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April 25, 2002
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April 25, 2002
BioWarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Home Brew?
By Francis A. Boyle
[Editors' Note: What follows is the transcript of a faculty
lecture given by Professor Boyle at the University of Illinois,
followed by a few questions and answers.]
Last fall we saw an anthrax attack on the United
States government that obviously was designed to shut the government
down at a very critical moment in our history as a republic,
that is immediately after September 11 when Congress should have
been in session, making very critical decisions on oversight
of the executive branch of government. This did not occur because
of these anthrax attacks. I am going to work up to what I think
really happened then to the extent anything can be figured out
at this point in time. But to do that I will have to go through
some historical background on the law and policy and science
of biological weapons here in the United States.
Origins of
BWC
We had at least going back to World War
II an extremely aggressive offensive biological warfare program.
Finally, Nixon and Kissinger decided to get rid of this offensive
biological warfare program. Two grounds. One, it was counterproductive,
just militarily, you could not really control these things. Two,
we had a massive superiority in nuclear weapons anyway. Bios
were the poor man's atom bomb and we wanted to get rid of them
to deprive anyone out there in the third world of a weapon of
mass extermination. Nixon unilaterally ordered the termination
of our biowarfare program for offensive purposes. Nevertheless
the CIA continued anyway despite the President's order. Eventually
we supported and became a party to the Biological Weapons Convention
of 1972 that prohibits research, development, testing of biological
weapons, agents, components, etc., except for prophylactic and
defensive purposes. And at least after the treaty came into effect
we wound down our offensive biological warfare program. There
was still a CBW unit there lurking in the Pentagon that had been
starved of funds, wanting to come back to life. I am not sure
exactly what the CIA was doing.
Reagan
Then the Reagan administration came to
power. And I point out that many of the same people in the Reagan
administration dealing with these issues are now back under Bush
Jr. The Reagan administration took the position that we were
going to exploit our superior technology with respect to weapons
across the board. Whether it was nuclear weapons, chemical weapons,
biological weapons, space weapons, it did not matter. And they
began to pour massive amounts of money, hundreds of millions
of dollars, into researching and developing what they said were
defensive biological agents.
Now what had happened in the meantime
to the technology after Nixon was that DNA genetic engineering
had come to the forefront. The technology itself, that is gene
splicing. And the Reagan administration decided to exploit it.
They engaged in dual-use research and development of biological
agents, that is research that could be put to both offensive
uses and defensive uses at the same time. The technology is the
same.
To have a biological weapon as a weapon
you need three things. First you need an agent. Second you need
a delivery device. And third you need a vaccine to vaccinate
your own troops and your own people. Using a biological agent
you are going to send an army in there, they are going to occupy
the territory, they need a vaccine.
The way the Reagan administration did
this was to say that we are going to go out and investigate every
exotic disease you could possibly imagine for the purpose of
developing vaccines to deal with them despite the fact that there
was no real evidence that anyone else was investigating these
things and therefore we fit within the loophole of the Biological
Weapons Convention for prophylactic purposes. While of course
the technology to get the vaccine, using the DNA gene splicing,
is exactly the same technology to get the agent. Indeed you use
the DNA gene splicing to get the agent first and then you develop
the vaccine. After you have created the agent then you create
the vaccine and then you come up with an aerosol delivery device.
Then you have a bioweapon.
U of Illinois
Contracts
We had two of these contracts here on
the University of Illinois campus. I have read these contracts.
They were clearly biological warfare contracts and the tip-off
on any of these contracts is they call for the development in
the contract of an aerosol delivery device. That is how biological
warfare agents are delivered, by air. All of this type of research
then was being farmed out all over the country to large numbers
of life-science researchers. Meanwhile the Reagan administration
was cutting back funding for the National Science Foundation,
on other hand. So what we had was second and third rate scientists
who were no longer able to get money in the life-sciences from
NSF had to go to the Pentagon in order to get funding. Now the
Council for Responsible Genetics then responded to this by putting
out a Pledge saying the signers would not accept any money from
the Pentagon for any reason.
You can read these biowarfare contracts.
It clearly says "military justification" for this contract.
Indeed the ones here on campus, they were gassing pigs and sheep
and rabbits over there at VetMed. And the contract said that
we picked pigs because they have a circulatory system and respiratory
system most akin to human beings. You can read it there in the
contract.
