HANAA to aid weapons inspectors

As UN scientists begin work in Iraq this week, searching for weapons of mass destruction, they are hopeful that a new system of on-the-spot analysis of samples will help them avoid the stalemate that eventually forced their predecessors to leave the country four years ago.The search for biological warfare agents is being conducted by UNMOVIC, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Its first inspectors arrived on November 18 and, combined with inspectors seeking chemical and nuclear arsenals, they should number about a hundred by the end of the year.The inspectors are drawn from a UN list of 220 experts, mostly scientists, ready to travel to the country. Their task is daunting but two factors suggest they could succeed where their predecessor body UNSCOR is reckoned to have failed in the 1990s.First, the new rules of engagement drawn up by the UN Security Council do not allow the Iraqis to obfuscate and delay. The UNMOVIC team head Dmitri Perricos said this week that this time "We won't have to wait for two or three hours to get into military premises, which gives plenty of time to get rid of incriminating things." Equally important, the inspectors come with a new array of equipment that will allow near-instant analysis of samples, particularly of small amounts of suspicious biological material. No longer will they have to take samples back to a base laboratory, or even out of the country, to establish if pathogens are present.This time, they can conduct on-the-spot analysis, in the presence of Iraqi technicians, and do follow-up analysis of new samples to confirm their findings. The work of weeks can be telescoped into hours and the possibility for dispute about the findings largely removed.Even before their arrived in Baghdad, the inspectors had a new array of data that they did not have a decade before. Satellite imagery today is double the resolution. And the much-discussed radar systems for checking for underground research and production facilities could also be a great help.But the key new inspection weapon on the ground for the biological weapons inspectors goes by the name of HANAA, the Handheld Advanced Nucleic Acid Analyzer. This piece of kit, about the size of a brick and weighing around a kilogram, has been available only since the summer.It emerged from the US government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which seven years ago set its scientists to developing a rapid, hand-held method for identifying biological toxins. Its original purpose was to arm police and firefighters to identify possible future acts of bioterrorism. It arrived on the market too late for the anthrax attacks in the US last autumn but just in time for the weapons inspectors.The device uses the polymerase chain reaction to amplify DNA fragments of the sample being tested. Within minutes there is enough DNA for the sample to be compared with a DNA probe for anthrax, plague, or whatever. If the DNA matches, a fluorescent tag attached to the probe is released. A single device can analyze four samples at once — provided the operator knows what he or she is looking for.The Livermore laboratory did not wish to discuss HANAA at present. But in a recent interview biomedical scientist Richard Langlois, who helped develop the kit, said: "The system doesn't test for all unknowns. A responder has to decide what kind of pathogens to test for ahead of time and set up the system accordingly."But, he continued, "the HANAA system could, in principle, detect as few as 10 individual bacteria in one-hundredth of a millilitre [of liquid] in less than 30 minutes. It could be the difference between doing an analysis in an hour and having to send samples back to the US."Livermore scientists have also been developing another piece of kit that could be left behind in any suspect facility as a kind of smoke detector for pathogens. The Autonomous Pathogen Detection System (APDS) is an aerosol collector originally designed for installing in public places such as airports or conference halls, where it would sound an alarm if it detected a biological agent. But equally it could be left behind by weapons inspectors, hooked to a computer and phone line to sound an alarm at some remote destination. The system is reportedly not yet ready for service but could be available by next summer.Such equipment represents "a powerful new means of verification," says the chief weapons inspector Hans Blix. And there could be a lot to verify. Blix's predecessors at UNSCOM may have destroyed Iraq's main biological warfare facility, at al-Hakam in the desert south of Baghdad, before they left. This supposed agrochemicals plant was actually producing anthrax spores and botulinum toxin. But they also gathered evidence that even in the mid-1990s the Iraqis were adapting a series of other civilian facilities for the production of biological warfare agents — evidence they did not have time to act on before their departure. One of the UNMOVIC inspectors' first tasks, says former UNSCOM inspector Jonathan Tucker, now of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, will be to return to these facilities, in many of which they left behind monitoring equipment. The facilities include: a foot-and-mouth vaccine institute at al-Dawrah, where a five-year investigation by UNSCOM finally won an Iraqi admission that it had produced botulinum toxin; the al-Fudaliyah research centre where the Iraqis also eventually admitted that aflatoxin was produced; and the Amariyah Sera and Vaccine Institute at Abu Ghraib, used for storing biological agents and for genetic engineering research that UNSCOM came to believe was intended to develop bio-warfare agents. "A vaccine plant is inherently dual-use, so the same equipment used to make a vaccine could also be used to make anthrax," says Tucker.Since UNSCOM's departure, Western intelligence has pinpointed a series of other innocent-sounding biological facilities that could be in the weapons-manufacture business, at least part-time. These include a castor oil factory at Fallujah, which was damaged in allied bombing in 1998 but has since been rebuilt. Castor bean pulp residues can be used to make ricin, which Iraq is known to have manufactured.And a British government report released recently says Iraq has "started to produce biological warfare agents in mobile production facilities." This new project, it said, has being undertaken since 1995 by Dr Rihab Taha, widely acknowledged as the architect of the entire biological warfare programme both before and after the Gulf War. Tracking down such facilities will clearly add an extra dimension to the inspectors' work.Does Iraq still hold old stockpiles of biological weapons that need to be located? Probably, say the British. The smoking gun is two tonnes of growth media, which Iraq bought before 1991 and which have never been satisfactorily accounted for. "Iraq cannot explain the discrepancies between the amount of growth media it procured and the amounts of [biological] agent it admits to having manufactured [and destroyed]," say the British.The inspectors are also likely to go in search of further evidence that the Iraqi military put biological warfare agents into missiles. Back in the 1990s, after much arm-twisting, officials told UNSCOM that they had filled 25 warheads with anthrax, botulinum and aflatoxin, and had prepared another 183 biological weapons for delivery. Few doubt that Iraq has used the opportunity of almost five years without inspections to resume similar preparations.

HANAA to aid weapons inspectors

UN inspectors start the search for bioweapons in Iraq this week helped by new technology.

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