear. The rate of eye injuries has since decreased markedly. Still, for many new problems, the answers remain unclear. Early in the war, for example, Kevlar vests proved dramatically effective in preventing torso injuries. Surgeons, however, now find that IEDs are causing blast injuries that extend upward under the armor and inward through axillary vents. Blast injuries are also producing an unprecedented burden of what orthopedists term "mangled extremities" — limbs with severe soft-tissue, bone, and often vascular injuries. These can be devastating, potentially mortal injuries, and whether to amputate is one of the most difficult decisions in orthopedic surgery. Military surgeons have relied on civilian trauma criteria to guide their choices, but those criteria have not proved reliable in this war. Possibly because the limb injuries are more extreme or more often combined with injuries to other organs, attempts to salvage limbs following the criteria have frequently failed, with life-threatening blood loss, ischemia, and sepsis. Every other Thursday, surgeons at Walter Reed hold War Rounds by telephone conference with surgeons in Baghdad to review the American casualties received in Washington during the previous two weeks. The case list from October 21 provides a picture of the extent of the injuries. There was one gunshot wound, one antitank-mine injury, one grenade injury, three rocket-propelled–grenade injuries, four mortar injuries, eight IED injuries, and seven patients with no cause of injury noted. The least seriously wounded of these patients was a 19-year-old who had sustained soft-tissue injuries to the face and neck from a mine and required an exploration of the left side of the neck. Other cases involved a partial hand amputation; a hip disarticulation on the right, through-knee amputation on the left, and open pelvic débridement; a left nephrectomy and colostomy; an axillary artery and vein reconstruction; and a splenectomy, with repair of a degloving scalp laceration and through-and-through tongue laceration. None of the soldiers were more than 25 years of age. Late complications have emerged as a substantial difficulty as well. Surgeons are seeing startling rates of pulmonary embolism and deep venous thrombosis, for example, perhaps because of the severity of the extremity injuries and reliance on long-distance transport in management. Initial data show that 5% of the wounded at Walter Reed have had a pulmonary embolism, resulting in two deaths. The solution is not obvious. Using anticoagulants in patients with fresh wounds and in need of multiple procedures would seem unwise. On the other hand, there is no facility or expertise in Iraq for the routine placement of inferior vena cava filters. Injured soldiers from Iraq have also brought an epidemic of multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumanii infection to military hospitals. It is not known how this has occurred. No such epidemic appeared among soldiers from Afghanistan, and whether the drug resistance is being produced by antibiotic use or is already carried by the strains colonizing troops is still being debated. Regardless, data from 442 medical evacuees seen at Walter Reed showed that 37 (8.4%) were culture-positive for acinetobacter — a rate far higher than any previously experienced. The organism has infected wounds and prostheses and caused catheter-related sepsis in soldiers and, through nosocomial spread, in at least three other hospital patients. Medical evacuees from Iraq are now routinely isolated on arrival and screened for the bacteria. These are just the medical challenges. Perhaps the most pressing difficulties arise from the changing conditions of the war. Medical teams were designed and outfitted for lightning-quick, highly mobile military operations. The war, however, has proved to be slow-moving and protracted. To adapt, CSHs have had to be converted into fixed facilities. In Baghdad, for example, the 28th CSH took over and moved into an Iraqi hospital in the Green Zone. This shift has brought increasing numbers of Iraqi civilians seeking care, and there is no overall policy about providing it. Some hospitals refuse to treat civilians for fear that some may be concealing bombs. Others are treating Iraqis but find themselves overwhelmed, particularly by pediatric patients, for whom they have limited personnel and few supplies. Requests have been made for additional staff members and resources at all levels. As the medical needs facing the military have increased, however, the supply of medical personnel has gotten tighter. Many surgeons have been on a second deployment or an extended deployment, and even this has not been sufficient. As a result, military urologists, plastic surgeons, and cardiothoracic surgeons have been tasked to fill some general surgeon positions. Planners are having to contemplate pressing surgeons into yet a third deployment. Compounding the difficulties, none of these realities have made it appealing to sign up as a military surgeon. Interest in joining the reserves has dropped precipitously. President George W. Bush has flatly declared that there will be no draft. However, the Selective Service, the U.S. agency that maintains draft preparations in case of a national emergency, has recently updated a plan to allow the rapid registration of 3.4 million health care workers 18 to 44 years of age. The Department of Defense has indicated that it will rely on improved financial incentives to attract more medical professionals. Whether this strategy can succeed remains unknown. The pay has never been competitive. One now faces a near-certain likelihood of leaving one's family for duty overseas. And without question, the work is dangerous. The nation's military surgical teams are under tremendous pressure, but they have performed remarkably in this war. They have transformed the strategy for the treatment of war casualties. They have saved the lives of an unprecedented 90% of the soldiers wounded in battle. And they have done so under extraordinarily difficult conditions and with heroic personal sacrifices. One surgeon deserves particular recognition. Dr. Mark Taylor began his Army service in 2001, to fulfill the terms of his military scholarship to attend medical school several years before. He, like many, was deployed twice to Iraq — first from February through May 2003 and then from August 2003 through the following winter. On March 20, 2004, outside Fallujah, four days from returning home to Stockton, California, the 41-year-old surgeon was hit in a rocket-propelled–grenade attack while making a telephone call outside his barracks. Despite his team's efforts, he could not be revived. None among us have paid a greater price^ref.
• long-term consequences
• infertility : few questions of fertility surrounded the return of WWII veterans, who promptly seeded a baby boom. But in the wake of the Vietnam War, anecdotal reports of a link between exposures and infertility contradicted conclusions from the National Academy of Sciences. Since 1975 hundreds of patients thought they were infertile because of exposures in Vietnam, either to Agent Orange or sustained trauma, stepping on a mine, or an illness. And so in 1990 and 1991, California Cryobank in Los Angeles offered soldiers discounted sperm storage : not many guys availed themselves of the offer. But in 2004, announcement of a discount brought hundreds of requests, and prompted other cryobanks to follow^ref. The reasons: fear of chemical and biological weapons and a link, after all, between infertility and exposures in the Gulf. 10,465 Gulf War veterans trying to conceive and 7,376 matched controls in the military but not the Gulf were queried and results revealed more infertility and delayed conceptions for the vets. Data on a number of self-reported exposures, including petrochemicals, pesticides, depleted uranium, as well as information on multiple vaccinations and pyridostigmine bromide, an anti-nerve gas agent were collected. In the future, biomonitoring data teamed with information from particulate monitoring devices and biosensors for biological weapons will pinpoint threats to fertility^ref.
• autoimmune/psychiatric disorders : Gulf War syndrome (GWS) (chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), fibromyalgia)
• environmental extremes : soldiers in Iraq describe the punishing heat; those in Afghanistan, the treacherous and frigid mountains. Effects of extreme temperature on ion-channel functioning are being assessed in human cortical neurons and in mini-swine. Research using hypobaric chambers identifies susceptibility to mountain sickness. Modern research into adaptation to extreme environments began at the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory in 1927. The field, which had morphed into exercise physiology, relocated to university laboratories and the Department of Defense. A soldier fighting is not as simple a situation as an athlete running a marathon : the athlete is in good condition and knows the outcome. The soldier is exposed to the environment not knowing for how long, with minimal food and water. Soldiers suffer tremendous sleep deprivation, fear, hard work, and exposure to heat and/or cold. The WPSM project is proceeding with these extremes in mind. A "sleep watch, for example, tracks wrist movements that foretell stage of awareness. A swallowed 3-ounce, jellybean-shaped pill continuously transmits core body temperature readings, courtesy of the space program. And the WPSM recently added to its evolving ensemble the LifeShirt, from Ventura-based VivoMetrics, already used in exercise physiology studies. It weighs 8 ounces, is machine washable, and feels like Lycra. Embedded wires detect heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, blood pressure, carbon dioxide level, and coughing. Just as WWII-era findings found their way to athletics and health care, so too will the fruits of biomonitoring in the battlefield yield valuable information on physiology under stress, even if it seems as if a future soldier won't be able to belch without setting off alerts miles away. But the incoming data may make the combat theater a safer place
A brief history of military medicine :
• 1860-1865 : civil war
• infection/combat deaths = 2:1
• problems: malaria, yellow fever, scurvy, smallpox, typhoid, dysentery
• medical advances : management of mass casualties, anesthesia, very limited pharmacopeia
• 1866 -- Italian monk Montegazza uttered idea for cryobanks: "A man dying on a battlefield may beget a legal heir with his semen frozen and stored at home."
• 1867 : Joseph Lister promotes carbolic acid as antiseptic
• 1900 : Karl Landsteiner lays groundwork for blood transfusions
• 1902 : United States begins manufacturing vaccines
• 1914-1918 : WWI
• infection/combat deaths = 1:1
• medical advances : triage, prosthetics, plastic surgery, public health, antisepsis medicines, vaccines
• 1930s : sulfa drugs
• 1939-1945 WWII
• infection/combat deaths = <1:1
• medical advances : Improved sanitation, better vaccines, whole-blood transfusions
• 1949-1953 : Korean War
• medical advances : helicopter evacuation, refined triage, cold-weather effects studied, plasma- volume expanders, mobile army surgical hospitals (MASH)
• 1960s-1975 Vietnam
• problems : quinine-resistant malaria
• medical advances : recognition of "biological acclimatization" period of 6 weeks, trauma care in field, evacuation refined
• 1990-1991 : Gulf war (Desert Storm)
• problems: Norwalk virus, Shigella, malaria, leishmaniasis (transmitted by sand flies), pollutants, irritants, pesticides, Gulf War syndrome (GWS) (chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivities), inhibited red fuming nitric acid from scud missiles, uranium from munitions, smoke from burning oil fields, sarin.
• medical advances : studies on multiple chemical sensitivities
• 2003-? : the war in Iraq (Iraqi Freedom)
• problems: "Uxo" (unexploded ordnance), suicide bombings, beheadings on the Internet, blowing sand
• medical advances : automated real-time biomonitoring and health records, one-handed tourniquet, bandages with built-in clotting factors or chitosan gel
• landmines

Prevention : currently, one person can check and clear just 2 m² of land a day. A transgenic version of thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), activates the anthocyanin-making apparatus (normally switched off during most of the year except autumn) in the presence of NO₂ gas, which is released by underground landmines. The leaves of the plant change from green to red after 3-5 weeks of growth in the presence of this gas : the plant is quite shallow-rooted, and so will only detect mines near the surface, but this is where most landmines are found. Aresa is now developing spray guns that can sow the seeds cheaply and safely. They are also working on plants that will respond to other environmental pollutants such as cadmium and nickel, so that soil can be cleaned up once these heavy metals have been detected. The team has also taken steps to ensure that the genetically engineered plant won't spread in the wild. They have removed the gene for an important growth hormone, so that the plant needs a specially designed fertilizer in order to grow.
Web resources :
• Adopt a minefield
• International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL)
• Landmine Survivors Network (LSN)
• Campagna Italiana contro le Mine - ONLUS
• Campagna Italiana per la messa al bando delle mine antiuomo
• Geneva International Centre for Humaniatarian Demining (GICHD)
• Handicap International
• InterSos
• La bonifica umanitaria dei territori by Fernando Termentini
• Mines Advisory Group (MAG)
• Safelane : Canada's guide to the global ban on landmines
• Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) - Campaign for a Landmine Free World
• chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high explosive (CBRNE) weapons of mass destruction (WMD) / nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons^ref
• biological weapons (bioweapons / BW) / bioterrorism

Key features of biologic agents used as bioweapons :
• high morbidity and mortality
• potential for person-to-person spread
• low infective dose and highly infectious by aerosol
• lack of rapid diagnostic capability
• lack of universally available effective vaccine
• potential to cause anxiety
• availability of pathogen and feasibility of production
• environmental stability
• database of prior research and development
• potential to be "weaponized"
Timelines :
• 1925 : Geneva Protocol forces adhering countries not to use BW in war, but doesn't ban development, production and stockpiling
• mid-1930s : Wickham Steed charges German BW testing in the Paris Metro
• the secret Biopreparat (The System) program directed by Yuri Kalinin involved 35,000 workers, including 9,000 scientists working at laboratories at 47 sites across the former Soviet Union, including Obolensk (with the "Corpus One" containment building), Oblask, Sverdlovsk (since 1946), Stepnagorsk, Kirov (since 1953), and Omutninsk. Open-air testing of the pathogens produced was carried out at Vozrozhdeniye (Renaissance) Island and Rebirth Island, in the Aral sea. Vozrozhdeniye, whose summer heat of > 100 °F, dry climate and distance from population centers made it ideal to test deadly germs on animals. First used in 1936, the island was abandoned by the Soviet army when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. It become the property of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. But because of its remoteness, neither country sent forces to guard it, and scavengers have been picking it of valuable materials every summer since 1996. In 1988 the anthrax was buried there after Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev became concerned that the stockpile — produced and stocked at Zima, near Irkutsk — would be an embarrassment if Western countries asked to inspect the plant. So the Soviets sent 100 and 200 tons of spores by train to Aralsk, then by ship to the island, according to Kazakhstan officials. The anthrax was buried at a depth of 5 to 8 feet. The British and American governments learned of the Soviet-era BW program between very late 1989 and 1992. The first break was the evidence that began to be published in the USSR in 1991-1992. In 2002 an American team digged trenches in the vicinity of each of the 11 pits where the anthrax had been buried : the trench was lined with thick plastic, filled with calcium hydrochloride, and the contaminated earth was covered with water there for 6 days and then re-buried after testing found no live spores.
• 1936-1945 : the Japanese program included large-scale open-air testing of live pathogens, including anthrax as bacterial slurry in bombs at its experimental station in Pingfan, Manchuria, China. Unit 731 was a Japanese biological warfare unit led by General Ishii Shirou that carried out experiments on 3,000-12,000 local Chinese and allied prisoners of war. In November 1941 Japonese airplanes spread Yersinia pestis in Changte, China. US military officials worried by the contemporaneous British BW program saved Unit 731 members from Tokyo trial (1946-48) to get their knowledges.
• 1942 : British evacuated Gruinard island to use it as a BW trial land. In 1943 trials were stopped after a Bacillus anthracis outbreak in cattle living on Scottish coasts near Gruinard island. The island was drained by spreading a formaldehyde solution on the whole land.
• 1950 : Joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments are conducted in which tens of thousands of people in New York and San Francisco (1953) bay are exposed to the airborne germs Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii, infecting 800,000 people. 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Some of the areas included San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Key West, Panama City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
• night between April 14 and 15, 1952 : during Korean war, an American F-82 airplane spreads Yersinia pestis-infected rats in Min-Chung, Kan-Nan region, North Korea.
• 1955 : at Tampa Bay an outbreak of Bordetella pertussis (including 12 deaths)
• 1956-1958 : yellow fever virus-infected mosquitoes are spread via airplanes over Afroamerican communities in Savannah (Georgia) and Avon Park (Florida)
• Johnston Atoll was a U.S. open-air biological weapons test facility 1,000 km S-W of Hawaii
• 1954-1973 : Operation Whitecoat. The US Army Medical Institute in Fort Detrick, MD, experimented the biological agents which could be potentially bioweaponized by exposing healthy volunteers (mostly belonging to the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church, who refused to use arms but wanted to be patriots the same) to sublethal aerosols sprayed into a giant stainless steel sphere termed the "Eight Ball".
• June 7-10, 1966 : > 1,000,000 people are infected by Bacillus subtilis spores spread in New York subway
• 1967 : U.S. military releases clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia. Their intent is to determine how efficiently they could disperse chemical agents.
• April 10, 1972 : 70 countries signed on the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), which bans the development, production, and stockpiling of BW, as well as BW research for offensive purposes. United States, one of the 2 superpowers that did possess biological weapons, gave them up and destroyed them in 1969. The treaty came into force on March 16, 1975, when the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom deposited their instruments of ratification for the convention. Contrary to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, in the BTWC there was to be no preferred group of countries that would continue to retain the weapons.
• 1995 : Larry Wayne Harris, member of Aryan Nation, is stopped while buying Yersinia pestis samples. He was arrested in February 18, 1998, accused to have spread Bacillus anthracis vaccine in Las Vegas
• Slaman Pak and Al Hakam were an Iraqi biological weapons facilities
• WGE-6 is a NATO term for Working Group of Experts. It includes three groups PG-31, PG-32, PG-33 which specialize in defence against biological weapons. Canada is a member of both PG-32 and PG-33.
• January 28, 2003 : US announces Project BioShield, a new10-year, $6-billion, Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services (presumably NIH) joint program to develop and produce new vaccines and countermeasures against potential bioweapons.
• Umatilla Chemical Depot consists of igloo-like bunkers in the high desert that house 12% of USA's deadly nerve gas and blistering agents. The corrosive components have eaten through some of the M-55 rockets, mines and bombs that contain 3,700 tons of deadly nerve agent. More than 100 rockets are already classified as "leakers," meaning vapor has already been detected outside the steel casings. Chemicals are already being burned at Tooele, Utah, and Johnston Island, 800 miles southwest of Hawaii.
Agents : are B. anthracis or F.tularensis present as background organisms?  If so, are they background everywhere or only in certain environments? If this information is not available, what is considered "normal" or "safe"? What levels of organism require remediation? Without answers to these and multiple other thorny questions, the USA is at risk for a situation that terrorizes the public for no reason other than a lack of knowledge regarding natural background
• category A
• easily disseminated or transmitted from person to person
• high mortality rates and have the potential for major public health impact
• might cause public panic and social disruption
• require special action for public health preparedness
• Bacillus anthracis
• it was part of the Biopreparat program in the former USSR
• Alibekov anthrax is weaponized anthrax (spores mixed with 2 unrelated ingredients to make it more volatile) developed by Dr.Ken Alibek (Kanatjan Alibekov), is said to be 4 times more deadly than natural anthrax.
• the unintended release of Anthrax spores over a 50-60 km area from a facility in Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains in April 1979 (now Yekaterinburg, Russia), killed 66 of 77 human cases (85% case fatality) as well as the majority of exposed livestock. The affected area covered approximately 900 sq. km.. In the spring of 1992 President Yeltsin’s admitted that the outbreak had been due to an accidental release from a Soviet Ministry of Defense R&D facility "Compound 19" in the city, causing 68 deaths (and hundreds of died animals) from inhalatory anthrax in a 4 km-wide leeward zone.
• since October 4, 2001 several cases of anthrax have been reported in Florida, USA : there were 19 disease cases and 5 fatalities in total. Persons on the East Coast, including 2 postal workers in Washington, have died, while government sites on Capitol Hill have been contaminated. The Ames strain was used. Since the 2001 anthrax attacks, the Postal Service has spent $1.4 billion to install a biohazard detection system at 283 mail facilities; the federal government has spent $370 million to boost state and local public health labs, the backbone of the CDC's 140 bioterror Laboratory Response Network; and Homeland Security has launched a $60 million-plus BioWatch system to monitor air in more than 30 U.S. cities. All rely on the same CDC protocols. But the Defense Department has not signed a federal memorandum of understanding that standardizes alerts, terminology, data sharing and response when biohazard systems at military sites within the United States are triggered, a senior federal health official said. The Pentagon is spending $1 billion on a 5-year program to develop biohazard warning systems and procedures at 185 U.S. and 15 overseas bases. The BioWatch system has gone 2 years without a false positive. The Postal Service's system has reviewed 500 000 samples without a false positive. A false alarm event began on Mar 10, 2005 when one of 4 swab samples taken daily from sensor filters at the Pentagon delivery facility tested positive for anthrax at Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc. in Richmond, a Pentagon subcontractor. The finding was confirmed by a highly accurate PCR test and forwarded on Mar 11 to the prime contractor. Pentagon officials say they were notified on Mar 14 morning of the finding : what if it had been a public holiday

