Jonathan Tucker Quotes (12 Quotes)

This island is definitely a potential time bomb, because the shrinking of the sea and the likely emergence within a few years of a land bridge to the mainland and the possibility that insects and rodents, carrying deadly diseases, could cross over and infect the local population.

These weapons were extraordinarily potent. Some of them were actually engineered, genetically, to become more lethal than the strains in nature,

How are we to know which ones an adversary would be likely to pursue.

It's very difficult to guess a biological weapons threat because of the huge number of genetic variations possible.

The State Department is stepping back and the intelligence community is reasserting itself.

We should improve our intelligence about what terrorists are doing in this area, but we shouldn't panic. I think the threat is quite small.

Regardless of what people say, this is very difficult to do, to inflict mass casualties with chemical or biological weapons. One really needs large quantities.

Even a Ph.D. microbiologist doesn't know the dark arts of putting microbes into weapons.

A country's intent is the key in determining whether research is for an offensive or defensive purpose. It's hard to judge the intent of others, and the classified nature of the program could provoke our enemies and lead to an arms race.

The fact that no traces of agent have yet been found and that other chemicals that one would not expect in such a facility have been found do raise doubts about the conclusiveness of the analysis.

Terrorists are opportunistic. They apparently figured it would produce some toxic mess that would do some harm.

They will have sophisticated detection devices -- for example, for biological weapons that can take samples and analyze them rapidly to determine their identity, whether Iraq, for example is producing anthrax at a vaccine plant.