CRG Congressional
Briefing
Now the other thing the Council for Responsible
Genetics did was to have a Congressional Briefing on Capitol
Hill on September 13, 1985. They asked me to go in there and
explain what was going on here, what the Reagan people really
were up to and how dangerous this really was. Notice we were
deliberately proliferating this technology. We were encouraging
these scientists to go out and develop this dual-use technology,
we were funding it. It was going out all over the country and
indeed around the world.
So I went to Washington and I gave this
briefing, I answered questions, went through the whole thing
and said we really need domestic implementing legislation for
the Biological Weapons Convention to make it a serious felony
in order to stop this research because it is too dangerous. You
have proliferation of biowarfare technology. Even the safety,
if you analyze these contracts, the safety levels were atrocious.
You have these dirty little agents out there that could easily
escape into the environment.
Bio-Weapons
Anti-terrorism Act
So then I was requested by CRG to draft
the legislation to deal with this problem and in particular the
abuse of DNA genetic engineering technology for biowarfare purposes.
I worked in conjunction with the CRG scientists and we also worked
with the biotech industry. At that time the biotech industry
had no desire to get into biowarfare technology -- Monsanto and
the others. So they supported our legislation.
What happened? The Reagan administration
fought it tooth and nail. They knew full well that my legislation
was designed to stop what they were doing at the Pentagon. I
made it very clear that research, development, testing of such
biowarfare agents would be punished by life in prison. I do not
believe in the death penalty for any reason so I did not put
it in there. But it is in there now - life in prison.
What we did not know at that time when
the Reagan people were fighting us tooth and nail is that they
had also authorized at least forty shipments of weapons specific
biological agents to Iraq from the American Type Culture Collection,
which is a big scientific institute. It has for scientific purposes
cultures of every type of exotic disease in the world. You name
it, it is there. It was clear the Reagan administration was shipping
all this to Iraq knowing full well Iraq was going to develop
biological weapons and use them against Iran, and yet they did
it anyway. Now at the time my legislation was coming through
we did not know this. It came out later. So we got nowhere with
the legislation.
Bush Sr.
Bush Sr. was elected and then the question
was whether should we continue under Bush Sr. or just junk the
legislation. I took the position: Look, the Reagan administration
also developed a new generation of chemical weapons - binaries.
It was hotly contested and CRG opposed that too. It came down
to a tie vote in the Senate and George Bush as Vice President
broke the tie vote in favor of the binary chemical weapons. However,
his mother then publicly stated she was very disappointed. I
said my guess is that really indicates he is trying to send a
message here and that really indicates where he stands. So I
argued we should go forward with Bush Sr., maybe we will see
a change in policy.
To the credit of Bush Sr., the moment
they came into power all opposition to our legislation stopped
by the Executive Branch. We were advised, however, that it would
help on the Hill if we would repackage it as a piece of legislation
designed to deal with biological warfare out there in the Third
World. That there were the crazies out there in the Third World
who were going to develop biological weapons and our legislation
was designed to deal with that. So I said fine, I am concerned
about the crazies in the Pentagon and the private sector working
with them, but if that is the advice we get from the Hill then
fine. So we redid it, we did not change the legislation just
repackaged the way we presented it and finally it was adopted
unanimously by both Houses of Congress, signed into law by President
Bush Sr., and he to his credit, wound down this program.
Iraq
However to get back to the biological
agents shipped to Iraq. As you know in the fall of 1990 as we
were going to war against Iraq, Bush and Cheney ordered all U.S.
armed forces to take experimental medical vaccines for anthrax
and botulin. I had no idea why but the reason why was very simple.
It came out later. Under Reagan they had shipped these biological
agents to Iraq, Iraq had weaponized them, and we knew full well
our troops would be vulnerable. So using some of the same technologies,
we put these experimental medical vaccines into our own troops,
500,000 of them. Today they suffer from the Gulf War Syndrome.
The Pentagon still denies it, but it is a lie.
Indeed, I worked over in Britain on an
expose over there "The Dirty War" a documentary film.
Finally the British government admitted there is such a thing
as the Gulf War Syndrome. I personally believe they go back to
these vaccines. They were experimental medical vaccines in violation
of Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation. I argued this point
in the court martial proceedings of Captain Doctor Yolanda Huett-Vaughn,
who was court martialed in part for refusing to give these vaccines.
And later Senator Jay Rockefeller held hearings in which he also
accused Bush, Cheney and Powell of committing a Nuremberg crime
on our own troops. Today approximately a minimum of 50,000 U.S.
military personnel suffer from what is called the Gulf War Syndrome.