Monday? Or had involved the dispersal of a '2001' product. The mind boggles. That afternoon -- apparently by coincidence -- a machine on the 8th floor of the Fairfax complex that receives mail from the Pentagon sounded an airborne biohazard alarm. Military officials said that although Army scientists at Fort Detrick confirmed the initial positive finding, quality control problems at the lab probably spoiled the sample. Commonwealth Biotechnologies Inc. has processed 2000 samples from the Pentagon over 2 years. The Postal Service reopened its main government mail processing center at V Street NE at noon of 16 Mar and advised about 200 employees that they could stop taking antibiotics. The Pentagon expected to reopen its intake facility on 17 Mar. The Fairfax buildings will reopen today except for a suite in one of the towers, where more testing will be done. Anyway anthrax was detected independently by 2 government laboratories in samples collected from the 2 Pentagon mail facilities that were at first closed last week and then declared free of the pathogen : anthrax found was the same genetic strain used in the 2001 attacks. There has since -- on Fri 18 Mar 2005-- been a 3rd alert at Bolling Air Force Base triggered by automatic sensors, which is located along the Anacostia River in Washington, in a mail-handling facility used by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which apparently is now regarded as a negative after FBI testing. The Pentagon is working to gather more than 8000 pieces of mail that moved through its detached facility between 10 and 14 Mar 2005.
• Clostridium botulinum toxin : a paper that analyses a hypothetical poison attack on the USA has been published despite the government's objections. The paper's authors modelled the health and economic losses that would result if a terrorist poisoned the US milk supply with the botulinum toxin. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) originally said it would publish the paper on 25 May, but it delayed publication to address concerns from the US health department. After consideration, the journal has decided to publish the paper without any substantive changes. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, which publishes PNAS, explained the journal's decision in an editorial, which was posted with the paper online^ref. It is important to recognize that publishing terrorism-related analysis in the open scientific literature can make the nation safer. But Stewart Simonson, assistant secretary for public health emergency preparedness at the health department, was critical. The assistant secretary respects the decision, but he doesn't agree with it. The episode raises thorny issues about the proper handling of 'dual use' scientific research. This is research that aims to bolster defence but that could be used maliciously. Scientists and security experts have been wrestling over what to do with dual-use research and information since the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. The PNAS paper, by Lawrence Wein and graduate student Yifan Liu from Stanford University, California, considers what might happen if botulinum toxin were poured into a milk tanker on its way to a holding tank. The toxin is a potent nerve poison that is sometimes used in very low doses in plastic surgery to smooth the skin. Wein and Lu calculate that, when diluted, this would deliver potentially lethal doses to about 568,000 people. They then estimate the number who would fall ill, with symptoms ranging from cramps to paralysis, depending on factors such as when the poison is detected and whether the milk is pasteurised. In some scenarios, the great majority of these people could fall ill or die. Health officials contend that the paper amounts to a blueprint for terrorists. But Alberts and the paper's authors say that much of the information is readily available on the Internet, so it does not provide any new ideas. Instead, they said, it will inform the nation's defences. Wein notes that publications on vulnerabilities can help the government to strengthen the nation against attacks, and can help the public put pressure on policy-makers when they drag their feet. There has been no perceptible move in the food industry or in the government to shift from a food safety to a food security mentality. In a free society, the notion that we become more secure through transparency is important. The government needs to be reminded of that from time to time. The PNAS episode raises the profile of these issues at a crucial time, occurring just before the first meeting of a US government group that has been set up to tackle difficult issues in science and security. The National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity (NSABB), based in Bethesda, Maryland, was created in March 2004 and is scheduled to hold its first meeting on 30 June. In his editorial, Alberts suggested that the board use the botulism paper as a case study for further analysis. In 2003, many journals, including PNAS, said they would specially review dual-use research papers for security concerns, and PNAS did follow this procedure for the botulism paper. But Elisa Harris, an analyst at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland in College Park, says the dispute over this paper shows that the scientific community needs more guidance. I think this whole exercise demonstrates that the publishers' statement from 2003 is not sufficient. We need real guidelines for PNAS, other scientific journals and scientists to use in assessing the biosecurity risks of a given manuscript.
• Yersinia pestis : such an aerosol would likely be used in an indoor setting to avoid the outdoor UV radiation inactivation of the organism. The paragraphs below are the abstract and edited summary of an article in Clinical Infectious Diseases 2005; 40:1644-8, entitled "Destroying the Life and Career.of a Valued Physician-Scientist Who Tried to Protect Us From Plague: Was It Really Necessary?" Thomas Campbell Butler, at 63 years of age, is completing the 1st year of a 2-year sentence in federal prison, following an investigation and trial that was initiated after he voluntarily reported that he believed vials containing Yersinia pestiswere missing from his laboratory at Texas Tech University. We take this opportunity to remind the infectious diseases community of the plight of our esteemed colleague, whose career and family have, as a result of his efforts to protect us from infection by this organism, paid a price from which they will never recover. Dr. Thomas C. Butler has had a long and successful career that has focused on problems and illnesses of underprivileged persons, including those in the developing world and indigent patients in this country. His curriculum vitae lists >170 published peer-reviewed articles, reviews, and chapters, with his most important contributions being made in the areas of diarrheal diseases, typhoid fever, plague, and relapsing fever, as well as investigations of therapeutic modalities for other infectious diseases. His work in the late 1960s on oral rehydration therapy in Dhaka and Calcutta, India, resulted in one of the earliest articles describing the important clinical applications of basic physiologic studies of patients with cholera and led to the 1st use of oral rehydration solution in a refugee camp in Calcutta in 1971. Although the agent of plague, Yersinia pestis, is a potential weapon of bioterrorism, it is also endemic in the United States and many other parts of the world, as pointed out in all major texts and reviews, including some written by Tom Butler. Indeed, as pointed out in Butler's 1983 monograph about plague, "In the United States during these same years (1970s), the

number of human cases of plague increased several fold", and, on average, there are 2-15 known cases reported each year in the United States, with >40 cases occurring in some years. Butler's work on plague, which includes published chapters, peer-reviewed articles, and reviews, goes back 35 years, to his service in the Vietnam War. In 2000, he began a collaboration with colleagues at the University of Tanzania in which he served as a consultant and provided a reference laboratory for a study designed to compare the efficacy of gentamicin and doxycycline therapy in clinically ill patients with _Y. pestis_ infection. The study was reviewed by Tanzania's medical research review board and was conducted at the University of Tanzania and under government authority; the institutional review board at Texas Tech University apparently exempted the project from review, because Dr. Butler was serving only as a consultant, without direct patient care responsibilities. The study was successfully completed; samples were provided to the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colorado; data were provided to the Food and Drug Administration; and a manuscript awaits publication. Because Dr. Butler's laboratory acted as a reference laboratory for the study, clinical and laboratory specimens were exchanged, and all original specimens were returned to Tanzania, as per contractual agreements. In January 2003, Dr. Butler could not locate 30 vials of plague specimens and reported this to the safety officer at Texas Tech University; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was notified by Texas Tech University, which resulted in  60 FBI agents rapidly descending upon Texas Tech University and the briefing of government officials, apparently up to the level of President George W. Bush. According to reliable sources, Butler was questioned by FBI agents without legal counsel which he waived, because he felt he had nothing to hide, he had worked with the military and federal agencies for years on this and other projects, and he genuinely wanted to help the FBI allay public fears. Testimony at the trial indicates that, after many hours of interrogation without sleep, and with the assurance that such interrogation would prevent any legal action, he signed a statement to the effect that the vials may have been autoclaved. He was then put in handcuffs and jailed, having been accused of lying to the FBI (a charge for which he was later acquitted). Jonathan Turley, an attorney
for Butler and a professor at George Washington University School of Law, noted that "this made no sense. He would never have created a controversy to conceal the accidental destruction of vials". After being incarcerated for 6 nights in county jail without bail, Butler was allowed to post bail of US$100 000 (which was later increased to $250 000) but remained under house arrest, with electronic monitoring. He was not to contact colleagues who were on a witness list, and he had no access to his computer or e-mail for many months, despite having worked as Chief of the Infectious Diseases Department at Texas Tech University and having lived in Lubbock for 16 years, where he and his wife were raising 4 children and enjoying much respect in the community. Butler was offered a plea bargain which involved pleading guilty to lying and spending 6 months in jail but declined and chose to risk trial by jury to clear his name. Although the original concerns of bioterrorism were not supportable, multiple additional charges largely unrelated to the disappearance of the vials containing _Y. pestis_ were filed (i.e., "piled on"), including illegal transportation of plague bacteria, tax evasion, embezzlement, and fraud, for a total of some 69 charges carrying a maximum sentence of 469 years in prison and US$17 million in fines. Many of the charges had to do with contract disputes Butler had with his university (which are normally handled through civil, not criminal, proceedings) and
were unrelated to the original charges associated with the disappearance of the vials. During the trial, prosecutors described Dr. Butler as an "evil genius" and compared him to "a cocaine dealer smuggling illegal drugs," and they emphasized the accusations of lying to the FBI and endangering the public and made repeated references to terrorism, actions many felt were designed to create an atmosphere of fear in the conservative West Texas courtroom. Ultimately, a jury acquitted Butler of most of the original charges, including lying to the FBI, and the charge of tax evasion; he was convicted of charges related to one overseas shipment of an express-mail package containing "lab specimens" originally from Tanzania (a technical violation) back to his collaborators in Tanzania and of charges concerning contracts and indirect administrative charges associated with grants received from pharmaceutical companies. However, the former dean of Texas Tech University who had helped recruit Butler, was aware of Dr. Butler's grants and consultancies and had encouraged him to finance his research and fund his salary with them. Testimony also indicated that others at Texas Tech University were aware of and/or had signed his contracts; there were apparently no rules against such arrangements at the time. During his trial, members of the Texas Tech University administration testified against Butler, despite strong support from his colleagues and friends. The role of the Texas Tech University administration in the prosecution of Dr. Butler has been of great concern to faculty throughout the nation and is considered by many to be unprecedented. In attempts to explain this behavior toward a prominent and respected tenured faculty member, questions have been raised about pressures that may have been exerted on the university through its biodefense contracts with the Department of Defense. The judge (who was obviously sympathetic) imposed a sentence of 2 years (to run concurrently), rather than the 10-year sentence corresponding to his conviction, and a payment of approximately US$38 000 to Texas Tech University, rather than $1 million. Many wrote to the judge urging a suspended sentence with community service; rumor has it that the judge did not do so out of concern that this would result in an automatic federal appeal for an even longer sentence. Reactions in favor of Butler and expressions of concern about the handling and impact of the case have been strong, including comments from the Human Rights Committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the National Academy of Engineering, and the New York Academy of Sciences. The presidents of the NAS, the IOM, and the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, as well as many prominent scientists and physicians, wrote to then Attorney General John Ashcroft to express their concern about the impact of the prosecution of Dr. Butler (the presidents of the NAS and the IOM had written only once before to an attorney general, Janet Reno, and their letter was concerned with the prosecution of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee). 4 academy members who are Nobel Laureates wrote, on behalf of themselves, that "this respected colleague has been subjected to unfair and disproportionate treatment." Media coverage has been extensive; Science, The Scientist, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, BBC, CBS, and many other news sources have run stories suggesting that Butler may have been a victim of the widespread fear about (bio)terrorism and may have been singled out, presumably to serve as an example, as part of a flawed strategy to fight bioterrorism. Dr. Tom Butler, a physician-scientist and member of the IDSA, respected by all colleagues who know him and his work, has been stripped of his professorship, tenure, salary, and medical license and has spent his life savings and retirement to defend himself. He and his family have no sources of income. His situation is a cautionary tale to all of us, especially those who work with biological agents with potential for use in bioterrorism, even if in collaboration with governmental laboratories and scientists. Can we help Butler's situation? All concerned individuals can help Dr. Butler and discourage misuse of current laws designed to defend us against terrorism by writing to members of Congress, to the Department of Justice, or to the newly confirmed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Dr. Butler's appeal is currently pending in the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.. He has exhausted his personal savings and retirement funds. If you wish to assist his defense by providing expenses for his appeal, donations to the Thomas Butler Legal Defense Fund may be sent to Daniel C. Schwartz, c/o Bryan Cave LLP, 700 Thirteenth St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20005. There but for the the roll of the dice could go any one of us (unless of course we had the good fortune to work with non-communicable agents instead of an agent like Y. pestis). We at ProMED-mail consider what has happened to Dr. Thomas Butler to be unconscionable and on a par with events that occurred in China and Cuba. In the past we have posted on these human rights abuses and called for assistance in putting pressure on the offenders.  By posting this article we are doing just that, calling upon ProMED-mail subscribers to assist in putting pressure on the judicial system in the USA for permitting this injustice and abuse of the legal system to go forward.
• variola major virus :
• 1763 : sir Jeffrey Amherst, British governator of New Scotland, spread among native Canadian Indians (suspected to flank French troops) blankets coming from an hospital, infected with smallpox, decimating Indian communities
• 1971 an open air test on Aral Sea in the Soviet Biopreparat program caused death of 2 infants and 1 young woman
• the only currently declared stocks of live variola virus are nowadays preserved in 5 WHO-approved high-security labs at Center for Disease Control (CDC) (Atlanta, Georgia, USA) and at the Russian State Center for Research on Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo facilities (Novosibirsk, Siberia, Russia) to allow further research projects monitored by WHO. The Research Institute of Viral Preparations in Moscow, Russia, collects 120 different strains. According to the Weapons Intelligence Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) of CIA, Iraq, North Korea, Russia, and the Jean Merieux Laboratoires in Lyon, France have undeclared smallpox samples.
• the re-emergence of smallpox is possible from many sources (for example, from bodies of smallpox victims that are frozen in the permafrost, inadvertent laboratory stocks that were never recognized during the WHO-directed centralization of variola virus stocks in the 1970s and 1980s, and rogue sources) and by many scenarios (biowarfare, bioterrorism, ...)
Assuming a transmission rate of 3 (from 2 to 5) new cases per infected person, calculations indicate that a single focal outbreak would result in the spread of infection for up to 1 year, until vaccination and quarantine strategies caught up. On June 22-23, 2001 the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, in conjunction with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, held an exercise at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, DC entitled "Dark Winter" simulating a single release of variola virus in Oklahoma City, modelled as an initial outbreak of 20 cases : unresolved jurisdiction issues and unpredictable individual actions of citizens in quarantine scenarios lead to a failure in response capacities of the health-care sector. For further timelines see here. Bioengeneering of variola virus to weaponize it includes :
• variant that is sufficiently different in terms of surface proteins to escape the immune response that is induced by the smallpox vaccine (difficult to accomplish due to many highly conserved envelope proteins)
• introducing a T_h2 cytokine gene
• Francisella tularensis strain Schu 4. Aerosol dispersal is considered the most hazardous mode of transmission, as it would affect the most people. This claim was recently reported by the Working Group on Civilian Biodefense, a group of 25 specialists in the fields of medicine, public health, the military, and various governmental agencies convened to provide recommendations for management of a biological attack^ref. According to their model, onset of abrupt cases of acute, nonspecific febrile illness would be expected to occur in a large number of people beginning 3 to 5 days after aerosol release of F tularensis in a densely populated area. Over the next several days and weeks, a significant number of people would predictably develop pleuropneumonitis. Only a relatively small amount of F tularensis would be needed to cause this, as reported over 3 decades ago by the World Health Organization (WHO), which estimated that 50 kg of F tularensis spread through aerosolization over an urban area would result in substantial casualties, including thousands of deaths (Health Aspects of Chemical and Biological Weapons. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization; 1970:105-107). In a so-called "contained casualty setting," the Working Group on Civilian Biodefense recommends parenteral antimicrobial treatment for tularemia. Use of the existing LVS vaccine would require FDA approval for an emergency-use IND. The DoD is drafting a protocol for emergency use for the military and the public. Under this IND, military personnel could be vaccinated with informed consent or with presidential waiver in the event or evidence of a biowarfare attack. Use of this IND vaccine for the public at large is contingent upon an initiative from the Department of Health and Human Services^{ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6}. Soviet and Russian bioweapons scientists reportedly developed and tested virulent transgenic tularemia bioweapon strains that had been genetically engineered to possess vaccine-subverting and/or antibiotic-resistance properties (Non-Proliferation Review 6, Sunshine Project). Russian officials announced on 22 Dec 2004 that security officials had successfully prevented efforts by foreign spies to "seize control" of the research in "especially dangerous pathogens" being conducted at the Vektor State Scientific Virology and Biotechnology Center (Lenta). Vektor is a former Soviet bioweapons research facility that currently houses one of the world's most extensive collections of potential bioweapon pathogens -- including but not limited to the smallpox, Marburg, and Ebola viruses -- which was the site of a recent fatal laboratory accident involving the Ebola virus. In 1969, the World Health Organization estimated an aerosol dispersal of 110 pounds of virulent tularemia in a city of 5 million would cause 250 000 illnesses, including 19 000 deaths.
• viral hemorrhagic fevers (HF)
• Filoviruses
• Ebola virus. The Aum Shinrikyo sect, the Japanese group responsible for the 1995 sarin gas attack in the subways of Tokyo, is reported to have sent members to Africa during the 1992 Ebola outbreak to obtain samples^ref
• Marburg virus (named "Variant U" after death of Dr.Nikolai Ustinov on April 30, 1988). The former Soviet Union is known to have successfully developed a weapon for Marburg virus, with less effective efforts using Ebola virus (Alibeck K. Biohazard. New York, NY: Random House; 1999). Variant U likely arised from Mr.Popp, a survivor of the 1967 outbreak at a Marburg vaccine farm. A pathology team removed Ustinov's liver and his spleen. They sucked a quantity of his destroyed blood out of a leg vein using large syringes. They froze the blood and the body parts. They kept the Ustinov strain alive and continually replicating in the laboratories at Vector and learned how to mass-produce it in simple bioreactors, flasks used for growing viruses. They dried Variant U, and processed it into an inhalable dust. The particles of Variant U were coated to protect them in the air so that they would drift for many miles. In late 1990, Biopreparat researchers tested airborne Variant U on monkeys and other small animals in special explosion-test chambers at the Stepnagorsk plant. Marburg Variant U proved to be extremely potent in airborne form : just 1-5 microscopic particles of Variant U lodged in the lungs of a monkey were almost guaranteed to make the animal crash, bleed, and die. With normal weapons-grade anthrax, in comparison, it takes about 8,000 spores lodged in the lungs to pretty much guarantee infection and death. By the fall of 1991, just before Boris Yeltsin came to power, Marburg Variant U was on the verge of becoming a strategic/operational biological weapon, ready to be manufactured in large quantities and loaded into warheads on MIRVs. These warheads are sinister things. Ten separate cone-shaped warheads, each targeted on a different location, sit atop a missile. Special cooling systems inside each warhead keep the virus alive during the heat of reentry through the earth's atmosphere. The biowarheads are parachuted over a city, and at a certain altitude they break apart. Out of each warhead bursts a spray of more than a hundred oval bomblets the size of small cantaloupes. The cantaloupes fly out a distance and then split in overlapping patterns, releasing a haze of bioparticles that quickly becomes invisible. Variant U never became part of the Soviets' strategic arsenal
• Arenaviruses
• Lassa virus
• Machupo virus
According to America’s resident expert, Dr. Ken Alibek (Kanatjan Alibekov), defector and former assistant director of Biopreparat program, chimeric viruses would have been produced :
• veepox would be a genetic combination of Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEEV) and variola major virus developed by Russian biological weapons experts in 1990-1991 by grafting parts of the reversely transcribed VEEV genome into a smallpox virus
• ebolapox would be a genetic combination of Ebola virus and variola major virus developed by Russian biological weapons experts by grafting parts of the reversely transcribed Ebola virus genome into a smallpox virus. Blackpox would be much harder than Ebola hemorrhagic fever, more like hemorrhagic smallpox, with much more resistance to sunlight, heat, cold, drying, and humidity. Like smallpox, it could lie dormant for weeks in the air. In the 10 deaths (including 4 children) and 25 hospital admission in the villages of Moro and Malik, Pakistan, near the Indus River, there was blackening of the skin in hands and feet, facial edema and severe fever, but the skin does not develop blisters. The inhabitants while giving details said that they were using water from a tap installed in their village
The reported "suicide" and then "accidental death" of noted Harvard biophysics scientist and anthrax, Ebola, AIDS, herpes, and influenza expert, Dr. Don C. Wiley, on the Interstate 55 Hernando De Soto Bridge that links Memphis to West Memphis, Arkansas, in January 2002 was probably a well-planned murder, according to local law enforcement officials in Tennessee and Arkansas.
• category B
• moderately easy to disseminate
• moderate morbidity rates and low mortality rates
• require specific enhancements of CDC's diagnostic capacity and enhanced disease surveillance.
• Brucella spp.
• e toxin of Clostridium perfringens : Clostridium spp. and any of the 12 different protein toxins produced by them can affect any species. Clostridium has been listed as a potential bioterrorism weapon, because the toxin can be easily manufactured and can be aerosolized easily, causing serious acute pulmonary disease. In addition, it can cause hemolysis, vascular leaking, thrombocytopenia and

