posted
This is scary enough. Yet do such bioweapons exist that they would actually do noticeable damage when leaking out of a barrel in the middle of a desert? Even yer regular Omega Strain scifi virus would have a tough time spreading out, let alone a typical real-world bioweapon that has to be poured directly onto the victim or his food.
This week, the caches of discarded mustard gas and assorted other chemical weapons at the bottom of the Baltic sea once again made news, as a curiosity item in Newsweek, I think. A lot of poison is leaking out, sometimes causing injuries. Yet the best bet is to do nothing - not just because we lack the means to do anything, but also because all that poison *is* just a drop in the sea, literally.
A bioweapon in the sand is probably as much a "weapon" as a gun stored in a robber's garage in a can of paint makes him an "armed" robber.
Saltah'na
Chinese Canadian, or 75% Commie Bastard.
Member # 33
posted
quote:Originally posted by Mountain Man: The real worry is what if we stop looking too soon. Some of the stuff the Russians tried to destroy many years ago by filling the containers with pure bleach was found to still have viable spores. A time bomb of rusting containers may be just below the surface and that is a lot of country to hide something in. As long as the containers stay sealed there is no problem but what about next year?
I would agree with you on that fact.
Just because I was against the war does not necessarily mean that the inspections must not stop.
-------------------- "And slowly, you come to realize, it's all as it should be, you can only do so much. If you're game enough, you could place your trust in me. For the love of life, there's a tradeoff, we could lose it all but we'll go down fighting...." - David Sylvian FreeSpace 2, the greatest space sim of all time, now remastered!
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
Mountain Man
Ex-Member
posted
Bio weapons need not be poured onto the victim or the food source. One accidently infected host can spread disease to all he comes in contact with. Chemical weapons if released in a city could cause many thousands of causualties. A recent chemical spill in a city near my home caused panic and evacuation of thousands. The Iraq military were adept at hiding things. The discovery of Jet fighter aircraft buried in the sand proves that. The threat of the WMDs has cost both sides a great deal already. They are weapons of terror pure and simple.
IP: Logged
posted
Of course, to put things in perspective, there exist today vast reservoirs of viciously lethal micro-organisms, which occasionally overwhelm our practically non-existent containment strategies and wipe out whole villages over night. We call them rain forests. Fortunately for us it turns out that viciously lethal micro-organisms have their own problems.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
We aren't burning down rain forests we are roasting viciously lethal micro-organisms!!!!
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
| IP: Logged
posted
I suppose that's as good an excuse as any...
500th post in this thread!!!!
-------------------- "I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman, which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Jubal Harshaw
Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged
capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
Member # 709
posted
Hans Blix said today that he thinks Iraq really did do away with their WMD's ten years ago but maintained the apearance of having them as a deterrant to invasion.
Kinda backfired there, huh?
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
Not when your real purpose for invading Iraq is pursuing a personal vendetta against Saddam, the guy who tried to get your dad. When that is the case, as it was here , the immediate excuse / reason / justification for invasion is unimportant and can be molded afterward in exactly the ways we are seeing from this administration.
All they needed was an excuse they could rally the American people behind. Or more cynically put, one you could sell the American people:
Andrew Card recently acknowledged that "from a marketing standpoint, you don't roll out a new product in August."
Simply saying that Saddam is a bad / evil guy was wasn�t going to cut it. There are plenty of bad guys out there and no one is suggesting we invade their countries, loose hundreds of lives, kill thousands of people, and spent billions of dollars to eliminate them Even super hawk, Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged as much.
quote:The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.
Rather, you needed an immediate cause you could get the people behind, one they were willing to sacrifice lives and treasure for. So you tell the people unequivocally that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction aimed that them and that not only is he willing to use them, but he can use them in 45 minutes.
You scare the pants of the populous by telling them that Saddam has been trying to acquire nuclear material from Niger.
You hint at, yet never publically deny, a connection between Saddam and the attacks of 9/11 so that two years on, 60% of the people believe there is a connection. After all, those attacks are the reason we revved up the war machine in the first place and give the administration a great excuse to go after Iraq.
All this allows Mr. Bush to change to justification from 'Saddam has them pointed at us' to 'Saddam had a program.' The difference between the two requires a word bigger than huge.
The point is, now that the administration can't find the WMDs, it doesn't much matter, because it didn't much matter in the first place.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
Saltah'na
Chinese Canadian, or 75% Commie Bastard.
Member # 33
posted
Jay: It's the oil, stupid.
-------------------- "And slowly, you come to realize, it's all as it should be, you can only do so much. If you're game enough, you could place your trust in me. For the love of life, there's a tradeoff, we could lose it all but we'll go down fighting...." - David Sylvian FreeSpace 2, the greatest space sim of all time, now remastered!
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
So. . . A Jordanian Islamic fundamentalist who heads a group based in northern Iraq (not exactly a bastion of Saddam control at the best of times) kills a US diplomat in Jordan (bit of a difference between 'helped to orchestrate' and 'ordered' by the way). Said group has ties with Al-Qaeda (clever word, ties - can mean all sorts of things). This Jordanian received medical treatment in Baghdad, and we all know how no-one ever got to go see a doctor in Iraq without first getting a note from Saddam himself.
And THATS one of their ties (it's that word again) between Saddam and Al-Qaeda? Hell, I can link Osama Bin-Laden to Kevin Bacon with less degrees of separation than that!
posted
Heve you seen He said She said? That's an act of terrorism unto itself.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
http://www.millennium-debate.org/suntel20feb3.htmhttp://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1190.htm Background information. These links tell a bit about what happens when Chemical weapons are left laying around rather than being properly disposed of. I first heard about the Disaster at Bari from an elderly italian survivor. Casualties among the civilian population are not mentioned in most accounts.
IP: Logged
Topic Closed
Printer-friendly view of this topic