WEB NOTES

 The Iraqi VX Warhead Threat: Hype vs. Reality

by Elisa D. Harris
January 30, 2003

To bolster the Administration’s case against Iraq, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice in the January 23 New York Times cited former UNSCOM chairman Richard Butler’s estimate that a VX missile warhead launched at a major city "could kill up to one million people." However, Rice misrepresents Butler’s analysis, at least as outlined in his book, The Greatest Threat, and neither Rice nor Butler appear to have fully considered the range of factors that can influence the outcome of any given chemical attack.

In his book, Butler does not state that a VX warhead would result in up to one million deaths. Rather, he notes that a single 140 liter warhead would contain enough agent to produce that effect. But the fact that a warhead contains a million lethal doses does not mean that a million people would be killed if such a warhead were deployed. As various commentators have pointed out, the outcome of any chemical attack will vary greatly depending on 1) the purity and form of the agent; 2) the dispersal mechanism; 3) weather and meteorological conditions; 4) the terrain of the target area; and, 5) population density and disposition.

In any strike by a warhead using a "point detonation and burster" technique, the fuzing method identified by Butler, a significant portion of the VX would be destroyed upon impact and by the bursting charge itself. Those closest to the detonation point would be exposed to multiple lethal doses, thus reducing the amount of agent left to cause casualties further downwind. In an urban area, any agent that impregnated paved surfaces or nearby buildings’ masonry structures would be unlikely to cause a wide-spread, high-order vapor hazard. Residual contamination would exist, but could be dealt with by cordoning off areas prior to remediation efforts.

In short, up to a million casualties could result, in theory, from a single Iraqi warhead attack. But the reality is likely to be far, far less. In 1993, the Office of Technology Assessment modeled the impact of the release of the nerve agent sarin from a SCUD-like missile over Washington, DC. It concluded that, under average weather conditions (neither best nor worst case), about 600-2,000 people would be killed. Although sarin is approximately an order of magnitude less lethal than VX, the OTA study assumed a warhead twice as large (300 kg) as the warhead used in Butler’s example. The OTA analysis also assumed that all of the agent in the warhead was aerosolized and that it was released at the optimum height above the ground (for lethal effects).

As the chemical attacks against Halabja in 1988 made clear, any large-scale chemical attack on a populated area would be horrendous. Rice, as both an academic and a senior policy maker with access to the full range of government resources routinely used to estimate threats, should not mortgage her credibility or that of the U.S. Government by making excessive claims about a single warhead’s destructiveness. The reality is bad enough.