liver damage, tissue hypoxia and shock, any of which may be incapacitating or fatal. The toxin could also be put into water and food. Indeed, the possible effects of e toxin in humans are, based on published data available to me, suppositions. What may be known by some is unpublished and is not available to us. In vitro very few human cell lines are susceptible to the effects of epsilon toxin. -
• food safety threats
• Salmonella spp. (placed on food in salad bars, by the Rajneesh group in The Dalles, Oregon, in 1984. This resulted in 751 recorded instances of illness, with no mortality.)
• Escherichia coli O157:H7
• Shigella spp.
• Burkholderia mallei (used by Germans in WWI and by Soviets in Afghanistan in 1982 to kill enemy horses)
• Burkholderia pseudomallei
• Chlamydophila psittaci
• Coxiella burnetii : although not thought to be related to bioterrorism, was spread by mail in a post office in the UK in 1987 (Winner SJ, Eglin RP, Moore VI, Mayon-White RT: An outbreak of Q fever affecting postal workers in Oxforshire. J Infect 1987; 14:255-61).
• ricin. Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was killed by poison dart filled with ricin and fired from the tip of an umbrella in London in 1978^ref. In recent years, ricin has become a favorite tool of extremist individuals or groups who seek to harm others, as the following examples demonstrate:
• 2 tax protesters were convicted in February 1995 of possessing ricin as a biological weapon. This was the first case of prosecution under the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act.
• a retired electrician who had worked on the trans-Alaska pipeline recently committed suicide in an Arkansas jail after being arrested under the antiterrorism act for possessing castor beans. 2 years before, a large quantity of ricin toxin and weapons, ammunition, and gold were found in his car by Canadian customs officials as he crossed the border from Alaska to Canada
• on Feb 3 white powder has been also discovered in a postal facility in Wallingford, CT but its identity is not yet known.
• staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB) from Staphylococcus aureus. Money that has been contaminated with a biological toxin is a whole new possible direction for bioterrorism. It is a case that the FBI terrorism unit has taken over from state police that involves several cities, including Philadelphia. As CBS 3's Tamsen Fadal reports, the unit is trying to determine whether or not a toxin was actually placed over money to protect the interest of the Russian mob. In an exclusive investigation, CBS 3 has obtained documents detailing a bizarre criminal plot involving a toxin, suspected drug money, and the Russian mob in Northeast Philadelphia. Earlier in January 2005, Pennsylvania State Troopers intercepted USD 250 000 during a routine traffic stop. The alleged drug money, which had been sealed in plastic, was being driven from Columbus, Ohio to Northeast Philadelphia. According to law enforcement sources, after counting the seized cash, troopers began feeling ill, and one trooper was even hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Sources tell CBS 3 that tests on the cash counter revealed the presence of a toxin derived from the bacterium Staphylococcus. It may be a new application of terrorism, although this time, it was used as a deterrent among thieves. A warning has been issued, at both the state and federal level, recommending that officers should take extra precaution, and wear protective masks when handling suspected drug money, now more than ever. Not enough information is available regarding the incubation period of illness in the state troopers, and the manifestations of this illness, to assess the biological plausibility of this report. In addition, the type and amount of toxin is not mentioned. Influenza-like illnesses can occur after aerosol exposure to staphylococcal enterotoxin B (SEB), as reported by the USA Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland. In one episode, which occurred in 1964^ref, at least 9 laboratory workers were exposed to aerosolized staphylococcal enterotoxin B, following what was described as an accident in a lab. The ensuing illness was heralded by rigors and fever with readings as high as 106°F. The onset of the fever averaged 12 hours after the exposure (range 8-20 hours), and the febrile period lasted from 12-76 hours (mean duration 50 hours). The fever was associated with muscle aches and headache. Respiratory symptoms began about the same time as the fever and muscle pain as a nonproductive cough. Of the 9, 5 had an abnormal lung exam associated with shortness of breath, and 3 had shortness of breath at rest. One of these had "profound" shortness of breath for the 1st 12 hours of symptoms and exertional shortness of breath for 10 days. Chest x-rays obtained during this sublethal exposure were abnormal. Chest pain, described as moderately intense, also occurred with the respiratory symptoms, lasting an average of one day (range 4 hours to 4 days). Vomiting and loss of appetite developed in most, with a mean onset of 17 hours (8-24 hour range), with the anorexia lasting several days and the vomiting limited to a mean of 9 hours (4-20 hour range). In a 2nd, more recently reported laboratory event (in which the timing of the events involved are not noted)^ref, ocular exposure with purified toxin occurred, resulting in conjunctivitis with periorbital swelling 1-9 hours after exposure; subsequent gastrointestinal symptoms followed. This report also summarized 16 cases of aerosolized SEB occurring in 1963 and 1964 which included reference 1. Exposure to the usual inoculum of staphylococcal enterotoxin (there are at least 15 antigenically distinct toxins) by the usual route (enteric) produces a short incubation, self-limited (usually < 24 hours) primarily afebrile illness with vomiting. Most of the laboratory exposures initially presented with respiratory symptoms and high fever, the latter being quite uncommon with natural enterotoxin exposures. If SEB was contaminating the money and a respiratory influenza-like illness followed, it would have to be concluded that aerosolization of toxin occurred by some mechanism. The flu-like illness reported in the posting could represent "stomach "flu," which is not influenza at all, and could be due to inadvertent ingestion of a significant amount of toxin.
• Rickettsia prowazekii
• viral encephalitis
• Alphaviruses
• Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEEV)
• Eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV)
• Western equine encephalitis virus (WEEV)
• water safety threats
• Vibrio cholerae
• Cryptosporidium parvum
• Rift valley fever virus
• category C
• ease availability
• ease of production and dissemination
• potential for high morbidity and mortality rates and major health impact.
• emerging infectious disease threats
• Nipah virus
• Hantavirus
• WNV
• JEV
• historical weapons
• at the end of 1700 British sent prostitutes infected with Treponema pallidum subsp. pallidum among Maori native in New Zealand
Prevention :
• in March 2004, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) created the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), meant to be the centerpiece of a new national system to prevent bioterrorists from seeing research they could transform into bioweapons. But since then, the board has never met, its members have not been chosen, and its professional staff is not yet in place. As of earlier this month, the news page of its Web site had not been updated since June 22. A committee of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) proposed the board as a self-policing body of scientists necessary to preempt the federal government from taking more drastic measures, such as classifying some research as secret and outlawing its publication.
• collective protection units (COLPRO)
• individual protective equipment (IPE)
• Integrated Biological Detection System (IBDS)
• Ruggedized Advanced Pathogen Identification Device (RAPID) is a man-portable commercial off the shelf (COTS) system
• Double Wheel Sampling System (DWSS) integrated into the NBC Reconnaissance system (RS) FOX
• Biotrace Biological Detection System (BBDS)
Evidence for animals as sentinels of bioterrorism agents :

agent/disease		animals provide early warning of acute bioterrorism attack because an animal species had increased susceptibility to a particular agent, because the disease caused by the agent had a shorter incubation period, or because animals were exposed sooner (or at more intense and continuous levels) than the human populationref	Animals could be markers for ongoing exposure risk if a released biological agent persists in the environment (such as soil, water, or air). Aside from case detection, active surveillance with surveys of animals may be useful; this surveillance may require testing wildlife as well. Such testing could involve antibody seroprevalence or use of polymerase chain reaction techniques to detect antigen. Evidence about the usefulness of such an approach was inconsistent.	Animals can propagate/maintain epidemic
Category A	Bacillus anthracis	Yes: sheep, cattle (level 3 evidenceref) No: dogs and pigs (level 1 evidenceref) whether animals would have a shorter incubation period in the event of an aerosol release was not clear, since the incubation period in the 2001 mail attacks was <4 days, while during the 1979 release of B. anthracis from a Soviet military laboratory, human symptoms began in 2 days, with death in as few as 6 days. At the same time, while human cases in Sverdlovsk were concentrated along the path of the prevailing wind <4 km from the laboratory, livestock, including sheep and cows, began dying 3 days after the release in 6 villages located along the path of the aerosol at a distance <50 km downwind from the facility. No human cases were reported in these villages. Calculations of the airborne B. anthracis dosage at a town where several sheep and a cow died indicate that the animals were exposed to a dose more than an order of magnitude lower than humans received near the weapons facility. This finding suggests that sheep and cows are more susceptible than humans, although they could have also remained outside in the path of the aerosol for a longer period, which led to greater exposure	Yes: sheep, cattle (level 3 evidenceref1, ref2).  Although dogs and cats are less susceptible to B. anthracis than ruminants, their proximity to humans and their contact with soil could make them sentinels; for example, anthrax developed in a Labrador retriever after the dog hunted in a freshly plowed fieldref	-
	Yersinia pestis	Yes: cats (level 1 evidenceref) : evidence from experimental inhalation studies indicates that the usual incubation period for symptoms of plague to develop after an inhalation exposure may be shorter (1–2 days) than the presumed incubation time for humans (1–6 days), which provides evidence that symptoms develop in cats at the same time as in humans, and thus may have some sentinel value	Yes: dogs, cats (level 1 evidenceref), multiple species (level 2 evidenceref)	Yes: cats, camels, goats (level 3 evidenceref1, ref2)
	Francisella tularensis	No (level 3 evidenceref) : during a prolonged outbreak of pneumonic tularemia in Scandinavia, for example, febrile illness developed in a number of horses, a cow, and a pig, but apparently not before the onset of disease in humans living nearby	Yes: rodents (level 2 evidenceref) No: horses, cows (level 2 evidenceref) During an epidemic of pneumonic tularemia, attributable to contaminated hay, F. tularensis can persist in the environment; a serosurvey of asymptomatic livestock (horses and cows) did not show evidence of exposureref. By contrast, in a more recent tularemia outbreak, serosurveys in the wildlife population did show antibodies in a skunk and a rat that lived near persons who had become infected after mowing fieldsref	Yes: ticks, rodents, prairie dogs (level 2 evidenceref)
	Clostridium botulinum	No (level 3 evidenceref)	No (level 3 evidenceref)	No (level 3 evidenceref)
	Filovirus (Ebola virus, Marburg virus)	Studies in Africa have demonstrated that Ebola virus outbreaks can be preceded by deaths in primates as well as in other animal species such as duikers (type of antelope)ref, but whether a generalized attack that used Ebola virus in the USA would affect certain animal species first is unknown.	-	Yes: wildlife (level 3 evidenceref). The results of animal surveillance for Ebola virus in Africa found that ongoing outbreaks in both primates and duikers suggest that the virus may be able to propagate in a wildlife population, however, this characteristic has not been demonstrated in US wildlife species.
Category B	Coxiella burnetii	No: sheep (level 1 evidenceref) :  infection in animals is either asymptomatic or develops so slowly that recognizable human cases seem certain to precede animal cases if the agents are released as an aerosol.	Yes:  wild hogs, goats (level 2 evidenceref1, ref2)	Yes: cats, sheep, goat, cattle (level 3 evidenceref)
	Brucella spp.	No (level 3 evidenceref) :  infection in animals is either asymptomatic or develops so slowly that recognizable human cases seem certain to precede animal cases if the agents are released as an aerosol.	Yes: cattle (level 2ref)	Yes: wildlife, cattle, dogs (level 3 evidence (Radostits OMG, Gay CC, Blood DC, Hinchcliff KW, editors. Veterinary medicine: a textbook of the diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, goats and horses. 9th ed. London: Harcourt Publishers Ltd; 2000))
	Foodborne illness: Salmonella spp.; Shigella spp.; Cryptosporidium parvum, etc.	Yes: cattle (level 3 evidenceref). animals would likely not manifest illness before humans if an attack were directed at humans, since in a typical attack scenario, food would be infected during the distribution pathway before consumption by humans and not necessarily allow for animal consumption before this. However, if the attack on the food supply were directed at the animals themselves, they could potentially manifest symptoms before humans who would consume the meat, eggs, or dairy products. Attacks on water supplies with agents such as Clostridium botulinum could put humans at risk as well, although dilution and water treatment would reduce the riskref. An exception may be Cryptosporidium spp., which have caused widespread outbreaks through the water supply. Waterfowl die-offs from type C and type E botulism have been well documented, although these types are not well recognized as causes of clinical C. botulinum poisoning in humans, but the fact that primates are susceptible to type C makes C. botulinum poisoning a possibility. On the whole, however, an attack on human populations with C. botulinum would probably not be first detected in animals; the illness would have such a short incubation period in humans that they would become symptomatic at the same time as or before the animals	-	-
	Burkholderia mallei	–	Yes: horses (level  2 evidenceref)	Yes: horses (level 3 evidence (Greene CE. Infectious diseases of the dog and cat. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders; 1998))
	Alphaviruses (Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEEV), Eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV), Western equine encephalitis virus (WEEV))	Yes: horses (level 3 evidence (Greene CE. Infectious diseases of the dog and cat. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders; 1998)) : natural outbreaks have often appeared in animal populations before they affected humans, for example, EEEV often appears in equines 2 weeks before humans become symptomatic. Whether the same pattern would hold true during an attack with an aerosol is not clear.	Yes: birds (level 1 evidenceref)	Yes: wild birds (level 2 evidenceref). Agents such as alphaviruses that are prevalent in wild bird populations can spread over a wide area in a short time
	Rift valley fever virus	Yes: cattle, sheep (level 3 evidence (Radostits OMG, Gay CC, Blood DC, Hinchcliff KW, editors. Veterinary medicine: a textbook of the diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, goats and horses. 9th ed. London: Harcourt Publishers Ltd; 2000)) : 12-hour incubation period compared to the incubation period of several days in humans	Yes: sheep (level 1 evidenceref)	Yes: mosquitoes, rodents (level 1 evidenceref). Studies of mosquitoes native to the USA have demonstrated their potential to spread a disease such as Rift Valley fever through livestock and other animal populations, even though person-to-person transmission does not occur
	ricin	-	-	-
	e toxin of Clostridium perfringens	-	-	-
Category C (emerging diseases)	Nipah virus	-	Yes: multiple species (level 3 evidence (Bunning M. Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia, 1998–1999. Journal of Swine Health Products. 2001;9:295–9))	Yes: pigs (level 1 evidenceref)
	Hantavirus	No (level 2 evidenceref) :  infection in animals is either asymptomatic or develops so slowly that recognizable human cases seem certain to precede animal cases if the agents are released as an aerosol.	Yes: multiple species (level 2 evidenceref)	Yes: rodents (level 2 evidenceref [33])
	Flavivirus (WNV, JEV)	Yes: wild birds (level 3 evidenceref)	Yes: mosquitoes, birds (level 2 evidenceref)	Yes: birds (level 1 evidenceref). WNV can easily spread from animal to animal in bird populations

