Homeland Security

DATE=1/13/03

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=OPPENHEIMER TERRORISM

NUMBER=3-483

BYLINE=REBECCA WARD

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

INTERNET=

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HOST: British police have arrested six more people on terrorism charges, although a police spokesman would not confirm that the arrests are linked to the recent discovery of the deadly toxin ricin in a London apartment. Andrew Oppenheimer (AH-pen-HY-mer) is a consultant on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons for Jane's Information Group -- which publishes Janes Defence Weekly. Speaking by phone from London, Mr. Oppenheimer tells News Now's Rebecca Ward that Ricin is not very hard to create.

MR. OPPENHEIMER: It is easy to get hold of the raw material, which is castor beans. And castor beans are made, in a manufacturing process, into castor oil. And in the process of doing that, you can produce ricin. It is one of the byproducts of turning the castor beans into oil. And the amount you can get is up to 15-percent in that particular process. It does not take very much skill to make. A chemistry undergraduate could probably do it, and a chemistry graduate [student] certainly could do it.

MS. WARD: It is widely available then?

MR. OPPENHEIMER: Yes. You can get these beans from various countries in the world. I have never tried to get hold of them, but I think if you wanted to, you would not have very much trouble.

MS. WARD: How dangerous is ricin? How much would it take to inflict harm on a number of people? And what does it do?

MR. OPPENHEIMER: Ricin is highly toxic. It is many thousand times more toxic than cyanide. And a very small amount, one-tenth of a gram, is lethal to an individual. And that would be probably most lethal if it was injected. And it could also be breathed in if it was in the form of a spray, an aerosol.

However, having said this, this is not a weapon of choice for mass destruction, because you would need a lot of it to produce mass casualties. So, if I give you a comparison with anthrax, for example, you would need about four-metric tons of ricin to achieve the same effect as one-kilo of anthrax.

MS. WARD: Of course this is purely speculation, but if indeed these people who were arrested for a possible terrorism plot were planning to carry out an attack with ricin, what would they have done?

MR. OPPENHEIMER: Well, if they are tied in with al-Qaida, then they would be planning to make lots of it, or at least enough of it to target possibly people on the Underground, if they were going to try to make it into a spray, or if they wanted to assassinate specific people, they did not need all that much to do that. And a lot depends on how much more of the ricin has been made other than the amount that was originally found in London.

MS. WARD: You may have heard on the news, the United States has a vaccine for smallpox prepared, first, to emergency services personnel and armed forces.

MR. OPPENHEIMER: Yes.

MS. WARD: So, is Britain doing something similar as far as vaccination?

MR. OPPENHEIMER: Well, we have to take each agent in turn. First of all, ricin does not have an antidote. So, that is lot number one. And then, number two, smallpox, the government is ordering smallpox vaccines from a contractor, and I believe that there are still other firms that are [in the frame] to supply more vaccine. And we are looking at vaccinating the first-responders in the way that they are in the United States, but there is no talk of going any further than just doing the emergency personnel.

And there is a big argument going on, which I have written about myself, the argument for mass vaccination. Because if something like smallpox, which is the ultimate bioweapon, was to be released, then the infectious levels of that are so much that just the first-responders, there would not be enough to actually vaccinate them. It is the most infectious of all, other than the flu.

And if you were to genetically modify flu, then you really would have a bioweapon of mass destruction. But smallpox is already a weapon of mass destruction, even if it is not modified. You would have to vaccinate everybody to make sure that it did not claim the millions of lives that it could potentially claim, because it kills a third of its victims.

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