Edition: U.S. / Global

U.S. Vulnerable to Terrorist Chemical Weapons

Published: March 21, 1996

The United States is "very poorly" equipped to defend itself against a terrorist group armed with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, the Director of Central Intelligence, John M. Deutch, testified today.

"The ability of our country or, I might say, any other country in the developed world to protect their infrastructure from a terrorist attack based on nuclear, chemical or biological weapons is very, very small indeed," he told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee.

Having issued that grim warning, Mr. Deutch also said there was very little evidence that nuclear weapons technology had become missing from Russia, none whatsoever that terrorist groups had acquired nuclear materials and little likelihood that a "loose nuke" from Russia would turn up on the underground market anytime soon.

Still, he said the Central Intelligence Agency worried a great deal about the spread of chemical and biological weaponry and knew next to nothing about the plans and the ideas of small terrorist organizations that might use them.

"In a curious way," Mr. Deutch said, "it makes you wish for the old cold war, where you knew the kind of target you were dealing with and the problem you had in penetrating it and issues you were facing." The big picture, he said, "is how lucky we are and how great the threat is."

Today's hearing, led by Senator Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, fell on the first anniversary of the attack on the Tokyo subway system by a fanatic religious group, Aum Shinrikyo.

And Mr. Deutch's testimony made it clear that the threat of an attack by a group armed with chemical weapons -- relatively cheap and easy to make -- was greater than that posed by the threat of "loose nukes" or black-market nuclear weapons technology.

Following Mr. Deutch, Rolf Ekeus, the United Nations' chief weapons inspector, said Iraq may still have as many as 16 missiles armed with biological warheads, despite its insistence that it has destroyed such weapons. He said Baghdad had made the weapons out of spare sparts supplied by Moscow before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Iraq has put "enormous emphasis on keeping a nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capability," he said, and is willing to forgo billions of dollars in oil exports rather than submit to the United Nations demand that it destroy all its missiles. Iraqis blocked United Nations inspectors five times in the last three weeks as they searched for biological weapons there, he said.

Iraq produced thousands of gallons of botulism and anthrax toxins in the months before United States and United Nations forces began the gulf war in January 1991, the C.I.A. said in a report released on Tuesday. The report, by the agency's Nonproliferation Center, said Iraq had produced the nerve gas VX for five years before the gulf war, developed a missile armed with the nerve agent sarin and flight-tested a missile with a chemical warhead in April 1990.