Level 1 evidence, experimental or cohort study or randomized clinical trial; level 2 evidence, case-control or cross-sectional study; level 3 evidence, case reports or case series, expert opinion; .–, insufficient evidence found
Web resources :
• Bioterrorism at CDC
• Biological diseases/agents listing at CDC
• American Society for Microbiology Biodefense Meeting
• Bioterrorism information from MEDLINEplus, NLM
• Biological warfare information at SIS, NLM
• Canary Database : animals as sentinels of human environmental health hazards by Yale University School of Medicine
• Center for the Study of Bioterrorism & Emerging Infections at Saint Louis University School of Public Health
• Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University
• Guidelines on Bioterrorism by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, National Guideline Clearinghouse
• Biological weapons (bioweapons) by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
• Biological warfare agents at eMedicine
• NIAID
• Biodefense Research
• Counter-bioterrorism research agenda
• JAMA bioterrorism article collection
• ASM Information on Biological Agents
• using animals as réservoirs of weaponized germ agents :
• migratory birds as carriers for Leptospira interrogans and West Nile virus (WNV)
• chemical weapons (CW)

Timelines :
• the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which bans the development, production, and stockpiling of CW, as well as CW research for offensive purposes, was signed in 1972
Agents :
• blister / vesicants
• distilled mustard (HD)
• arsenic (As)-based vesicants :
• lewisite (L) / chlorovinyldichloroarsine [named for W. Lee Lewis, American chemist, 1879–1943] : a lethal war gas; it is a vesicant, lacrimator, and lung irritant
• methyldichloroarsine (MD) : a lethal and vesicating war gas.
• ethyldichloroarsine (ED)
• phenodichloroarsine (PD)
• mustard gas (H) / dichlorodiethyl sulfide (HD) / sulfur mustard / vesicating gas / yellow cross / yperite : a vesicant gas once employed in war. It has a smell of sulfur, or burning garlic, onions or horseradish. However, acclimation to the odor causes the sensation to be rapidly lost. Mustard gas may not cause detrimental effects for 2 to 48 hours. It produces erythema, blistering and subsequent sloughing of the skin with involvement of the eyes (conjunctivitis) and respiratory tract. Death results from bronchopneumonia. Mercaptoethanol, as anyone who has ever mixed up a batch of RPMI complete cell culture media will attest, has a strong garlicky odor. On the contrary the odor of methyl mercaptan is more of rotten eggs than of garlic.
• phosgene oxime (CX) has a pepperish or pungent odor
• Lewisite 1 (L-1) has an odor like penetrating geranium
• Lewisite 1 (L-2)
• Lewisite 1 (L-3)
• mustard/Lewisite (HL)
• mustard/T
• nitrogen mustard (HN-1)
• nitrogen mustard (HN-2) : general term for a group of cytotoxic alkylating agents having the general formula R—N(CH₂CH₂Cl₂; they are homologous with the vesicant war gas dichloroethyl sulfide (mustard gas). Those used as antineoplastic and immunosuppressive agents include chlorambucil, cyclophosphamide, ifosfamide, mechlorethamine (nitrogen mustard), melphalan, and uracil mustard.
• nitrogen mustard (HN-3)
• sesqui mustard
Biological effects : mustard has an asymptomatic latent period. Lewisite has immediate burning pain, blisters later. Specific antidote British Anti-Lewisite (BAL) may decrease systemic effects of Lewisite. Phosgene oximes cause immediate pain. Possible pulmonary edema
• short-term effects :
• blisters, erythema and burns
• chemical pneumonitis
• pancytopenia
• infections
• long-term effects are dose- and route-dependent :
• cancers
• congenital malformations
• infertility
• chronic obstructive lung diseases
• blindness
Therapy :
• no antidote or treatment exists
• burn care
• eye therapy : instant removal of agent is required to prevent damage. Initially irrigate with copious amounts of water; at treatment medical, facility use saline eyewash for 10-15 minutes
• if breathing difficulty, five oxygen (pulmonary support)
• decontamination completed within 2' to prevent tissue damage :
• remove contaminated clothing immediately
• gently wash skin with soap and water
• do not abrade skin
• hydrolyse mustards using
• bleach (0.5% hypochlorite solution)
• alkali (avoiding eye penetration)
• baking soda
• Fuller's earth powder over exposed areas, left for 1' and removed gently with clean gauze or cotton
• water and regular soap
Mustard gas has low volatility and thus may persist for many years in acid soils and solid surfaces and in contribution to water table unless hydrolysed in alkaline soils or in soils treated with bleach.
• blood agents
• arsine (SA) (AsH₃)
• cyanogen chloride (CK) : a gas, ClCN, used for fumigating houses, ships, etc. It is as lethal for rats and other vermin as hydrocyanic acid, but less dangerous to man, as it also causes lacrimation, which makes it useful as a warning gas in fumigants.
• hydrogen chloride HCl
• hydrogen cyanide HCN (AC)
• choking, lung or pulmonary damaging agents / asphyxiant or suffocating gas : any of several war gases, e.g., phosgene, that causes intense irritation of the bronchial tubes and lungs, resulting in pulmonary edema
• chlorine (CL) : the London-based Christian human rights group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) says it has collected strong evidence of a chemical attack on Karen rebels by Myanmar's military government, which denied the allegation on Friday. CWS said it had examined 5 rebels who detailed the attack on 15 Feb 2005 and who suffered blisters, throat, eye and lung irritations and vomiting. CSW international president Dr Martin Panter told Reuters a Thai doctor had examined the rebels 5 days after the attack and reported the men were extremely sick, they were not able to eat, their skin had a yellow color to it and severe irritation. The attack occurred at the Karen border post Nya My, 10 km (6 miles) west of the Thai hill town of Mae Hong Son, during prolonged heavy artillery shelling which started on 14 Jan 2005. On the morning of 15 Feb, a shell exploded near the post, giving off pungent yellow smoke, unlike the usual black and white smoke from artillery shells (chlorine gas is usually described as having a yellowish-green cast). When the shell exploded immediately a thick yellow vapour, like a cloud, emanated from it. They said immediately on inhaling some of this yellow vapour they felt sick, their eyes burned, their throat burned. They found it very difficult to breathe, they became very short of breath. A Thai military intelligence officer confirmed shelling had taken place in the area on 15 Feb 2005, but said he did not know if chemical weapons had been used. They've collected evidence around the area for lab tests, but they haven't got any results yet. The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), most of whose soldiers are Christian, has waged a 56-year war -- Asia's longest insurgency -- against the military junta in the former Burma, demanding autonomy for an ethnic Karen state.  They struck a loose deal in January 2004 to end hostilities, but skirmishes continue. The Myanmar army was accused of using chemical weapons in the 1990s, but there has never been any proof. Myanmar Information Minister Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan said government troops were not even involved in the 15 Feb 2005 fighting, which he said involved rival militias : he tolds these 2 groups are only using conventional weapons and Myanmar does not have the technology to produce chemical weapons. KNLA commander-in-chief Mutu Saepoe told Reuters in an exclusive interview 2 weeks after the alleged incident that there had been skirmishes between the army and his men in the area.  However, when asked to describe the nature of the fighting, he made no mention of chemical weapons. Panter said the rebels had never witnessed anything like the yellow vapour before. These are not rookie soldiers. They are experienced, hardened soldiers, most of them having fought with the Karenni resistance for between 15 and 25 years. 2 of the men started vomiting blood within 30 minutes, and within a few hours none of them could stand up. All were carried on stretchers to the Thai hill town of Mae Hong Son, and then taken to the northern (Thai) city of Chiang Mai for treatment but sent back to Myanmar sick and barely able to walk. When he examined the rebels they were still very weak and were suffering the affects of what he believes was an attack with a chemical cocktail. Certainly there was very strong evidence of blistering and severe irritation of the skin. From the conclusion he has made, it was probably a cocktail of chemicals, containing a blister agent similar to mustard gas, probably a nerve agent similar to sarin gas and also a pulmonary agent affecting the lungs. CSW is a human rights organisation specialising in religious freedom. It began in 1979 as the British branch of the Swiss-based organisation, Christian Solidarity International. Since independence from Britain in 1948, Myanmar has been convulsed by a series of ethnic guerrilla conflicts with the ruling ethnic Burman majority. The Karen number around 1.5 million inside Myanmar, according to rebels. This report is of the alleged effect of a single shell, after 4 weeks of heavy shelling. No results of laboratory tests on the alleged victims' lesions are given. It has been suggested that the shell could have contained trichothecene mycotoxins (poisons produced by fungal molds on wheat), which were allegedly used in Vietnam & Laos in the 1981 "yellow rain" attacks^ref but on analysis the substance turned out to be bee feces. CSW has been alleging chemical or toxin attacks on rebels by the governments of Burma & Sudan since at least 1981, but none of their allegations has ever been conclusively proved.
• diphosgene (DP) :  a gas which is intensely irritating to the lungs, producing pulmonary edema.
• cyanide
• cyanogen chloride may cause frostbite from contact with liquid form
• nitrogen monoxide (NO)
• perflurorisobutylene (PHIB)
• phosgene (CG) : carbonic dichloride, CCl₂O; a highly toxic, colorless gas that causes rapidly fatal pulmonary edema or pneumonia on inhalation, and frostbite from skin contact with liquid phosgene; used in the synthesis of a number of organic compounds and formerly used as a war gas. It smells like newly mown hay or grass
• red phosphorous (RP) / amorphous phosphorous : a dark red amorphous powder, which is infusible and insoluble in carbon disulfide, and is not poisonous
• sulfur trioxide-chlorosulfonic acid (FS)
• Teflon and perflurorisobutylene (PHIB)
• titanium tetrachloride (FM)
• zinc oxide (HC)
They may cause delayed pulmonary edema, even following a symptom-free period that varies in duration with the amount inhaled
Therapy :
• remove clothing imedately if no frostbite
• gently wash skin with soap and water : do not abrade skin
• for eyes, flush with plenty of water or nosmal saline
• fresh air, forced rest
• semi-upright position
• if signs of respiratory distress are present, oxygen with or without positive airway pressure may be needed
• other supportive therapy, as needed
• incapacitating agents
• Agent 15/BZ may appear as mass drug intoxication with erratic behaviors, shared realistic and distinct hallucinations, disrobing and confusion, hyperthermia, mydriasis (dilated pupils); dry mouth and skin, initial tachycardia, altered consciousness, delusions, denial of ilness, belligerance, ataxia
• BZ
• cannabinoids
• fentanyls : on October 23, 2002 Russian army forces ended the 700 people hostage standoff in a Moscow theatre with an estimate 40-50 hostage-takers Chechen gunmen demanding an end to the war in Chechnya. Volatile substances were used to subdue terrorists and their prisoners, causing 117 deaths. Following massive foreign pressure, Russian authorities provided information indicating that the aerosolised form of the narcotic fentanyl had been used in the ambush. Over the subsequent days and weeks, numerous theories were proposed in connection with the feasibility of the Russian explanation. The most widely acknowledged notion was that a mixture of anaesthetic gases, including fentanyl and halothane, had incapacitated terrorists. Prompted by patients' insecurity about the safety of these commonly used drugs, it is amazing the readiness with which this official theory was taken for granted by a wide (medical) public, neglecting most basic pharmacokinetic assumptions. Furthermore, it is dismaying that no practising anaesthesiologists seem to have openly contradicted this belief. The minimum alveolar concentration (MAC) of halothane able to block the response to surgical stimuli in 50% of patients undergoing surgery is 0·75%. In view of this parameter, and assuming a size of 12x50x100 m of the main theatre hall, it would be necessary to pump some 450 m³ of halothane into the building to achieve target unresponsiveness within less than a minute. Taking into account the allegation that authorities massively overdosed these substances, the theoretical volume employed by Russian special forces would have been even higher. Halothane, as anaesthesiologists are aware, has a distinctive sweet and ether-like odour, and in the time taken for hundreds of m³ to have been pumped into the theatre premises and evenly distributed, terrorists inside the building would have undoubtedly been alerted sufficiently. Moreover, pharmacokinetic properties of free and liposome-encapsulated aerosolised forms of fentanyl have equally been investigated, and a mixture of both was found to have a time to peak absorption of approximately 22 min. This effect was, however, only achieved after direct inhalation from a nebuliser mask. It is doubtful that the concentrations needed to incapacitate terrorists would have been achieved rapidly enough to prevent countermeasures or bloodshed among the hostages. Hence the anaesthetic drugs conjectured in the raid on the Moscow theatre would be highly insufficient to cause rapid incapacity, and that this is by far the weakest of theories in connection with the mysterious gas used by Russian special forces ^ref.
• lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)
• phenothiazines
• laughing gas / nitrous oxide
Therapy : hyperthermia and self-injury are largest risks. Hard to detect because it is an odorless and non-irritating substance. Possible serious arrhythmias. Specific antidote (physostigmine) may be available
• remove heavy clothing immediately
• gently wash skin with water or soap and water
• do not abrade skin
• evaluate mental status
• use restraints as needed
• monitor core temperature carefully
• supportive care
• nerve gases
• G series
• sarin was used in June 1994 in a Japanese city (causing 7 deaths and 200 injured) and in March 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo group (led by Shoko Asahara) in the Tokyo subway (causing 13 deaths and several hundreds injured)
• multiple chemical agents - including mustard gas, and the nerve agents sarin, tabun (impure form released cyanide, too), and Vx were used by Iraqi Army between the night of March 16th and 19th, 1988, when 14 45-minutes-long aircraft sorties, with 7-8 planes in each group, dropped chemical bombs over Halabja, a small town on Iraq's northeastern border with Iran, killing up to 5,000 civilians, mostly women and children of Kurdish minority, which had sympathised with Iran during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Previous smaller attacks had been launched by Iraqi aircraft against 20 small villages in 1987.
• V series.
Biological effects : AChE inhibitors
• muscarinic effects
• miosis, ophthalgia, diplopia
• headache
• rhinorrhoea
• tightness in chest, bronchoconstriction, cough
• nausea and vomiting
• increased sweating, salivation and tears
• bradycardia
• pollachyuria and involuntary micturition
• nicotinic effects
• striated muscle
• hyposthenia
• twitching
• flaccid paralysis of muscles (including respiratory system => respiratory failure => death)
• sympathetic ganglia : systemic arterial hypertension => hypotension and hypothermia
• CNS :
• immediate, acute effects
• depression of respiratory and circulatory centres
• hypotension
• convulsions
• loss of consciousness => coma
• delayed and chronic effects
• giddiness
• anxiety
• jitteriness
• restlessness
• emotional lability
• excessive dreaming
• insomnia
• nightmares
• headache
• tremor
• withdrawal
• depression
• bursts of slow
• waves of elevated voltage on EEG
• drowsiness
• difficulty concentrating
• slowness of recall
• confusion
• slurred speech
• ataxia
About a week later, survivors go on to develop a second wave of symptoms: the result of the chemical destroying nerves, causing severe and irreversible paralysis. Onset of symptoms from dermal contact with liquid forms may be delayed
Animal models :
• chickens (which succumb to pesticide poisoning easily)
• mice defective in neuropathy target esterase (Nte) (ortholog to human NTE; inhibition either kills the mice before birth, or leads to a range of behaviors very similar to ADHD)
Chemoprevention
Therapy
• remove clothing immediately
• gently wash skin with soap and water : do not abrade skin
• for eyes, fush with plenty of water or normal saline
• atropine and pralidoxime (2-PAM) chloride before other measures

 

patient age	antidotes		other treatment
	mild/moderate effects (localized sweating, muscle fasciculations, nausea, vomiting, weakness, dyspnea)	severe effects (unconsciousness, convulsions, apnea, flaccid paralysis)
infants (0-2 years)	atropine : 0.05 mg/kg IM, or 0.02 mg/kg IV; and 2-PAM chloride: 15 mg/kg IM or IV slowly	atropine : 0.1 mg/kg IM, or 0.02 mg/kg IV; and 2-PAM chloride : 25 mg/kg IM, or 15 mg/kg IV slowly	assisted ventilation after antidotes for severe exposure repeat atropine (2 mg IM, or 1 mg IM for infants) at 5- to 10-min intervals until secretions have diminished and breathing is comfortable or airway resistance has returned to near normal phentolamide for 2-PAM-induced hypertension (5 mg IV for adults; 1 mg IV for children) diazepam for convulsions : (0.2-0.5 mg IV for infants < 5 years; 1 mg IV for children > 5 years; 5 mg IV for adults
child (2-10 years)	atropine : 1 mg IM, or 0.02 mg/kg IV; and 2-PAM chloride (if calculated dose exceed adult IM dose, adjust accordingly) : 15 mg/kg IM or IV slowly	atropine : 2 mg IM, or 0.02 mg/kg IV; and 2-PAM chloride (if calculated dose exceed adult IM dose, adjust accordingly) : 25 mg/kg IM, or 15 mg/kg IV slowly
adolescent (> 10 years)	atropine : 2 mg IM, or 0.02 mg/kg IV; and 2-PAM chloride (if calculated dose exceed adult IM dose, adjust accordingly) : 15 mg/kg IM or IV slowly	atropine : 4 mg IM, or 0.02 mg/kg IV; and 2-PAM chloride (if calculated dose exceed adult IM dose, adjust accordingly) : 25 mg/kg IM, or 15 mg/kg IV slowly
adult	atropine : 2-4 mg IM or IV; and 2-PAM chloride : 600 mg IM or 15 mg/kg IV slowly	atropine : 6 mg IM, or 0.02 mg/kg IV; and 2-PAM chloride : 1800 mg IM, or 15 mg/kg IV slowly
elderly, frail	atropine : 1 mg IM; and 2-PAM chloride : 10 mg/kg IM or 5-10 mg/kg IV slowly	atropine : 2-4 mg IM; and 2-PAM chloride : 25 mg/kg IM, or 5-10 mg/kg IV slowly

