[Rhodes22-list] Another Fearless Prediction

[Roger Pihlaja]

Brad,

Since your news story seems to have vindicated the prediction I made last summer regarding smuggling WMD's out of Iraq into Syria & Lebanon, let me make another fearless prediction.  By, the way Bill, you are mistaken regarding the shelf life & stability of chemical & biological weapons.  They are both plenty stable enough to be transported long distances over the desert.  If they weren't, they would never survive the heat & pressure of the explosive used to disperse them when the warhead goes off.  Anthrax, for example, is a bacteria that lives naturally in the soil by forming spores that are remarkably resistant to the environment.  So-called "weaponized" Anthrax is actually a mixture of spray dried Anthrax spores stuck to the surface of particles of an inert low density substrate such as finely ground cellulose.  The trick is to get the particle size distribution just right so the particles tend to get lofted into the air, float around on air currents for long distances, & eventually get inhaled by potential victims.  In the moist, warm conditions inside the respiratory tract, the Anthrax spores spring back to life & infect the victim.  Chemical weapons are usually of the so-called "binary" type wherein the warhead actually contains two compartments.  Each compartment contains a reactive precusor.  When the warhead is fired, the precursor chemicals are mixed together & chemically react to form the final toxin, such as a nerve agent.  Although the final toxin may have a short half life, each of the precursor chemicals is quite stable over long periods of time.

I just heard a news story that the US State Dept has approved the sale of several hundred million dollars worth of "penetrating munitions" to Israel.  Now what do you suppose Israel would want with a boatload of bunker busters?  Unless Iran opens up its nuclear program to permit on-site inspections, I predict Israel will do a coordinated air assault to take out about a dozen key Iranian nuclear facilities all at the same time, in a scaled-up version of a similar operation they pulled on Iraq in 1985(I think that was the year?).  I predict this will happen in less than a year from now.  The United States will chastise Israel in public for this action; but, in private we will be thanking them for doing our dirty work for us.

If the Iraqi WMD's really are in Syria &/or Lebanon, I hope we've captured them by then.  Or maybe the approval of this sale of penetrating munitions to Israel means they've already been secured by special forces or some other means?  The general public may never hear the full story on this one.

Roger Pihlaja
S/V Dynamic Equilibrium