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CNN Live At Daybreak
Bioterrorism: Richard Butler's Views on the Threats of Anthrax and Smallpox
Aired October 19, 2001 - 07:33 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Back here in the United States, those anthrax attacks are topping the list of national concerns. Iraq is one of the countries suspected in the anthrax cases under investigation but is there any way to prove it?
For that and other insights, let's turn to former U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Ambassador Richard Butler who joins us again this morning -- welcome back.
RICHARD BUTLER, FORMER U.N. CHIEF WEAPONS INSPECTOR: Morning, Paula.
ZAHN: Let's talk about what's at the top of the news this morning. Investigators are now looking at the route this mail carrier in New Jersey walked...
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: ... to determine perhaps where some of those letters were mailed from in New Jersey. How promising of a path is this?
BUTLER: I think it's one of the two paths that we have to walk down to get to the bottom of this. One is the one we talked about yesterday, the scientific and technical, the forensic path with respect to anthrax as a substance.
The other is the delivery of the letters, so this is good news. It seems that we may be able to put together the history of where those letters came from, and I gather all three of them are now being seen as related, correct?
ZAHN: Absolutely. The FBI is determining that.
BUTLER: So I think that's promising. That could lead to a person who actually licked that envelope, put the stuff in it and so on. So that's very fruitful, but we still need the other thing, Paula. We still need to know where the substance came from.
ZAHN: Well let's talk about the cold hard reality of that investigation.
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: We know that Iraq bought some nine strains of anthrax...
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: ... from the Unite States and what was the second...
BUTLER: France.
ZAHN: ... country? From France...
BUTLER: France, yes.
ZAHN: ... before the Gulf War. If it was bought here, isn't that going to make it a heck of a lot harder to trace where this stuff came from?
BUTLER: It's not going to be easy. It's a process of elimination. We've got to know what kind of anthrax it was which leads to how it was made and then possibly to the country or person that made it.
Now nine strains is a lot, that's true. There's a particular strain called the Ames strain that is being focused on now, maybe that could leads us towards Iraq.
The fact is, Paula, that 20 years ago this stuff was much more readily available. Many countries were in the business of making biological weapons during the Cold War...
ZAHN: Right.
BUTLER: ... on both sides of that divide, east and west. In 1972, a treaty was done that said no one should do this anymore. We obeyed it. Western countries obeyed it. Russia did not. It signed, but it actually had a secret program going on until 1990 making anthrax, making other substances, maybe even using smallpox. Iraq did the same.
Iraq -- this is incredible, Iraq is a signatory state to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention yet it made this very substantial quantity of those weapons, including anthrax with raw material obtained earlier on, as you rightly point out, in nine different strains. We know what they are but to actually go through the process of elimination and pin it down to Iraq is not going to be easy, but it is the path we have to walk. We have to do this.
ZAHN: It can take, what, months, years, what? What are we talking about?
BUTLER: I don't know,...
ZAHN: Don't know.
BUTLER: ... but certainly months, yes.
ZAHN: You brought up the issue of smallpox.
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: I want to quickly read for you a quote out of an extremely powerful editorial that ran in "The Wall Street Journal" yesterday, and it says smallpox spreads rapidly...
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: ... from person to person, primarily by aerosol expelled from the throats of those infected and by direct contact. An attack would likely consist of a few suicide bioterrorists self-inflicting themselves and walking around New York City. It goes on to say that historically in each case of smallpox you can trigger from 10 to 20 new infections.
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: How nervous does the prospect of this kind of attack make you?
BUTLER: Very.
ZAHN: What's the likelihood of it?
BUTLER: Not large, but what September 11 showed us was many things, obviously, but one of the things it showed us is that there are people out there who are vial and who will sacrifice their own lives in delivering their homicide.
Now the possibility of people being themselves the vector of smallpox walking around and spreading it is something that we now can't ignore. The possibility of the use of smallpox as a weapon is something we can't ignore. Go out there and be terrified tomorrow, no, but what we do need is for the vaccination situation to be greatly improved immediately.
ZAHN: All right, but...
BUTLER: We need millions of more doses than are presently available in (INAUDIBLE).
ZAHN: So are you at all mollified by what Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson says which they're in the process of stockpiling it? He asked Congress for a bunch of money...
BUTLER: Yes.
ZAHN: ... to help create a greater small -- supply of this stuff. Is it going to be soon enough?
BUTLER: It's the right decision, but it needs to be done quickly and I'm not sure precisely whether that's going to be the outcome of what he has said. It is intrinsically the right decision, but we need to change that situation rapidly and big time because we're going to need I think some 40 million doses or more and we don't have that now and so we've got to get that.
ZAHN: Quickly though, your intent is not to alarm people here?
BUTLER: That's right.
ZAHN: You just want to make them clear that the world changed on September 11.
BUTLER: The world changed. People are prepared to commit suicide in their attempt to kill us so we've got to take that seriously. And in the biological area smallpox, vastly more serious than anthrax. We've got a way of dealing with it which is to get the supply of vaccine up and get it up quickly.
ZAHN: Ambassador Butler, good of you to join us.
BUTLER: OK. Thank you.
ZAHN: You're going to be with us a lot in the weeks to come.
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