• repeated antidote administration may be necessary
• riot control/tear gas : a gas that produces severe lacrimation by irritating the conjunctivae
• bromobenzylcyanide (CA)
• chloroacetophenone (CN) : a commonly used tear gas
• chloropicrin (PS)
• CNB - (CN in benzene and carbon tetrachloride)
• CNC - (CN in chloroform)
• CNS - (CN and chloropicrin in chloroform)
• CR
• CS
• cyanogen bromide : a highly toxic lacrimatory war gas, BrCN
• chloroacetophenone
• o-chlorobenzylidenemalonitrile
• vomiting
• adamsite (DM) / diphenylamine chlorarsine / phenarsazine chloride : a toxic compound used as a gas in war and, as a compound with tear gas, in riot control; also used in some wood preserving solutions. It irritates the skin and respiratory tract and also causes nausea, vomiting, depression, and weakness
• arsenic (As)-based :
• diphenylchloroarsine (DA) / sneezing gas : (C₆H₅)₂AsCl, a toxic war gas that causes sneezing, coughing, headache, salivation, and vomiting
• diphenylcyanoarsine (DC). Prominent cerebellar symptoms in apartment building residents in Kamisu, Japan. The well that provided drinking water contained diphenylarsinic acid, a degradation product of diphenylcyanoarsine or diphenylchloroarsine, which were developed for use as chemical weapons, inducing severe vomiting and sneezing. Characteristics of diphenylarsinic acid poisoning include brainstem-cerebellar and cerebral symptoms. Mental retardation associated with brain atrophy inMRI was evident in some infants^ref.
• trichlorotrivinylarsine : a sternutatory war gas.
Devices :
• Chemical Agent Monitor (CAM™)
• GID-2A Fixed Chemical Agent Detector
• GID-3
• Joint Chemical Agent Detector (JCAD)
• powered air-purifying respirators (PAPR) with corrective eyeglasses and/or drinking facility
• Transportable Unhardened Collective Protection System (UCPS) provides a Toxic Free Area (TFA) for rest and relief from an NBC environment.
• all known portable chemical detection technologies that work for trace vapor concentrations outside the laboratory have problems with false alarms, which can cause evacuation of a facility, unnecessary use of chemical protective gear and eventually complacency to electronic detections that are actually true. The Multi-Sensor Analyzer/Detector (MSAD) combines a flame photometer, an ion mobility spectrometer and a surface acoustic wave array to simultaneously and continuously sample air in its environment for chemical weapon vapors : each of these sensors is capable of detecting chemical vapors at non-lethal exposure levels. However, each sensor has vulnerabilities to false detections from common chemical vapors such as diesel exhaust and cleaning products. The ARL software is a continuous inference network (CINET). It operates like the reasoning process a weapons inspector would go through when trying to make a danger determination based on the data from the chemical vapor detectors. For example, when the detectors sense a vapor, the CINET performs this reasoning process: if this is mustard gas, what is the range of data values one should see in the flame photometer, the ion mobility spectrometer and the surface acoustic wave array? The CINET will reject false alarms by an individual detector when the other detectors do not corroborate the data or if the data from all of the detectors falls outside the ranges for chemical weapons. Through a cooperative research and development agreement between Penn State and the U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center, ARL researchers developed a database of responses for all 3 sensors over a wide range of weapons chemical concentrations and interferants. Interferants are chemicals, such as cleaning supplies, that could be misinterpreted as dangerous by a detector. All testing and analysis on toxic materials is performed at Edgewood. Over a broad range of vapor concentrations, it virtually eliminates false alarms in the 41 test trails conducted so far in which 1 or more of the 3 individual chemical detectors was in error. The ARL software architecture allows the device to be operated from a secure location, remote from the area under surveillance, or as part of a mobile unit. Data also can be transmitted over secure computer networks and displayed as websites. Kuchera Defense Systems of Windber, Pa., supported the research effort and has built a prototype for testing by the Marine Corps System Command. The company will manufacture the MSAD units. The CINET was originally developed at ARL by James Stover for use in an autopilot for underwater vehicles.
Web resources :
• Chemical diseases/agents listing at CDC
• Chemical weapons demilitarization at CDC
• nuclear weapons 
• radiation hygiene : the science of practices involved in human protection from radiation injury.
• a landmark lawsuit by French atomic bomb test veterans filed November 2003, pitting scientific questions about radiation's dangers against an ever-mounting roster of morbidity and mortality alleges "collective negligence," involuntary homicide, and more on behalf of the veterans of 210 French atomic tests in the Sahara and French Polynesia between 1960 and 1996. Former Minister of Defense Pierre Messmer said the government committed such "imprudences" that he urged then president Charles de Gaulle to abolish the French Atomic Energy Commission^ref
• nuclear explosions aboard the Russian submarine Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea in 2000.
• natural nuclear reactors were discovered in the Oklo region of Gabon in 1972. Uranium in lens-shaped veins of uranium ore had undergone self-sustaining fission chain reactions, generating intense heat. In this process, subatomic neutrons released by radioactive decay of uranium atoms induce decay of other uranium atoms, leading to a cascade of nuclear fission and substantial release of energy as heat. This is what modern nuclear reactors use to produce power. The puzzle, however, is why the Oklo reactors didn't plunge straight into a runaway chain reaction, leading to meltdown of the veins or even to an explosion. In nuclear plants the reaction is kept under control by using 'moderators'. These are substances that either slow down the chain reaction by absorbing some of the fission neutrons or encourage it by adjusting the neutron energies. The Oklo reactors switched on and off cyclically : active periods of about 30 minutes seem to have been followed by dormant spells of around 2.5 hours related to the presence of water in the rocks. This 100-kW nuclear plant produced pulses of power for a period of about 150,000 years. When a uranium nucleus undergoes nuclear fission, the ejected neutrons are travelling too fast to be absorbed by other nuclei and trigger fission, so there is no chain reaction. But water slows the neutrons down. In the Oklo reactors, water allowed the chain reaction to be sustained. As the reaction proceeded, however, it generated heat, which would have boiled away all the water. The reactors dried up and shut down. Only after they cooled and their water was replenished by groundwater flowing into the uranium veins could the process start up again. No xenon (a radioactive decay product of uranium fission) is found in the uranium minerals themselves, but the largest concentrations of xenon ever found in nature are found in grains of aluminium phosphate dispersed throughout the reactor rocks. Xenon is a gas, and so it might be expected to escape from the hot mineral veins as soon as it was produced. But if the reactors cooled down periodically, this would have allowed the xenon to get locked inside phosphate grains. The researchers used their measurements to calculate how long these periods of heating and cooling must have been. Radioactive xenon and the related gas krypton are both generated in modern nuclear reactors, but are simply released into the atmosphere. There is no good way of capturing them. But in the Oklo reactors they seem to have been trapped inside atomic-scale holes in the phosphate crystal structure. Maybe this can give us a clue how to capture these gases in nuclear plants^ref
• the $6.1-billion ITER experimental nuclear-fusion reactor will try to prove the principle of creating fusion energy by heating plasma constrained by a magnetic field. But a deadlock among the project's 6 partners over the choice of host has stalled it for > 1 year. China and Russia are backing the European Union's Cadarache site in France, whereas the United States and Korea support Japan's rival site at Rokkasho. The latest international meeting, held on 9 Nov 2004 in Vienna, ended yet again without decision. On 26 November, the EU Competitiveness Council mandated the European Commission, the union's executive arm, to start ITER with fewer international partners if no deal could be reached with Japan. It also stated that the commission should complete the legal agreements needed to build ITER by June 2005, meaning that it would need to close any deal by the end of the year. An 18-month deadlocked contest between Japan and Europe over who gets to play host to a US$5.5-billion experimental fusion reactor has finally come to an end. After much political back-and-forth, rumours and anticipation, the winner is France. On Tuesday 28 June 2005, Japan bowed aside at a meeting of the six international partners in Moscow. Cadarache, in southern France, will be the site of ITER. In return, Japan was promised a host of benefits, including contract work, a significant leadership role, and support for hosting the next fusion project. Today's nuclear power comes from fission, a process by which heavy, radioactive elements such as uranium break apart and convert some of their mass into energy. But researchers anticipate that a much better source of energy would be the reverse process: fusion. This occurs when very light elements combine, such as hydrogen fusing to make helium. Unlike fission plants, a fusion reactor would not be vulnerable to meltdowns and its fuel could not be turned into nuclear bombs. Perhaps the biggest attraction of fusion is that the waste from a plant would only be radioactive for about a hundred years, rather than for hundreds of thousands of years. However, it takes intense conditions to fuse elements as they do in the centre of the Sun. Despite more than 50 years of research, scientists have not yet been able to make a fusion reactor here on Earth that produces more energy than they put in. But that's the goal of the long-planned ITER project. ITER aims to heat a mass of gas plasma to 200 million °C, and hold it in mid-air with powerful magnetic fields. This doughnut-shaped mass is expected to produce 400-700 megawatts of heat within the few minutes that it stays stable, which would be more than enough to power a town. If all goes to plan, ITER will generate five to ten times more energy than is put in to it. Once that principle is proven, researchers hope to take the next step and build a prototype fusion reactor called DEMO. This would convert the heat produced by fusion into useful electricity. Russia, the United States, Europe and Japan agreed on the importance of building ITER in the late 1980s. But it has taken decades to convince all the parties involved that it was possible and affordable. For the past year and a half the argument has been over who would get to host it. The project carries much prestige, along with billions of dollars in construction, work for physicists and other contracts. After much negotiation, it has finally been decided that France will take the site. As part of this deal, the European Union will pay half of ITER's construction costs. The other partners will pay 10% each, mostly in the form of equipment and components. Japan will be given contracts to produce 20% of the project's components. Europe also agreed to support the nomination of a Japanese director-general for the organization that will be created to run the programme. And Japan will have a larger share of scientists working on the machine that it would be entitled to on the basis of its 10% contribution. Using a large chunk of European funding, Japan will host a facility to work towards the DEMO project, and Europe has promised to support any bid by Japan to host the reactor. The deal must still be ratified by member parliaments, a process that will probably take months. If all goes smoothly, construction should begin later in 2005
• Kyrgyzstan : looming above is a 250-meter-high sandstone ridge rippled with shades of brown, yellow, and ochre. In front, entombed in an artificial hill, are 115,000 m³ of slurry chock-full of radioactive metals--enough to fill a football stadium. The noxious cocktail includes isotopes of thorium, copper, arsenic, selenium, lead, nickel, zinc, radium, and uranium. There's more than 10,000 microroentgens per hour of radioactivity under--roughly 1000 times the local background rate. All that protects the surrounding region from the tailings in this impoundment (called T-3), a leftover of Soviet-era uranium mining, is a meter-thick layer of clay. Experts have identified T-3 as a far-reaching threat: in the scariest scenario, the ridge could dissolve in a landslide, sweeping the tailings into the nearby Mailuu-Suu River. The Mailuu-Suu is a tributary of the Syr Darya River, the main source of irrigation water for the 6 million residents of the densely populated Fergana Valley. The valley, which extends southwest into neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, is a melting pot of peoples and beliefs, including enclaves of Islamic fundamentalists. A radioactive accident here could be traumatic to a region already simmering with tension. Heavy spring rains in recent years have made landslides a more frequent occurrence in mountainous Kyrgyzstan, and in this seismically active region, a tremor capable of unleashing a devastating landslide could strike at any time.  Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are also grappling with the legacy of Soviet uranium mining. Anecdotal reports suggest that some sites in Tajikistan are in an even more precarious state than those in Kyrgyzstan. But Mailuu-Suu, poised like a match near Fergana's tinderbox, is deemed the top priority. After years of handwringing, Kyrgyz authorities are on the verge of doing something. In September 2004, Kyrgyzstan received the first installment of a $6.9 million World Bank loan to deal with the most hazardous uranium sites, starting with T-3. Work could begin as early as summer 2005. When the Soviet Union pushed its atomic bomb program to full throttle after World War II, Mailuu-Suu, nestled in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains, was wiped off maps and became known simply as P.O. Box 200. Specialists arrived here in droves. Officials in faraway Moscow pampered their uranium jocks with high salaries and ample food trucked in even during lean times. But many in Mailuu-Suu and other uranium towns in Cen tral Asia had no idea why they were so well off. Operated by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which ran the bomb program, the uranium facilities were top secret. The first Soviet bomb was made from uranium milled at Mailuu-Suu. Nazi POWs and prisoners from Tatarstan, Ukraine, and elsewhere toiled in shafts laden with radon, a radioactive gas that wafts from the ore. Even the miners' housing was built from uranium-rich stone. (According to Kist, the skeletal remains of workers are radioactive.) Lavrenti Beria, one of Stalin's most feared henchmen and chief of the bomb project, would come to Mailuu-Suu to check on the mines. Today his former quarters, garishly decorated with yellow and blue plastic wall tiles, is part of a hotel. Most people connected with the mines have left or died, but reminders of Mailuu-Suu's past linger. Tidy, two-story stone houses, built by German prisoners for the town's elite, line a street leading to a pair of former uranium mills. One mill was converted to a factory, Isolite, which makes insulation materials and glass wire. The other mill is a heap of rubble. The Soviets abandoned it in the 1960s after radioactive contamination of the machinery had grown intolerable even by the lax standards of the day. Rather than dismantle the site, the Soviets blew it up. These days, locals have been seen scavenging tainted metal from it. If anything, the shadows in Mailuu-Suu are deepening. Its population has dwindled from 36,000 to 23,000, in part due to an exodus after the uranium industry shut down. Local health officials assert that radioactive contamination is killing off many who stayed behind. The cancer rate here is twice that of the rest of the republic. Lung cancer is the biggest killer followed by stomach and digestive tract cancers--although limited financing has resulted in poor record-keeping. In 1958, flooding after a landslide ate into one of the impoundments at Mailuu-Suu (T-7), sweeping an estimated 300,000 m³ of tailings into the river. The tailings are thought to have spread tens of kilometers downstream. The consequences of the accident may never be known: Soviet authorities hushed it up, and records of any follow-up studies have long since disappeared. If T-3 were to disgorge its contents today, the contamination would cause about 600 cancer deaths in the vicinity of Mailuu-Suu over 100 years. In contrast, a 25-year cleanup at 24 U.S. tailings sites has prevented about 1300 deaths combined. Nor is Mailuu-Suu the only worry for Kyrgyzstan. Another 12 hot spots are scattered across the country. After the Soviet breakup in 1991 no maintenance was done on the tailings. The U.S. State Department is funding a $500,000 effort, led by Lawrence Livermore with support from Russia, to deal with the Kadzhi-Say impoundment on the south shore of Lake Issyk-Kul. Kyrgyzstan has staked its development on tourism, and the lake is its biggest asset. But the consensus of international agencies is that Mailuu-Suu poses the biggest risk. Mailuu-Suu is critical because at the end of the road is another country. Exacerbating the situation is that the environment is literally falling to pieces, from about 100 major landslides per year in Kyrgyzstan in the 1970s to > 200 last year. In 2004, 45 people in Kyrgyzstan died as a result of landslides, including 33 in a single disaster last April not far from Mailuu-Suu. The higher frequency of landslides has followed, almost in lockstep, seasonal increases in precipitation. In May 2002, a slide just 1 km upstream from T-3 engulfed several Isolite buildings. Today, an estimated 5 million m³ of soil at the site are at risk of sliding down. Although it wouldn't plow into T-3 directly, such a landslide could lead to a replay of the 1958 incident at T-7, this time disemboweling T-3. A fluke of Cold War political geography makes Mailuu-Suu--and T-3 in particular--more hazardous than other sites. From 1946 to 1967, > 10,000 tons³ of uranium oxide were processed in Mailuu-Suu. Many more tons were shipped here for processing from Saxony, in eastern Germany, and elsewhere in the East Bloc. After some of the uranium was extracted, the leftover slurry was piped into the clay-lined impoundments. Tailings from the imported ore are hotter than those from local deposits, accounting for a substantial fraction of the radioactivity sequestered in T-3. In 2004, thanks to a grant from the European Union, gravel was laid to shore up the base of the 20-meter-deep T-3. Now Kyrgyzstan is about to embark on a broader $16.7 million effort to clean up Mailuu-Suu. An initial $12 million from the World Bank, Japan, the Global Environment Facility, and the Kyrgyz government will allow us to deal with the most dangerous parts of the problem. The first step is to remove soil from the ridge above T-3 that's deemed especially prone to sliding down. With funds in hand, Kyrgyz authorities are now selecting contractors; work could begin as early as summer 21005. T-3's ultimate fate is unclear. Complicating matters, the drainage system that prevented rain and groundwater from saturating the 50-year-old impoundment no longer works. Water percolating into T-3 explains why the tailings, which have the consistency of toothpaste or newly mixed cement, are unusually mushy--and unstable. One option that Kyrgyz authorities are considering is to pump out the tailings from T-3 and store them at a more stable location nearby. Such a procedure has been carried out successfully in the United States. About half of the U.S. impoundments were just picked up and moved somewhere else andsome advocate this solution for T-3, as it would be almost impossible to eliminate a landslide risk. Some experts in Kyrgyzstan also favor this strategy. But there are risks: such an operation could expose workers to increased radiation levels, and if an accident were to occur you could contaminate the whole valley. Also a big issue is where precisely to put the tailings. If you look around the valley, there's an awful lot of instability in the landscape. The other option is to leave the tailings in place and sculpt the ridges to avert a serious landslide threat. Although a massive job, it might be considerably cheaper than hauling out the tailings. Experts in Uzbekistan are pressing for a third option: installing a pipe to divert any floodwaters generated by a landslide upriver around the T-3 impoundment.  It may take up to 2 years to make a decision and bring in new equipment and expertise
• Uzbekistan : the major headache is Charkesar, a fenced-off, decommissioned uranium mine that Aparin and others say may have sickened thousands of local residents. Uranium mining is still a big business there, unlike in Kyrgyzstan. These days, however, companies rely on a sulfuric acid process rather than miners to extract ore
• Tajikistan too was a major uranium producer in Soviet times. Processing took place at three sites: Adrasman, Chkalovsk, and Taboshar. According to a 2004 report from the state mining enterprise Vostokredmet, twice in recent years mudflows have destroyed impoundments at Taboshar. One Western expert who has visited the site describes having seen "mountains of tailings," one 200 meters high, in the open air.
• Pakistan : satellite pictures suggest Pakistan is planning to increase its plutonium production. According to a report from the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based nuclear watchdog, a 1,000-megawatt heavy-water reactor looks to be under construction in Khushab, a relatively empty part of Pakistan. The satellite picture shows the entire construction site: the purported reactor is the large black square in the centre. Such a reactor could produce up to 200 kg of weapons-grade plutonium a year — enough to produce 40 to 50 nuclear weapons. Where do the pictures in the report come from? The pictures were taken by the commercial satellite-image provider Digital Globe, which sells high-resolution pictures and geographical information to anyone who wants it — customers include emergency planners and oil prospectors. These pictures are used by Google Earth, a free piece of software that allows you to zoom in on any part of the planet. If you download Google Earth on to your computer, you can see the new facility here. The circular facility to the northeast of the construction zone is an older, 50-MW heavy-water reactor, which at peak efficiency can produce enough plutonium for 3 to 5 bombs a year. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons, so why the fuss? The country is believed to have only between 25 and 50 nuclear weapons. And most of these bombs are thought to be relatively simple uranium weapons with 'modest' yields around the size of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the new facility is what it seems to be, it would allow Pakistan to build a lot more bombs. The reactor is "gigantic" and would allow Pakistan to increase its total number of weapons tenfold. Why make plutonium? Plutonium can be used to construct smaller and more lightweight weapons than uranium. Most uranium bombs require 15 to 20 kilograms of material, but plutonium weapons can be built with as little as 5 kg. That makes it easier to fit plutonium warheads on missiles. In addition, small plutonium bombs are often used to trigger larger hydrogen weapons. So the technology is an important step towards developing those bombs, which are thousands of times more powerful than uranium and plutonium weapons. Could Pakistan start building more bombs right away? Probably not. The reactor seems to be still under construction and several years from completion. And to make bombs, Pakistan needs to chemically separate the plutonium from spent reactor fuel, which requires a special reprocessing facility. It is not known whether the country has such a facility. Many other countries have plutonium-reprocessing facilities, including Russia, China, India, Israel, North Korea, the USA, UK and Japan. If Pakistan gets a big stockpile then India's going to have to get a big stockpile and the Chinese are going to have to go back and count their pennies. The result could be an accelerating arms race in southern Asia
Uranium is the raw material of both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Found naturally in minerals containing uranium oxide, it typically consists of just 0.7% uranium-235, the isotope required for the release of nuclear energy. When uranium 'burns' in a reactor, it breaks down into other elements in a process called nuclear fission, releasing huge amounts of energy. Uranium enrichment is the process by which natural uranium is made more useful for nuclear purposes. Although some power plants can run on natural uranium, most require it to be enriched. This involves removing uranium-238 to increase the proportion of uranium-235. It is an expensive and difficult process as the 2 are chemically almost identical. Highly enriched uranium, also known as weapons-grade uranium, is what results when this process is taken far beyond the requirements of most nuclear power stations. The majority of domestic power plants require < 5% uranium-235 in the mix. But a bomb needs around 90%. Most uranium bombs require at least 10 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Weapons that involve simply bashing together 2 clumps of uranium typically need around 50 kilograms. For example, the first atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, contained 60 kilograms. More sophisticated 'implosion' weapons are detonated by rapidly squeezing a ball of uranium, and require as little as 10 kilograms. Nuclear waste is what is left over when nuclear power stations have finished with their fuel. One of the components is the element plutonium, which is formed from uranium-238. Separating plutonium from nuclear waste is much cheaper than making weapons-grade uranium, as it is chemically very different from other components of the fuel and therefore easier to separate. A more potent weapon ingredient than even uranium-235, plutonium hardly occurs at all in the natural world: it is a dangerous child of the nuclear age. Plutonium bombs require less radioactive material than uranium bombs. The one that obliterated Nagasaki in August 1945 contained just 6 kilograms of plutonium. The most sophisticated modern-day plutonium bombs need just 2 kilograms. What is more, any mix of plutonium isotopes will work in a bomb. Plutonium-239 is the most explosive, and 'weapons-grade' plutonium contains > 90% of this isotope. But 'reactor-grade' plutonium, which contains fairly high levels of plutonium-240, can still be used to produce bombs with the power of 1,000 tonnes of TNT. Some countries, such as the United States, Britain, France and India, have both nuclear-power and nuclear-weapons programmes. Others, such as Mexico and Taiwan, have nuclear power stations but are excluded from the fuel cycle. Under the terms of nuclear agreements, they receive low-enriched uranium and send back their spent waste; they are not allowed to enrich uranium themselves. Some reactor designs, however, allow nations to get around these safety measures and obtain plutonium. Heavy-water reactors run on natural uranium, meaning that countries can obtain fuel without needing access to enriched uranium from a country permitted to create it. Using such fuel in a reactor will create a plutonium source. And mixed-oxide (MOX) reactors run on a combination of uranium and plutonium oxides. Anyone wishing to make a bomb could simply extract the plutonium from the fuel rather than using it to run their power plant.
Nuclear-monitoring agencies are confident that the world's network of seismic and acoustic monitoring devices will rumble any nation that does try to deploy a nuclear bomb. Seismic instruments can detect underground explosions anywhere in the world, hydrophones can do the same for undersea blasts, and devices that detect ultralow-frequency sound waves can spot airborne detonations. Researchers are also developing a global network of 80 monitoring stations that can detect radioactive material. This will mean that experts will be able to verify a suspected nuclear blast within days by checking for fallout from the area. Underground tests are still legal, unlike air detonations, but they are frowned upon by most of the international community. Such tests will be banned under a proposal known as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), but that has not been ratified yet. Seismologists are building up a worldwide network of listening stations and these will be used to enforce the treaty, as well as providing data for research work. Attribution is a big issue, especially in the oceans or near borders. The treaty would allow inspectors to probe the scene of a suspected test as soon as it was spotted, allowing officials to get a true picture of what happened. India and Pakistan, for example, are still working on their arsenals. The treaty needs to be ratified by 44 key countries before it comes into force. But a dozen of these, including the United States, India, Pakistan and North Korea, have yet to formally approve it. Spear suspects that some countries may refuse to sign even when they have finished building and testing their nuclear arsenals. The USA, for example, maintains that it still needs to test its small nuclear bombs, known as bunker busters, despite having the computer capability to test them virtually^ref
