MILITARY OPERATIONS
SMUGGLING STILL FINDS A WAY THROUGH To acquire CBRN materials, rogue states use complex supply chains. Countering weapons capabilities involves tracing the transportation of illicit movements of goods. Tracking the many links in the chains requires constant intelligence efforts, lengthy investigations, surveillance, and interagency cooperation as the networks extend beyond national and transcontinental borders, as well as in cyberspace. In January a Maryland-based Pakistani national, Nadeem
Akhtar, was sentenced for plotting to use his business, Computer Communications USA, to export $400,000 worth of radiation sensors, calibration equipment, specialized resins, attenuators and surface refining materials to Pakistan, in violation of US nonproliferation controls.
At the heart of many such cases is document falsification and this one echoed the earlier revelations in 2004 of the
international nuclear proliferation network run over two decades by the Pakistani scientist A Q Khan.
Akhtar admitted acquiring export-controlled products from firms in six US states and falsifying records of the real recipients so that the items could be transported via shell companies in the UAE to their final destination.
The chain included a trading firm in Karachi, which instructed Akhtar and which claimed to have received its directions from people inside the Pakistan government.
The actual importers of the materials included the Pakistani Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission and the first atomic energy facility at the Chashma nuclear complex, but it is suspected that they ended up at Khushab, which produces plutonium for nation’s increasing nuclear arsenal, or to a potential reprocessing site at Chashma.
(main picture) Burning of Iraq’s Al-Hussain missile chemical warheads after the first Gulf War and subsequent explosion of the fuel. OPCW (left) Weapons confiscated by the US Army in Iraq. Wikileak files from 2007 show hard evidence of US troops unearthing suspected Al Qaeda caches on Iraqi soil. Spc. Daniel Herrera, The US Army (right) A U.S. Army chemical weapons crew takes samples from an M55 rocket. U.S. Army
In the heat of protests and uprisings there
is so much chaos and death that incidents related to anything with a CBRN element may not attract attention or be documented. In January the Egyptian press reported that radioactive materials were taken from the partly completed Dabaa nuclear energy installation near the Mediterranean Sea, during a protest. Apart from removing a locked container used to hold radioactive substances, a locked box was broken into and some of its radioactive contents removed. It was also reported that staff at the Dabaa facility were staying away due to the declining state of
security in the area. Such incidents were rife in the immediate post-invasion period in Iraq in 2003. The main victims are likely to be civilians who unwittingly come into contact with the materials, or criminals trying to sell on the materials to insurgents for use in RDDs.
Syria: real WMD Unlike Iraq, Syria has real WMD. Concerns grew from mid-March – as the government’s crushing of the uprising intensified to the point of all-out civil war - about possible use by either side of the conflict of Syria’s substantial and well-developed arsenal of CBW. This
40 | CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL & NUCLEAR WARFARE | 2012/02
exemplified the problems of unstable or ‘rogue’ states with CBRN and the potentially disastrous effects on civilians and serving troops in the region. Israel bombed the Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007, but that was just one location – and the CBW programme has allegedly continued at many more. Syria has not signed the CWC (Chemical
Weapons Convention), so precise data about its CW are not confirmed. It is, nevertheless, reputed by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) to consist of several hundred tons of sarin nerve agent and mustard blister agent with as many as 50
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