With four years of tidy-up time since weapons inspectors left Iraq, finding remnants of outlawed arms throughout the country would meet anyone’s idea of a tough job.
But advances in technology have given inspectors from the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency the ability to quickly sniff out telltale microbes or molecules that could signify chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
”Sensors have gotten much more sensitive over the last four years,” said Ewen Buchanan, chief representative for the inspection team, which is to return to Iraq on November 27 after being ousted in
1998.
”A lot of equipment that might’ve required a whole room has been shrunk and is more usable in the field.”
In the 1990s, UN inspectors dismantled Iraq’s nuclear programme and destroyed stocks of chemical and biological weapons and longer-range missiles forbidden by postwar UN resolutions.
But some weapons are believed to have survived — or been rebuilt. The 100 or so inspectors — backed by a tough UN Security Council resolution — plan to ferret out any remaining arms by draping Iraq in a surveillance net that knits together particle
detectors, satellite imagery, ground-penetrating radar, sensors and cameras that beam live video back to Vienna.
Most important, experts say, is knowing where to point the gadgets.
Inspectors will need a detective’s intuition, prescient intelligence and tips from Iraqi scientists and defectors. They’ll also need to be able to recognise what, say, a Scud missile’s turbo pump looks like, Buchanan said.
”We can assume Iraqis have moved all sensitive pieces of evidence,” said former UN inspector Victor Mizin. ”Without some data provided by the (Iraqi) government, the inspections won’t find anything meaningful.”
Still, inspectors are bringing in plenty of high-tech sleuthing gear, all paid for — like the entire inspection process — by the sale of Iraqi oil, Buchanan said.
The IAEA’s 20 nuclear weapons inspectors will scout sites with gamma radiation detectors mounted on helicopters or held in the hand, said Peter Rickwood, a representative for the IAEA in Vienna.
The agency owns more than a hundred analysers like the fieldSPEC by Germany’s Target Systemelectronic, a handheld scanner that can detect radioactive isotopes like plutonium-239 or uranium-233.
IAEA inspectors will also wield a portable sensor known as the Ranger, developed by Quantrad Sensors of Madison, Wisconsin. It uses X-ray fluorescence to pick out alloys used in nuclear weapons. The IAEA will install as many as 700 digital cameras in suspected weapons factories that will beam real-time video to the agency’s headquarters. It will also install water sensors in 50 places and air sensors in others, Rickwood said.
While the IAEA tracks nuclear items, the UN inspectors will seek banned missile components and the remnants of President Saddam Hussein’s biological arsenal — which included anthrax and botulinum toxin — and chemical agents sarin, VX and mustard gas.
One useful item, ground-penetrating radar, might be used — perhaps mounted on a helicopter or unmanned drone — to reveal buried weapons and underground bunkers, officials said.
In previous inspections, the radar found buried missile parts that had been smuggled from Russia, Mizin said. One handheld scanner that will probably find its way into Iraq is the $9 000 Chemical Agent Monitor, or CAM, made by Smiths Detection, a British defence contractor. The two kiogramme device uses ion mobility spectrometry — the same technology used in airports to find traces of explosives or drugs on luggage.
Others available for use in Iraq are HANAA and Chemlab handheld detectors built at US Department of Energy.
Inspectors seeking pathogens will probably use portable detectors like Idaho Technology’s $55 000 R.A.P.I.D. scanner. The company donated a pair to the UN and was training inspectors in their use last week, said Kim Woodhouse, the Salt Lake City-based
company’s marketing manager.
The machines can detect nine different bioweapons in about 20 minutes by using PCR, or polymerase chain reaction, which immerses a sample in a chemical bath designed to identify the agent.
The machines are so sensitive that they can detect pathogens if a suspected bioweapons lab has been cleaned up. All they need is a single microorganism, live or dead, said Rocco Casagrande, a UN weapons inspector awaiting dispatch to Iraq. Casagrande currently works as a scientist with Surface Logix, a Boston biotech firm. ”You look for places that haven’t been cleaned very well — any kind of crack or crevice that it could be hiding in,” he said.
If Iraq is determined to conceal some of its weapons, inspectors will have a tougher time finding some programs — like a biological weapons lab — than, say, a nuclear weapons programme that sought to enrich uranium.
Further complicating the search, raw materials for the world’s most lethal weapons have vital civilian uses in medicine, pesticides and vaccines. Some occur in nature.
UN inspectors disregarded a positive sample of anthrax in their last inspection because it could have occurred naturally, said former arms inspector Raymond Zilinskas.
”It might be less important to find a piece of equipment than to find a person who worked on the project and interview them,” Casagrande said. – Sapa-AP