• Iran : there is no concrete evidence that it is developing nuclear weapons, but there are plenty of worrying signs. Iran has huge oil and gas reserves, but in 2002 it announced plans to build 6 nuclear power stations. Iran is currently planning to enrich some 40 tonnes of uranium for its nuclear-energy programme. It wants to use plutonium and highly enriched uranium in these reactors; these elements can also be used to build bombs. It's all the more suspicious, given that Iran has around 7% of the world's crude oil reserves. Perhaps most worryingly, Iran attempted to conceal its centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, from international nuclear inspectors. Iran's nuclear-energy programme was set up at the height of its conflict with Iraq in the 1980s, leading security experts to suspect that it was conceived as a front for weapons production. Many analysts believe the power programme is a front for developing the technology to create a bomb, although opinion is divided on whether the government would actually build such a weapon. Analysts report that Iran is between three and five years away from building a 'heavy water' nuclear power station - a design that makes plutonium easier to produce. Iran's plans don't break international law unless Iran clearly breaches the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Under NPT rules, Iran can buy and operate centrifuges and other equipment needed for bombs as long as it only uses the devices for nuclear power programmes. The rules state that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) must be allowed into Iranian labs to verify this. The IAEA said on 13 September 2004 that its officials were being allowed good access to nuclear facilities, but added that some details of Iran's uranium enrichment programme remain unclear. Europe's 3 main players in the debate, Britain, France and Germany, are trying to call Iran's bluff. They say that they are happy to help Iran develop nuclear power. In return, they want its government to allow IAEA officials to keep tabs on the technology, to ensure that it is not militarized. The United States, by contrast, wants to report Iran to the UN Security Council if it does not reveal all the details of its enrichment programme to the IAEA. The council would have the power to allow sanctions or even military action. Diplomats are this week thrashing out a resolution at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna and early signs are that the USA could come out on top. Iran's case was not helped by a 13 September statement that it would resume uranium enrichment work. The Europeans are moving to the US position out of frustration with Iran. Some analysts caution Iran will react badly to a tough stance from Europe and the United States. Forcing the issue will build political support for hardliners in the Iranian government, who want to withdraw from the NPT and develop nuclear weapons. Such factions cite the situation in Israel and Pakistan, neighbouring countries that already have nuclear capabilities. Iran would be refused access to nuclear equipment from current suppliers in Europe and Russia if it quit the NPT, but it could find what it needs on the black market. Tensions have run high in the Aug 2005 over Iran's nuclear ambitions. And on Aug 8, Iranians restarted work at their uranium production plant, ending an agreement they had to put such activity on hold. The UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has monitored the country for some years, and this week installed cameras in the production plant to watch over proceedings. Tehran says that its uranium production is geared towards a civilian nuclear programme, but the United States fears that they intend to develop nuclear warheads. The Isfahan plant is a chemical refinery, which takes purified uranium oxide (U₃O₈) ore, known as yellowcake, and turns it into uranium hexafluoride (UF₆). This is just one stage in the complicated process of delivering uranium that can undergo fission in nuclear power plants and some nuclear weapons. The uranium conversion facility in Isfahan has started its activities under IAEA supervision. Iran has one of the largest deposits of uranium ore in the Middle East, and has mined it at Saghand since February 2003. Yellowcake will be extracted from the ore at a plant in Bandar Abbas once it begins operating this year. The only reason for producing uranium hexafluoride is that it can be enriched to boost the proportion of uranium-235, the isotope responsible for fission reactions. This involves turning the chemical into a gas, and feeding it through a series of centrifuges that spins the chemical to separate uranium-235 from its heavier and less fissile cousin, uranium-238. Natural uranium ore contains about 0.7% uranium-235. Reactor-grade uranium needs a few percent. Nuclear weapons need > 80%. At the moment, Iran says it has no immediate plans to enrich the uranium hexafluoride produced at Isfahan, which will contain no more uranium-235 than raw uranium ore. But Iran also says it would like to develop a nuclear energy programme, to help meet rising electricity demands; they say they would prefer to export their oil for profit, rather than burning it at home. The country is about a year away from finishing a 1,000-megawatt reactor being built at Bushehr. This reactor is specifically designed to use enriched uranium fuel, so it is presumed they will aim to enrich their uranium at some point in the future. Does Iran have the capacity to enrich uranium? An enrichment plant at Nantanz already houses a few hundred centrifuges, and several thousand more are planned. But large-scale enrichment is not yet possible in Iran. Enriching to weapons-grade uranium-235 requires many thousands of centrifuges, which poses serious engineering challenges. But the IAEA doesn't have a very good track record for finding undisclosed nuclear facilities. There are few short-term worries. But in the long term, the same technology used to develop a civilian nuclear programme would give Iran access to the material needed for a nuclear bomb. The country has concealed details of its nuclear activities from the IAEA in the past. So the authority has now installed cameras in the Isfahan factory to see how much uranium comes into the factory, how much goes out, and whether any goes missing along the way. If Iran did start enriching its own uranium sometime in the future, the IAEA would like to monitor that too, just as it does in many other countries with civilian nuclear power programmes but no weapons. Uranium enriched to a few percent is fine - a few tens of percent is not. Not easily at all. Several kilograms of uranium-235 are needed to reach the critical mass for a nuclear explosion, which would come from processing several tonnes of uranium hexafluoride using machinery that the country doesn't yet have. Iran could still be a decade away from having a nuclear weapon. But many think it is a case of when, rather than if, Iran pursues nuclear weapons, and so he argues that the country should not be allowed to develop nuclear energy.
• South Korea admitted in 2005 that it had run secret uranium enrichment experiments in the 1980s, prompting the IAEA to plan an official investigation. A report is due in November.
• North Korea : a mystery blast on 9 September 2004 had led some to fear that the country was detonating nuclear weapons, but those fears are now widely recognized as unfounded. North Korean government officials have declared that the explosion, which took place near the country's Chinese border and reportedly created a cloud some 3 km wide, was due to the demolition of a mountain to make way for a hydroelectric power plant.
Difficulties in radioisotopes procurement : because of passenger safety reasons, British Airways and KML Royal Dutch Airlines ban radioactives, airline spokespeople said. Northwest Airlines bans shipments on all its passenger planes, allowing them only on international cargo freighters. Several Asian airlines also refuse nuclear shipments. Although the IAEA is most concerned about shipments of short-lived radioisotopes needed for clinical purposes, these blanket denials affect researchers and industrial users just the same. It developed an action plan and a list of recommendations that included forming the IAEA committee, which consists of representatives from manufacturers, airlines, shipping companies, various countries' national regulatory agencies, and international nongovernmental organizations involved in shipping. IAEA has reclassified most tantalum ore—a rare element used in electronics circuits—from non-radioactive to radioactive, causing increasing numbers of shippers to refuse its transport.
The Sellafield plant for reprocessing nuclear fuel in northwest England is unable to account for about 30 kg of the plutonium it handled in 2004. That amount would be enough to make 7 nuclear bombs. There is no evidence that this material has been lost from the Sellafield site, which is managed by British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL). It may not even exist, having been conjured up simply by accounting errors. But that is not the point, says British nuclear-weapons expert Frank Barnaby, formerly of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston, UK. If Sellafield officials were asked to prove that the 'missing' plutonium had not been smuggled off the site they would not be able to do so. The discrepancy shows that you cannot safeguard a reprocessing plant effectively. Security is not stringent enough to defeat a determined group who sets out to steal the radioactive material. It is virtually impossible to illicitly divert nuclear material off the site. Sellafield reprocesses nuclear fuel by extracting plutonium from used fuel rods. The rods can then be used to make 'mixed-oxide' (MOX) fuel for further nuclear-power generation. Most of the material reprocessed at Sellafield comes from Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Sweden. Keeping track of the plutonium as it passes through the reprocessing system is challenging, because the spent fuel is so radioactive that its plutonium content cannot be measured directly. You have to rely on the reactor operators' estimates. As a result, some accounting error is inevitable. The nuclear industry agrees, and says that this error is typically around 1%; independent experts have argued that it is more like 3-5%. The 'missing' 30 kg of plutonium falls comfortably within this error margin, given that Sellafield reprocesses around 30 tonnes of the radioactive element each year. But it's a lot compared with previous years. And given that a well-designed nuclear weapon requires only about 4 kg of plutonium you can't afford to have that amount of material adrift in the current global climate. Barnham agrees: this sort of uncertainty is just not good enough. Similar accounting discrepancies are almost inevitable at other reprocessing plants around the world: France, Japan and Russia all run facilities that reprocess spent fuel. The auditing is also compromised by the fact that it does not include any plutonium present in the 'canning' material, which is stripped from the spent fuel before reprocessing begins. 5 years ago, the UK Ministry of Defence had discovered that it had an extra 300 kg of plutonium in its weapons stockpile for which it could not account. The shortfall at Sellafield is a very significant argument for not doing things this way. MOX nuclear plants are so expensive that they need big government subsidies, and only voodoo economics can make them seem profitable. And the only other use for plutonium is in weapons technology, whereas nuclear reactors that use uranium fuel can produce waste that has no military value at all. We should stop reprocessing.
Of the approximately 2000 nuclear weapons ready for use in the world today, 480 of them are stored on USA air bases in Europe (Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Turkey (90), Italy and the UK): weapons which the International Court of Justice has declared illegal.
The National Academy of Science told that power plants must do more to protect their radioactive waste from possible terrorist attacks : the danger is that terrorists might start a fire in a power plant's spent-fuel pool, where radioactive waste is stored after it is removed from the reactor. Under certain conditions a substantial amount of fission products can be released in a pool fire. Power plants around the world use swimming-pool-like structures to store used fuel rods while they 'cool', or lose their radioactive potency. The water in the pool shields the outside world from radiation produced by the rods, as well as genuinely cooling the rods, which are physically hot when they come out of the reactor. The panel decided that a terrorist strike on such a pool, using explosives or an aircraft, might drain the water, triggering a fire in the spent fuel rods, which are clad in radioactively stable, but flammable, zirconium metal. Although it would be difficult to attack such facilities, attacks by knowledgeable terrorists with access to appropriate technical means are a real possibility. To help reduce the risk of such an event, the panel calls for pools to be rearranged so that hotter, more radioactive rods are mixed with cooler, older ones. In addition, it suggests that backup water-spray systems be added to cool fuel if the storage pool begins to drain. Finally, in certain cases, it may be prudent to move some fuel from storage pools to dry cask systems, in which fires are easier to contain. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which oversees the US nuclear power industry, has expressed scepticism about some of the reports findings. In a 14 Mar 2005 letter to Congress, the commission said that the academy's recommendation that some spent fuel be moved to dry casks "lacks a sound technical basis". Lead casks physically isolate fuel rods, preventing fires from becoming widespread. The report was initially completed in July 2004, but a public version was not released until 6 April 2005. The NRC said it was concerned that the report might give valuable information to terrorists. Sceptics accused the agency of withholding the report because of a reluctance to revise safety standards, which would raise nuclear plants' operating costs
Treatment : potassium iodide (KI) pills are used to prevent thyroid cancer from inhalation of highly volatile and environmentally mobile iodine radioisotopes during acute phases of nuclear accidents : stable iodine competes with radioactive iodine for NIS.
Devices :
• Army Navy Portable Detector Radiation (ANPDR)
• muons are formed by cosmic rays from outer space smashing into Earth's atmosphere - 5 pass through our heads every second. Matter deflects muons: the denser the material, the bigger the swerve. A new device links a muon detector to a computer to build up an image and reveal dense material. While X-rays can damage health and are unable to distinguish nuclear material from, for example, steel, muons are harmless, and can tell different materials apart by the shape and the mass of their atoms
The rate of decay of radioactive atoms is often regarded as something preordained and beyond our power to manipulate. It has been known for some time that that is not really the case, but decrease in the half-life of beryllium-7 into lithium-7 by about half a day, almost 1% change, is by far the most dramatic effect achieved so far. In principle, the result suggests that we might be able to neutralize nuclear waste faster, but the possibility of magnifying the effect enough to significantly speed up this process remains somewhat remote. Atoms of beryllium-7 decay by grabbing electrons from their surroundings. The electron is absorbed into the nucleus, where it combines with a proton to make a neutron, transforming the atom into a different element, lithium-7. The rate of this kind of decay depends on the chance of an electron straying into the nucleus and getting absorbed. So increasing the density of electrons surrounding the atomic nucleus can speed up the decay. The reverse is true for the types of decay that involve expelling a neutron: increasing the electron density around that type of atom slows the process down. The researchers induced a nuclear reaction to produce beryllium-7 atoms with a lot of energy, which were able to bash their way through the walls of cage-like carbon molecules called buckminsterfullerenes. Once the beryllium atoms are trapped, the carbon cage surrounds them with a dense cloud of electrons. This makes it more likely for an electron to get into the trapped atom's nucleus and induce decay. The researchers found that beryllium-7 encased in buckminsterfullerene has a half-life of about 52.5 days, compared with 53 days for pure beryllium-7^ref.
Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, who played a key role in designing the first atomic bomb and worked out how stars generate their energy, died on Sunday 6 March, aged 98. Bethe had been a professor of physics at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, since 1935. "Hans Bethe was a giant of twentieth-century science," says Robert Richardson, Cornell's vice-provost for research. "He has been revered by his Cornell colleagues." Bethe was born in Strasbourg, then part of Germany (now France), on 2 July 1906. After training in physics, he fled to England in October 1933 to escape the Nazi regime. After brief spells at the universities of Manchester and Bristol, he moved to Cornell in 1935. Bethe's work on nuclear reactions led him to discover in 1938 how the brightest stars generate their energy. Dubbed the 'carbon-oxygen-nitrogen' cycle, these elements sequentially acquire 4 hydrogen nuclei before releasing a helium nucleus and a burst of energy, with carbon atoms effectively acting as a catalyst. Later, Bethe realized that smaller stars such as our own Sun are lit by the direct fusion of hydrogen nuclei. He was awarded a Nobel Prize for these discoveries in 1967, as well as for his work on nuclear physics in general. During the Second World War, Bethe led the theoretical-physics division at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, which was home to the Manhattan Project to build the world's first atomic bomb. One of his team's key tasks was to work out the critical mass of uranium-235 necessary to sustain the fission reaction that would drive the bomb's explosive force. When he witnessed the detonation of the first nuclear explosion at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, Bethe professed concern only for the smooth running of the test, rather than the implications for the world. "I am not a philosopher," he explained. But after the war, Bethe joined Albert Einstein on the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which aimed to educate the public about atomic energy. He later campaigned to restrict further research on nuclear weapons, and promoted the peaceful use of nuclear energy. He helped to persuade the White House to ban atmospheric nuclear tests in 1963 and antiballistic missile systems in 1972. He is survived by his wife Rose, his son Henry and his daughter Monica
A nuclear power station in Romania will be the scene of a full-scale emergency operation on May 2005, albeit a simulated one. Officials at the IAEA will lead a team of 8 agencies and 62 countries in testing responses to a Chernobyl-style nuclear accident. The 39-hour operation will begin on 11 May at the Cernavoda power plant in eastern Romania. After a pretend accident, officials will enact reporting the emergency, evaluating necessary health measures for those exposed, and tracking weather patterns to see where the fallout will land and which neighbouring countries should be notified. The exercise is a chance to test international communication lines, and officials will oversee the exercise from IAEA's Emergency Preparedness and Response Unit in Vienna, Austria. The IAEA and its collaborators aim to simulate a nuclear disaster once every 4 years; the last was held in 2001 in the town of Gravelines, on the north coast of France. Although IAEA member states hold regular domestic safety drills, the chance to test readiness on an international scale is a valuable one. Wednesday's proceedings will begin at an unspecified time in the morning, when the IAEA's Incident and Emergency Centre will receive details of a fictitious leak of radioactive matter from the plant. It will then notify collaborators including the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Commission, the World Meteorological Organization, NATO and Interpol. Real weather forecasts will be used to track the path that a release of fallout would take. The response to a major leak, like the one following the explosion at the Chernobyl plant in the former Soviet Union in 1986, depends on effective communication : no matter how ready you are, if there's no communication the response will not work. The network consists of some 30 centres around the world, which are ready to dispense medical advice or dispatch a health consultant to the scene of an emergency if requested. Such consultants are prepared to make decisions such as whether to administer potassium iodide tablets to prevent thyroid damage in those exposed to fallout. Meanwhile, Romanian domestic officials will check their own readiness to deal with a radiation leak, by staging an evacuation of nearby villages and testing lines of communication to countries that would be affected.
Chernobyl's ecosystems seem to be bouncing back in 2005, 19 years after the region was blasted with radiation from the ill-fated reactor. Researchers who have surveyed the land around the old nuclear power plant in present-day Ukraine say that biodiversity is actually higher than before the disaster. Some 100 species on the IUCN Red List of threatened species are now found in the evacuated zone, which covers > 4,000 km² in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Around 40 of these, including some species of bear and wolf, were not seen there before the accident. If animals at the top of the food chain are present, then the plants and animals they eat must also be thriving. By any measure of ecological function these ecosystems seem to be operating normally. The biodiversity is higher there than before the accident. How has this happened, given that radiation levels are still too high for humans to return safely? Many of the organisms mutated by the fallout have died, leaving behind those that have not suffered problems with growth and reproduction. It's evolution on steroids. There are a lot of deleterious mutations in species but these seem to be very quickly weeded out. Many young fish living in the reactor's cooling ponds are deformed, but adults tend to be healthy, implying that those harmed by radiation die young. Another factor in the ecosystem's apparent good health could be that the major radioactive elements in the region, such as caesium-137, tend to stay in the soil rather than accumulating in plants and animals. This means that contamination of the human food chain by radioactivity from Chernobyl might not be as severe as was feared. All this has led some people to propose that tourism to Chernobyl would help develop the area. In 2002, a United Nations report suggested that ecotourism could help plug the gap left by dwindling funds for regeneration. It is now possible to visit the area on holiday. But this doesn't mean that people can live there. Some 40 different radioactive elements, including strontium-90 and decay products of uranium and plutonium, were released into the exclusion zone, and it will be many hundreds of millennia before humans could move safely back. Humans spending long periods of time there would suffer a build-up of radiation that would shorten lives and raise newborn mortality. It would be a disaster for humans. Many birds are also showing the harmful effects of the fallout. Barn swallows nesting around Chernobyl have lower survival rates, fewer eggs and are in generally worse condition than those living southeast of Kiev, away from the exclusion zone. It is difficult to say what will become of the region's plants and animals. One way to find out is to sample the genetics of populations to see whether diversity is likely to continue to increase. What will happen here? That's the question. In a way it's a fantastic experiment.
Nuclear waste disposal : Britain should take steps to join the ranks of countries planning to store nuclear waste deep underground, an advisory committee has told the government. Because any such plan will take decades to implement, the panel adds that politicians need to act on the committee's recommendations immediately. The backing for 'geological disposal' comes from the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, which has been considering various storage options since 2003. The process has not always been straightforward — two panel members left after accusing the committee of focusing on public opinion rather than science — but the findings, announced today, put Britain in line with international thinking on how such storage issues should be addressed. Plans to create an underground storage facility are at an advanced stage in other countries such as the United States, where a site at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert has been studied for almost 30 years. Geological disposal plans are also under way in China, India and Finland, among others. At Yucca Mountain, waste would be stored some 300 m below the surface, in multilayered metal canisters that are designed to secure material safely for thousands of years. Several areas of Britain, such as parts of Wales and the Lake District in northern England, are considered geologically stable enough to host similar stores. The UK has been creating radioactive waste for 50 years without any clear idea of what to do with it. Persuading local communities to host such a project could pose a more tricky challenge than the technical difficulties of waste disposal. A proposal to create a waste store at Sellafield, an existing nuclear power plant, was thrown out by a public enquiry in 1997. The committee says that a repeat will only be avoided if benefits such as economic investment can be used to persuade local people to partner with the government on any storage plan. Forging such a partnership is likely to involve many years of discussion, but that a robust interim storage solution is needed now. Most waste from Britain's 33 nuclear power stations is currently stored at the plants where it is produced. The safety of these facilities should also be reviewed, the committee adds — they need to be safe for at least 100 years in case of delays to long-term storage programmes such as geological disposal. It is good that they have recognized that this will be a long process and that most of the key decisions will be made by future generations. What is needed now is the will to get the process moving quickly^ref.
A crunch looms in dealing with nuclear waste, and so there's no better time for airing unorthodox solutions. Radioactive decay might be speeded up by sticking the atoms in metals cooled to within a few degrees of absolute zero. The claim is disputed by other scientists, although the findings of the German group seem genuinely puzzling. The key question, however, is how we are to deal with such reports. Some techniques for altering the half-lives of radioactive elements have a basis in sound science — but others lurk at the wilder fringes. Can they be told apart? I've had unusual cause to ponder these questions. A few years ago, I found myself in the rather surreal situation of trying to explain to Madonna why it is generally beyond the means of science to tamper with rates of radioactive decay. She had heard (don't ask me how) about a team of Russian scientists who claimed to have developed a way to treat water so that it can 'neutralize' radioactive waste. They had data allegedly showing that the process worked on a lake contaminated by the Chernobyl accident. Since I had written a book about water, I was summoned as a putative 'specialist' to discuss the findings. So there we were: me, Guy Ritchie, 'Mrs R', and a clutch of excited scientists, talking for a couple of hours about a way to eliminate the carcinogenic legacy of nuclear power (or not). Madonna has made no secret of her interest in this work — she has been quoted on it in Rolling Stone magazine. I was told soon after our meeting that a California-based company was interested in working with the Russians and Madonna to promote the waste-treatment scheme. But they never got back in touch with me, so I've no idea what came of the plan. One can hardly blame a non-scientist for being excited by claims of a way to neutralize radiation. As I tried to explain on that strange afternoon, radioactive decay can't be 'neutralized' in the same way that, say, one might neutralize a nasty acid. Yet that's not to say it is totally beyond our influence. The Russian scientists suggested that their process might have something to do with the 'quantum Zeno effect', a phenomenon in which quantum probabilities are altered by repeated measurement^ref (Fischer M.C., et al. Phys. Rev. Lett., 87. 040402 (2001)). In principle it might be possible to exploit this effect; but it is normally tiny, and it's far from obvious how it might be translated into anything remotely useful, let alone how it might be induced by 'electromagnetically processed' water, as suggested by the Russians (who, to my knowledge, have never published the work). More credible was the report by a team of researchers in Japan in 2004 that they had decreased the half-life of the radioisotope beryllium-7 by almost 1%, or half a day (Ohtsuki T., et al. Phys. Rev. Lett., 93. 112501 (2004)). The researchers trapped atoms inside electron-rich, soccer-ball-shaped cages of carbon, making it slightly more likely that an electron would find its way into the nucleus and bring about the transmutation of the radioactive element. But the team couldn't make the effect any larger; the prospect of using it to speed up the decay of nuclear waste, they admitted, was somewhat remote. Claus Rolfs of the Ruhr University in Bochum, team leader of the latest attempt to accelerate nuclear decay (Limata B., et al. Eur. Phys. J. A, 28. 251 - 252 (2006); Kettner K. U., et al. J. Phys. G. Nucl. Part. Phys., 32. 489 - 495 (2006)), is more optimistic about his own findings, saying that they suggest the possibility of reducing the half-life of radium-226, a hazardous component of spent nuclear fuel, from around 1,600 years to just 1 year. This means that nuclear waste could probably be dealt with entirely within the lifetimes of the people that produce it. His approach is somewhat similar to that of the Japanese work, placing the radioactive atoms in the electron-rich environment of a metal. The metal's 'sea' of free electrons can enhance the probability that a positively charged particle might be ejected from the nucleus — as happens in some types of radioactive decay — as well as raising the chance of decay by electron capture. Lower temperatures apparently bring the free electron closer to the radioactive nuclei. Rolfs's team and their European co-workers have reported a decrease of about 1% in the half-life of sodium-22. And recently they described similar effects for heavy metals, suggesting that the technique could be viable for the elements typically found in radioactive waste — such as radium. But the estimate on how fast these elements could be made to decay is so far only theoretical. Other nuclear scientists have said that the findings contradict earlier experiments and, more damningly, current understanding of solid-state physics. But they are at least based on a plausible and testable theory. That's probably more than can be said for some of the 'nuclear remediation technologies' circulating on the fringes of science. One of the favourites involves Brown's gas, a putative form of water 'discovered' by American engineer William Rhodes in the 1960s and championed subsequently by the Bulgarian-Australian physicist Yull Brown. As well as 'neutralizing radioactive waste', this 'oxy-hydrogen gas' (produced by what seems to be basically electrolysis of water) is said to burn like a fuel, weld metals, support breathing, help plants germinate and relax muscles. If it sounds too good to be true, that's because it surely is. Like perpetual motion or the idea of water as fuel, a magic bullet for nuclear remediation has become something of a cultural myth. The fiction of cold fusion (advocated, for one, by Yull Brown) was also mooted as a way to transmute nuclear waste to harmless forms. There's a pattern to these fantasies, and I can't help feeling that Madonna's magic water fitted it rather closely. Yet the problem these claims confront is a very real one. In July 2006, the UK's Committee on Radioactive Waste Management criticized the failure of British governments to address the issue of waste disposal for more than three decades, and insisted that a site for deep burial must be found very soon. In the USA, the favoured site of Yucca Mountain in Nevada won't be accepting waste until 2017 at the earliest — if at all. These delays reflect a public discomfort about sweeping waste under the carpet. Burial is not a pretty solution. But at the moment, alternatives based on 'neutralizing' radioactivity look as unreachable as ever. So all of us, celebrities included, will probably just have to learn to live with the stuff.
Web resources :
• Papers by Rolfs et al.
• High-Z electron screening
• Experimentalphysik III
• Unorthodox nuclear remediation technologies
• Nuclear Remediation Technologies
• Brown's gas: eagle research
• Brown's gas: possible uses
• Free energy news
• Patents for cold fusion/nuclear remediation
• Possibility Of Using Of Cold Fusion For Nuclear Waste Products Transmutation
Web resources :
• Atomic Archive.com
• "Broken Arrows"
• Global Seismographic Network
• Greenpeace.org - Nuclear
• Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS)
• International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna
• Nuclear Data Services (NDS) collates data from a global seismographic network and is on the alert for the characteristic vibrations of nuclear bombs
• Nuclear safety and security issues
• Nuclear Control Institute
• Oxford Research Group on the nuclear industry, nuclear terrorism and dirty bombs
• Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO)
• Verification Research, Training and Information Centre (VERTIC) is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organisation. Its mission is to promote effective and efficient verification as a means of ensuring confidence in the implementation of international agreements with international involvement
• World Nuclear Association

