War Dilemma: Iraq Weapon Disposal 

02:00 AM Sep. 26, 2002 PDT

Despite predictions that U.S. armed forces will roll over any Iraqi resistance, there's a "major wild card" in American war plans, according to defense analysts.

Even if the American military can actually find where Saddam Hussein has hidden his chemical and biological arms -- and that's a big if -- the military has no way of quickly and safely destroying these weapons once they've been tracked down.

Drop a conventional bomb on a biological or chemical weapons storehouse, and "you haven't defeated the weapon, you've caused it to deploy," Dr. Steve Ramberg, chief scientist at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), said.

Spores or gas could be spread up to hundreds of miles around, depending on weather conditions. And with many of Saddam's suspected facilities in and around Baghdad, thousands upon thousands of civilians could suffer and die.

"Saddam is basically turning the entire Iraqi population into a giant human shield," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. "The only way he is going to get out of this movie in the last reel is to provoke the Americans into provoking massive Iraqi civilian casualties."

Such a move would rally the Arab world to Saddam's side, the logic goes, and cause an uproar in an American public already skeptical about an incursion into Iraq.

Defense agencies, including ONR, the Naval Surface Warfare Center and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, are now on a crash course to develop a bomb that can neutralize a chemical or biological cache. The program is known as "Agent Defeat."

And the idea is to burn up any deadly materials -- without blasting them in the air.

By changing the chemistry of the explosive reaction, government scientists are working to slow it down slightly, and make it generate more heat and less pressure, ONR's Ramberg said.

Designed to mount onto the 1-ton BLU-116 or BLU-109 penetrating warheads, the Agent Defeat system will employ small "bomblets" of copper to puncture its target. Then, a 1,000 degree Fahrenheit, long-burning mix of metals -- including titanium, boron and lithium -- will incinerate the hazardous materials. This mix eventually produces chlorine and fluorine gases, which are supposed to disinfect whatever's left.

The system shows promise, according to Andrew Koch, the Washington bureau chief of the military journal Jane's Defense Weekly. But Agent Defeat isn't scheduled to be on the battlefield until the military's 2004 fiscal year.

Koch noted programs such as Agent Defeat that are under the military's Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program have often been quickly ramped up in times of war. Scheduled for a two-year development, the BLU-118/B warhead -- which detonates a solid fuel dust to incinerate everything in an underground bunker or tunnel -- was completed in 60 days, and used in Afghanistan earlier this year.

Even if Agent Defeat can be similarly sped up, it probably won't be enough to knock out Saddam's chemical and biological stockpiles.

There are hundreds of potential targets, Pike noted, many of them buried beneath presidential palaces the size of small towns. And these sites may hold so much deadly gas or bacteria that Agent Defeat would not be enough to take it out.

"If (chemical or biological agents) are in large quantities, and you want to get rid of it fast, I'd be surprised if we have a capability of getting rid of any of it," Ramberg said.

That leaves the U.S. military with two choices. The first is quarantine.

"Anything or anyone going in or out of these sites doesn't live to tell about it," said William Martel, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College.

The second is to send commando teams to storm and secure suspected chemical and biological sites -- an operation fraught with danger.

It's one of several reasons why Pike and others feel that neutralizing Saddam's chemical and biological arms is "on a very short list of wild cards, things that could cause this war to go very badly."