From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Jan 27 2003 - 12:33:52 MST
On Mon, 27 Jan 2003 Artillo5@cs.com wrote:
> Seeing as we have a fairly accurate list of what Iraq seems to have and not
> have, I want to see the United States' list as well. Does anybody have
> accurate data on how many nuclear, chemical, and biological warheads or
> related components we have? THAT would surely be an interesting list.
Artillo, I would have to go and do some serious investigative work
(multi-hours if not days) to find some concrete references to
answer these questions in detail. But I can answer them "approximately"
from my knowledge and personal reveiw of some of the relevant
literature.
The U.S. has an active program for the disassembly of nuclear weapons
dictated by the various Start/"arms reduction" treaties.
This seems to be a useful URL:
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cps-nuke.htm
I believe much of the nuclear weapons disassembly is taking place
at the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas. Now precisely what is done
with the Uranium/Plutonium after disassembly I don't know. I would
presume it is classified information.
But it is a given that both the U.S. and Russia have thousands
of nuclear weapons. It seems likely that other nuclear powers,
e.g. the U.K. and France probably have hundreds of nuclear weapons.
India and Pakistan probably have dozens.
The U.S. did develop chemical and biological weapons in the '60s
and '70s. However, the U.S. military seems to have disliked them
due to their lack of specificity. That is probably a primary reason
why the U.S. signed onto the "Biological Weapons Treaty" and began
to destroy these weapons many years ago. I believe that process
is largely complete (though to be certain you should research it).
Biological entities that could cause significant harm would be
classified such that they could only be dealt with in P4 class
facilities in the U.S. There are only few (perhaps a dozen?)
such labs in the U.S. and they are not designed to manufacture
large quantities of these agents. [Bottom line: I believe the
U.S. has largely destroyed any of its biological weapons -- or
has a concrete plan for doing so. Chemical weapons may be a
bit more problematic, but I believe they have been/are on the
same path.]
However, Russia did develop some quite sophisticated biological
weapons during the cold war. To the best of my knowledge there
are *tons* of those weapons that are still in storage. Russia
is supposed to be disposing of them but as with many things in
Russia they are still in negotiations as to who will pay for them
to do this.
Robert
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