Nuclear issues news

• explosives (see also blast injury) : although information about terrorism has emphasized chemical, biologic, and radiation events, most terrorist attacks have involved explosive devices. To date, the number of lives lost, the number of people injured, and the consequences on the infrastructure are orders of magnitude higher after explosions6 than after chemical or biologic incidents. Nonconventional weapons have been perceived as more dangerous than explosives, probably because the effects of explosions are easier to comprehend^ref.
• TNT
• PETN
81% of suicide attacks since 1968 occurred after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, with 31 of the 35 groups held responsible being Islamic militants or 'jihadi'. > 80% of known jihadis live in diaspora communities, often marginalized from the host society, and in hard-to-penetrate social networks that consist of about 70% friends and 20% family. Seeking a sense of community, these small groups bond as they surf jihadi websites to find direction and purpose. In the past 5 years alone, jihadi websites have increased in number from < 20 to > 4,000. European jihadis act, not to achieve a clearly specified political goal, but to oppose a perceived global evil. Even in Iraq, jihadis from 14 other Arab countries say that they have volunteered to fight against 'international evil' rather than for Iraq itself^ref. From interviewing would-be suicide bombers and sponsors from Europe to southeast Asia, we have learned that terrorism thrives in people who feel humiliated, either in their own lives or through identifying with others, as seen, for example, in reports from Abu Ghraib prison. We ask questions such as: "What if your family were to be killed in retaliation for your action?". Almost all answer that, although they have a duty to their families, their duty to God comes first. "And what if your action resulted in no one's death but your own?" The typical response is "God loves you the same". Such reasoning is not very sensitive to standard cost-benefit calculations or moral trade-offs. How do we deal with this decentralized global jihadi community? Insights into home-grown jihadi attacks must come from understanding small-group dynamics and psychological motivations, including those that are religiously inspired. Given the increasing role played by the Internet, efforts should foster alternative peer groups in cities and cyberspace, showing the same commitment and compassion towards their own members as terror groups seem to offer, but in life-enhancing ways and also towards others^ref.
Prevention :
• airport queues might soon move faster thanks to a technique for 'smelling' traces of explosives^ref. As any frequent flyer knows, to look for tiny traces of explosives on clothes, shoes and luggage security staff must wipe surfaces with a swab and put it into a detector for analysis. Although this can take under a minute, using it to check a long queue of passengers can create significant hold-ups. In contrast, the method devised by Graham Cooks and his colleagues at Purdue takes just a few seconds because it doesn't require any swabbing. The security would guard simply spray a mixture of alcohol and water onto the surface while holding a detector close by. In lab tests, the researchers have been able to analyse 1 sample per second. The same should happen with a line of suitcases, so there will be time savings. By cutting out the swabbing step, which doesn't always pick up a proper sample, the method should also be more reliable. The spray scatters contaminant molecules on a surface into the air in a form that the detector can readily pick up. The technique can sniff out just 10^-14 g of TNT, and 100 trillionths of a gram of the high explosive PETN. It works on plastic, metal, paper and skin. As with the swabbing method, a mass spectrometer is used to detect any explosive chemical compounds. This entails capturing a tiny amount of vapour from the explosive and converting the molecules into electrically charged ions, which allows their mass to be measured individually. The swabbing method uses heat to vaporize the molecules in the swab sample, then bombards them with charged particles to ionize them. But the spray vaporizes and ionizes the sample in one go. As the liquid passes through a nozzle and breaks up into droplets, a voltage across the nozzle knocks charges off molecules within the droplets to create ions. When the ionized droplets hit a surface, the ions transfer their charge to molecules of contaminants such as explosives, at the same time 'sandblasting' them off the surface. As well as being quicker, the method is more accurate: it is more sensitive to the presence of explosive compounds and less likely to confuse them with innocuous substances. Testing could be completed in < 1 year, provided air security authorities decide to adopt the technique.
• a new material designed by a team of chemists and electrical engineers in the USA can detect explosives such as TNT with 30 times more sensitivity than current man-made detection devices. Specially trained dogs that can sniff out the chemical vapours released by buried explosives are currently the gold standard for detecting hidden bombs, but bomb dogs are expensive to train and can work for only a limited number of hours each day. Because of these limitations, much research is being done to develop man-made devices that can detect concealed explosives with the same sensitivity as a canine. To that end, Timothy Swager and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge developed a polymer that acts like a laser source, is stable in air, and is very sensitive to the presence of explosive vapours. The new material, a semiconducting organic polymer (SOP), releases a stream of light particles like a laser beam when bombarded with ultraviolet light, in a process called lasing. The ultraviolet light excites electrons in the polymer, and when the SOP absorbs enough of these photons to reach what is called the lasing threshold, a beam of light is released. When TNT is present, however, it sticks to the polymer and the SOP stops lasing. The disappearance of the beam of light from the polymer therefore reveals the presence of explosives nearby. Lasing is one way to get great sensitivity : with this polymer, we have achieved one of the lowest lasing thresholds known in organic materials. This property enables the SOP to operate for long periods of time in ambient air, conditions necessary for a sensor to work well in the field. The new polymer expands the team's previous work in designing fluorescing polymers that attract TNT and other electronegative chemicals. The researchers hope that the latest polymer could be as sensitive as the nose of a trained dog. Although it will be a year or two before a device incorporating the new polymer is in the hands of those uncovering buried explosives or screening cargo, the earlier-generation fluorescing polymers are the basis for a handheld detector developed by Nomadics for use by soldiers and security personnel. Rose hopes that the latest development could help the ongoing effort to rid the world of landmines - according to some estimates, there are as many as 100 million spread over > 60 countries around the globe
• the best thing to do with an unexploded bomb is usually to leave it alone. But scientists working on an abandoned US Navy bombing range in Puerto Rico have an ambitious plan to remove the site's decaying explosives to prevent an ecological disaster. The researchers have developed a remote-controlled robot arm, which sits in shallow waters and picks the bombs from where they lie off the eastern shores of the island of Vieques. Capable of lifting up to 225 kg, the device lifts the bombs into a cradle that floats to the surface using air tanks. The device could be used to remove bombs from the dozens of underwater bombing ranges around the world. Every coastal state of the USA, as well as the Great Lakes, rivers, and reefs on Guam and Hawaii, are affected. Preparation for war is messy. That's certainly the case on Vieques. The US Navy used this island as a bombing range until 2003, and until 1983 they dropped bombs on coral reefs. Even the bombs that failed to explode delivered a load of toxic materials. The island's shallow waters are also the final resting place of the USS Killen, a Second World War destroyer that miraculously survived its later incarnation as a practice target for nuclear bombs in the South Pacific, and was finally buried at sea off Vieques in 1975. The Puerto Rican authorities feared the boat might be a source of radiation : many fish live within the shelter of the boat's pockmarked, corroded flanks, and officials were worried that the extensive fishing around the vessel might be contaminating the human food chain. Porter did not find high levels of radiation on the boat, but when researchers began to look for chemical, rather than radioactive, contaminants in the fish and corals in and around the bombs scattered around the Killen, they found high levels of explosive-derived compounds such as trinitrobenzene and trinitrotoluene (TNT). Contamination levels drop off sharply away from the bombs, showing that the pollution tends to stay within the bomb casings and the fish that live inside. The bad news is that the site is toxic. The good news, if there is any, is that it's a point source of pollution, so all you have to do is pick up the bombs. We expect the concentrations will drop precipitously and immediately after removal. The only problem left is funding the job. At the beginning of this year, the US Environmental Protection Agency added the area to its list of 'Superfund' sites - polluted areas in need of special cleanup attention. But the US Navy has not yet parted with the cash to clean the site. If successful, the device could help to reduce some of the worldwide legacy left behind by military exercises. The human cost of war is often known : the environmental cost is not
• fiery crash of North Korea's Taepodong-2 missile has left arms control experts theorizing about what went wrong. The Taepodong-2 is North Korea's latest missile design. It is believed to be capable of reaching Alaska or the western United States and has been a source of anxiety for US officials who claimed that, if necessary, they would use their own missile defence system to down a test flight. But that turned out to be unnecessary. Just 42 seconds after its 4 July launch, the missile plunged into the Sea of Japan, according to US, South Korean and Japanese intelligence. Much of what is known about the failed launch remains shrouded in secrecy, but the length of the flight indicates that the rocket's massive first stage fired correctly and that the guidance systems were initially operational. It's very hard to get this far. The failure appeared to take place at the moment rocket designers call 'maximum q', when a rocket feels the greatest aerodynamic forces. The first stage had probably not finished firing by the time of the crash. But the fault lay elsewhere. Vick says he has seen reports that something fell from the rocket immediately after take-off. He thinks that part of the final, third stage may have pulled loose when under maximum strain, and struck the body of the rocket. Something came crashing down, and that's when all hell broke loose. After that, it was a wild ride. That 'something' may have been a shroud covering a small satellite that the North Koreans intended to put into orbit. Such a problem would be relatively easy to fix. If the shroud is the problem, we could see another flight within a year or less. But other types of failure are just as likely. For example, the steering mechanisms might not have been strong enough to guide the rocket at maximum q, or a software or guidance glitch might have caused the crash. If the latter were true: they could fly it again in a few months. Regardless of the specifics of the failure, the 42-second flight shows that the North Koreans are indeed skilled at rocketry. Most launch failures occur within the first few seconds after lift-off. During the early days of the US programme, a 40-second flight would have been described as a 'partial success'.

Web resources :
• Vick's writings on the launch
• More technical details on the Taepodong-2
• Jonathan MacDowell's page
• When British authorities announced Thu Aug 10, 2006 that they had thwarted a terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up 10 aircraft, the spotlight was thrown once more on airport security. The terrorists planned to smuggle liquid explosives disguised as beverages and other common products in their hand luggage, and set them off with simple detonators, which could take the form of anything from a camera to a digital music player. X-ray screens, pat-downs and swabs for nitrogen-based explosive materials currently used in airports are no match for such a scheme. The standard security devices can't tell the difference between shampoo and something far more dangerous. Nor could more extensive chemical tests necessarily sound an alarm. One common liquid-explosive, for example, can be made by mixing acetone (otherwise known as nail-polish remover) with hydrogen peroxide (which, when very diluted, makes for a legitimate antiseptic). And non-metallic items hidden about one's person would be hard to find, let alone characterize. Nevertheless, companies and governments are keen to expand high-tech security measures at borders and airports to cut the chance of dangerous materials getting through. Systems in development claim variously to be able to use X-rays, neutrons, radio-frequency or 'terahertz' radiation to identify the chemical make-up of items being scanned or swabbed, or to pick out items with high concentrations of elements such as nitrogen that are found in many explosives.
Web resources : Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN)
• electromagnetic (EM) weapons

Web resources : Electromagnetic Weapons by Judy Wall
• Can you bottle trust? The answer, it seems, is yes. Researchers have produced a potion that, when sniffed, makes people more likely to give their cash to someone to look after. A Swiss-led research team tested their creation on volunteers playing an investment game for real money. When they inhaled the nasal spray, investors were more likely to hand over money to a trustee, knowing that, although they could make a hefty profit, they could also lose everything if the trustee decided not to give any of the money back. The potion's magic ingredient is oxytocin, a chemical that is produced naturally in the brain. Its production is triggered by a range of stimuli, including sex and breastfeeding, and it is known to be important in the formation of social ties, such as mating pairs and parent-offspring bonds. It is perhaps no surprise that the compound has been nicknamed the 'love hormone'. Experts think that oxytocin exerts its range of effects by boosting some social behaviours: it may encourage animals or people to overcome their natural wariness when faced with a risky situation. The theory argues that people only decide to trust each other - when forming a sexual or business relationship, for example - when the brain's oxytocin production is boosted. This effect can be produced simply by getting people to inhale oxytocin rather than stimulating them to produce it. In the game, investors were allotted 12 monetary credits, each worth 40 Swiss centimes (32 US cents), and asked to decide how much to give to the trustee. The participants knew that the investment would be quadrupled, and that the trustee could then decide how much, if any, to hand back. Investors were more willing to part with their cash when they inhaled the potion^ref. Of 29 subjects given oxytocin, 13 handed over all of their cash. Only 6 of the 29 subjects given a placebo to sniff invested all 12 of their credits. When the human trustee was replaced with a random number generator the effect disappeared. This shows that oxytocin specifically boosts social interactions, rather than simply making people more willing to take risks. Knowing more about how trust is encouraged could help with everything from business to the treatment of psychological conditions. Damping trust may be useful for people with Williams syndrome, for example, in which patients are overly friendly. Increasing trust may be useful for people with social phobia or autism. Oxytocin is easy and cheap to produce and it is easy to get it in drug stores, at least in Switzerland. So does that mean it could be pumped into the air in department stores by unscrupulous salespeople, turning us all into soft targets? Perhaps, but it seems a trifle extravagant. Modern advertising already uses tricks to get us to trust a brand that probably make us boost our own oxytocin levels. It lures you in with images of wonderful landscapes or sex, and it probably works in exactly the same way.
• Principal agent problem
Web resources :
• Chemical and biological weapons non-proliferation list
• Deliberate use of biological and chemical agents at WHO
• Army Technology - NBC Equipment
• Survival Unlimited : survival & emergency preparedness supplies
• Select Agent Program (SAP) at CDC
• a study of the statistics of global terrorism concludes that attacks will become more severe in the future^ref. It all sounds very depressing and seems to imply, depending on your viewpoint, either that the 'war on terror' is essential or that it is futile. But can we really assert these things based on statistics alone? Computer scientists Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, have analysed the data on terrorist attacks compiled by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. The numbers follow a 'power-law' relationship. A graph of the number of attacks n plotted against their severity x (in terms of injuries and/or fatalities) reveals that n is roughly proportional to x ^-1.85. Put simply, this means that the frequency of attacks decreases as their size increases - which is what you'd expect - but also that this relationship holds for events ranging from those that injured or killed just a few people to those that, like the Nairobi car bomb in August 1998, produced over 5000 casualties. This might sound like no more than a formal way of presenting the statistics, but the power-law relationship has startling implications. For example, the statistics suggest a strong probability of an attack as devastating as that on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 within 7 years. And the power-law relationship implies that the biggest terrorist attacks are not 'outliers': one-off events somehow different from the all-too-familiar suicide bombings that kill or maim just a few people. Instead, it suggests that they are somehow driven by the same underlying mechanism. Similar power-law relationships between size and frequency apply to other phenomena, such as earthquakes and fluctuations in economic markets. This indicates that even the biggest, most infrequent earthquakes are created by the same processes that produce hordes of tiny ones, and that occasional market crashes are generated by the same internal dynamics of the marketplace that produce daily wobbles in stock prices. Analogously, the study implies some kind of 'global dynamics' of terrorism.  Moreover, a power-law suggests something about that mechanism. If every terrorist attack were instigated independently of every other, their size-frequency relationship should obey the 'gaussian' statistics seen in coin-tossing experiments. In gaussian statistics, very big fluctuations are extremely rare. Processes governed by power-law statistics, in contrast, seem to be interdependent. This makes them far more prone to big events, which is why giant tsunamis and market crashes do happen within a typical lifetime. Does this mean that terrorist attacks are interdependent in the same way? This touches on a deep, difficult and long-standing question that has divided historians for centuries: are there universal laws governing human history? Immanuel Kant, writing in his essay Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784), proposed that "Individual men, and even whole nations, little think, while they are pursuing their own purposes...that they are advancing unconsciously under the guidance of a purpose of nature which is unknown to them." The idea that there are robust laws of social behaviour analogous to the laws of physics - laws which are beyond our power to change - is what underlay the 'positivist' philosophy of Auguste Comte in the 1830s. It moved Leo Tolstoy to ask: "What is the force that moves nations?" A belief in the 'law-like' unfolding of history and economics also provided the foundation of Karl Marx's theories, and it continues to inform the thinking of Marxist historians today. In contrast, what one might call the 'Great Man' view of history, championed by Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century, holds that this sort of positivism is a chimera and that history is instead a much more contingent affair whose course is determined by the rise of powerful figures such as Napoleon and Hitler. Friedrich Nietzsche had a strong sympathy for this position: "So far as there are laws in history," he said, "laws are worth nothing and history is worth nothing." So does global terrorism operate in a way that individual states or initiatives cannot hope to control, or can a concerted effort to eliminate it reshape the power-law statistics of attacks? British physicist Lewis Fry Richardson made a similar study between the 1920s to the 1950s. He collected data on "deadly quarrels": fatal conflicts ranging from small local skirmishes to world wars. He found that their size-frequency distribution also followed a power law. When Richardson published his findings in 1960, they seemed to convey a very gloomy message: wars were apparently getting bigger, and the 2 biggest events had occurred only 25 years apart in the very recent past. It looked as though the world was headed for another, even more deadly war. But in reality, changes in global politics altered the very nature of wars. They did not by any means go away, but they are now fought for different reasons and in different ways. Clauset and Young are careful to point out that their own doom-laden forecasts assume that the power-law relationship for terrorism, based on 36 years of data, will continue to hold in the coming decades. Although it may be tempting for people to read the predictions as a form of statistically driven determinism, we must remember that statistics do not themselves have any motive agency in the real world. For example, when eighteenth-century statisticians discovered that the annual frequency of crimes obeyed gaussian statistics, some interpreted this as evidence for a kind of 'social force' that compelled some people to commit crimes. It is sadly possible, of course, that Clauset and Young's predictions will come to pass. But it is worth bearing in mind that several apparent power-law statistics in social phenomena have turned out, on closer inspection, to have natural cut-off points that preclude very large events^ref. And whatever the case, we should be wary of predictions based purely on statistics. History teaches us that it is possible, sometimes, to change the rules that generate them.
• as bombings in London attract international attention, one study claims that terrorist patterns of attack might be the natural endpoint for all modern armed conflicts. Ongoing wars in Iraq and Colombia, which had quite different causes and began as very different kinds of conflict, are developing a characteristic signature of long-term terrorist activity. The death statistics in both of these conflicts are converging on a particular mathematical pattern. This pattern is shared by fatality counts from terrorist attacks in countries that are not major industrialized nations. The ongoing war in Iraq is a new type of war. US military action in Iraq has been predicated on the view that it is a war of the sort that was fought until the middle of the twentieth century, where two military states battle for control of a territory. But this is the wrong approach. The US failure to understand the reality in Iraq and the tendency to impose its own view of what war should be like is immensely dangerous. Instead of approaching it as a conflict that can be conclusively won by military force, they should see it as an ongoing effort. The apparent convergence between the Iraq and Colombia conflicts could have even more chilling implications. Given that they share the same statistical description, are they separate conflicts, or are they a part of one big ongoing global war, a mother of all wars? All wars and conflicts seem to generate a common and distinctive pattern of death statistics. 50 years ago, the British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson found that graphs of the number of fatalities in a war plotted against the number of wars of that size follow a relationship called a power law, where all the data points fall on a straight line if plotted logarithmically. This power law encodes the way in which large battles with large numbers of deaths happen very infrequently, and smaller battles happen more often. Recently, the same kind of power laws were found to hold for terrorist attacks over the past four decades or so. But the precise form of the power law depends on the type of country to which it relates. Terrorist attacks in Western industrialized nations are rare but tend to be large when they happen. Terrorist attacks in the less-industrialized world tend to be smaller, more frequent events. The bomb attacks on London's public transport system on 7 July 2005, in which > 50 people were killed, fit this statistical picture. In Iraq, the battle began as a conventional confrontation between large armies. But the presence of coalition forces "has fragmented the insurgency into a structure in which smaller attack units now predominate. Since 2003, the 'casualties per attack event' for Iraq, measured over 30-day windows, have followed a gradually changing power law. The slope was initially equal to that found by Richardson for traditional warfare, but it is now approaching the value found for non-Western terrorism. The Colombia conflict, which has been fought between the government and various left- and right-wing guerrilla groups for many decades, is also approaching this value. Armies in Iraq and Colombia should be using different tactics. If you believe that you need to fight like with like, a conventional army is the complete opposite of what you need. You have to do away with centralization. In many ways, it is like fighting an illness that continually evolves, adapts and changes. The broader worry is that terrorist-style conflicts seem to be sustainable indefinitely. These wars are so much harder to end than to begin (Johnson N., et al. Preprint, (2005); Clauset A., Young M., et al. Preprint, (2005))
• the past 10 years Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian health professionals have worked together through the Canada International Scientific Exchange Program (CISEPO). In the initial project, nearly 17 000 Arab and Israeli newborn babies were tested for early detection of hearing loss, an important health issue for the region. The network has grown to address additional needs, including mother-child health, nutrition, infectious diseases, and youth health. Our guiding model emphasises two goals: project-specific outcomes in health improvement, and broader effects on cross-border cooperation. Lessons learned from this experience and the model provide direction for ways that health professionals can contribute to peacebuilding^ref.
• What is it like attending the G8 2006 in St Petersburg? John Kirton: watchdog, academic, and interested observer of the G8. There are thousands of people here. You have the G8 leaders and the delegations of these and other governments, the international organizations, and around 2,500 members of the media. Add in the security forces and the logistics, and it's like a little city within a city. At any second, history can be made. Outside their formal meetings there are informal bilateral ones, and chance encounters in the gym. Our centre's goal is to be the world's leading scholarly independent source of information and analysis on the G8. We want both global governance and the G8 to be more transparent, more open. It doesn't even have a secretariat, so it is one of the least transparent international organizations around. We try to perform that watchdog function. All the meetings are closed, but the national delegations give regular briefings. The host, president Putin, himself gave a briefing every night; that's very unusual. Veteran G8 watchers have the mobile-phone numbers of whoever is travelling with the heads of state. Their calls get answered, but sure, they are being spun. In an attempt to crack that system, we've brought a large group here to work the room and try to find out what's really going on. One focus this year was infectious diseases. Did you hear anything new in this direction? Putin said Russia would give back all the money it has received from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Okay, that's just US$270 million. But it signals Russia's shift from being a consumer of health aid to a producer, and that it trusts the Global Fund. Putin has realized that Russia is facing a very serious AIDS pandemic that could further shrink its already declining population, and cripple its emerging economy. Putin's conception of AIDS was a bit dated though. He thought the main source of infection was contaminated needles; this is a bigger problem in Russia than other countries, which might explain that focus. But he seemed open to a broad agenda on AIDS, including the problem of heterosexual transmission. Another declared focus was energy. What was the most promising thing you heard about that? We have come a long way from Russia's initial proposals for summit discussions last year, where there was no mention of the role of the market in energy security. Now a celebration of the market economy and democratic values pervade the final communiqué. There's also a strong emphasis on renewables and energy efficiency, and that's coming from a Russia that for a century has relied on extensive, rapacious exploitation of hydrocarbons. This take is brand new for Russia. It will feed into the G8 summit in Germany next year where it will be a central theme. The summit also gave a big yes to nuclear power, and said that government has a role in supporting nuclear safety and next-generation technology. How hard is it to tell whether the G8 leaders are really devoting resources to the promises made at these meetings? When they list what they are each spending on this or that, we get these maddening annexes where you can't tell what is old and new money; it's general to the point of being meaningless. You are tempted to throw your hands up in the air in exasperation and conclude "you are trying to trick us". But compliance has generally been rising over the years. G8 2005 Gleneagles summit in Scotland had the second-highest compliance rate of a G8 summit^ref. If one of this year's promises could be guaranteed to be met, which would you choose? It would have to be a pledge to educate young girls. The G8, since it was founded, has had a terrible record with gender issues. If there is a silver bullet for development, and even against AIDS, we know it is educating girls. But it has rarely been highlighted by the G8. This summit did a little better than one might have feared, and let's hope that this gets built upon by Angela Merkel, the woman hosting next year's summit.

Web resources : G8 Research Group at the University of Toronto, Canada

• Greenpeace.org - Politics
• Human Shields
• Global Security : reliable security information
• Scientists and Engineers for Change

Copyright © 2001-2014 Daniele Focosi. All rights reserved  |  Terms of use  | Legal notices
About this site  |  Site map  |  Acknowledgements | Open forum  |    |  Current link partners
 Abbreviations and acronyms  |  Medical terminology  |  Add a link  |  Translate   |  Softwares

---