The tip off here, the French Army rejected the vaccines because
they knew they were experimental. They had been burned once before
in IndoChina. Of course, there were multiple agents that worked
there - depleted uranium, carcinogenic substances in the air,
etc.
Clinton
Then what happened? For some reason,
in the last two years of the Clinton administration, Clinton
decided to get back into this dual-use biological warfare work.
And again began putting hundreds of millions of dollars into
the stuff, to again research and develop every known exotic disease
one could think of, developing the components that then get turned
over to the Pentagon where they could be assembled into weapons.
This is going on as we speak now.
Finally, the New York Times broke the
story. Yes, the United States government is violating the Biological
Weapons Convention. The CIA operation Bacchus. We are developing
an immune resistant strain of anthrax with DNA genetic engineering.
We have developed super weapons grade anthrax in quantities and
strengths that have no legitimate defensive purpose at all. We
had a bomb factory down there where we are simulating the production
of biological agents. It is very clear that we are now back into
the business of research and development of biological agents,
in clearcut violation of the Biological Weapons Convention and
my statute the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act.
Bush Jr.
That then is why the Bush Jr. administration
repudiated the verification protocol for the Biological Weapons
Convention. These negotiations had been underway for quite some
time. The Convention has no verification provisions. Finally,
this Fall all of a sudden out of nowhere, Bush Jr. repudiated
the whole thing and tried to kill it. Why? Because it is clear
we are involved in this type of work. Whether the Pentagon, the
CIA, or their contractors, or all of them.
Anthrax Attacks
Now this gets us to the anthrax attacks
on the United States government. Obviously it was not clear what
was going on, at least to me, until the New York Times published
the technology behind the Daschle letter. The technology behind
the Daschle letter, later the Leahy letter, was very sophisticated.
Trillion spores per gram. That is super-weapons grade. Second,
tied in there was a special treatment to eliminate electrostatic
charges so it would float in the air. You have to have special
equipment, special treatment, special everything. The only people
who would have the capability to do this would be individuals
who either are currently employed by the Department of Defense
or the CIA doing biowarfare work, or had been employed by the
Department of Defense or the CIA doing biowarfare work. And would
probably have access to one of the government's biowarfare labs.
This stuff is so dangerous. You could not do it unless you were
wearing one of these space suits. And there are only a handful
of these labs in the country.
FBI
That very day I called up a senior official
in the FBI who handles terrorism and counter-terrorism, he knows
who I am because of the work I have done in this field, and discussed
this matter with him. I said: Look there are very few people
who have this capability. I have a list of them under the Reagan
administration. That is where you have to start to look. I went
down the list and I said you know, this person worked with this
government lab, that person worked with that government lab,
etc., etc. He said, well, we are coordinating our efforts with
Ft. Deitrick. I said well, Ft. Deitrick could very well be the
problem here. They are one of the few labs with the capability
to do something like this. And you could have a Timothy McVeigh
type situation where someone who was once on the reservation
is now off the reservation. So you need to start looking at this
list of these people who have worked with the Pentagon, I do
not have a list of the CIA people, and my guess is you are going
to find your person. He told me he would pass the information
along to the right people.
This was just before I ran the CRG workshop
at Harvard on Biowarfare the first weekend in November. There
my colleague Jonathan King, Professor of Microbiology at MIT
and the head of their electron-microscope lab, publicly stated
the same exact conclusion independently of me. He had reached
the exact same conclusion that I had. Likewise Dr. Barbara Rosenberg
who is now with the Federation of American Scientists, she independently
of both King and me later reached the exact same conclusion,
that whoever did this was working for the United States government
now, in the Pentagon or the CIA or had in the immediate past,
and must have had access to a U.S. biowarfare lab. I was interviewed
on FOX, I was interviewed on BBC World Service and I was interviewed
on Pacific Network in Washington DC.
Cover-Up
What happened? Soon thereafter the FBI
authorized the destruction of the anthrax culture collection
at Ames, Iowa. It had been determined that this was Ames-strain
anthrax. The FBI authorized the destruction of that entire supply.
It is obvious it was a cover-up. If you had access to that supply
you could do a genetic reconstruction of the origins of the Daschle
letter. If you had access to the Ames collection scientists would
be able to do a genetic reconstruction of where the Daschle and
Leahy agents originated.
I believe the FBI knows exactly who was
behind this attack and they have probably concluded that yes,
it was someone who was currently involved in illegal and criminal
biological warfare research by the United States government.
Either the Pentagon or the CIA or one of their private contractors.
And for that reason they are not going to apprehend and they
are not going to indict him because obviously he would spill
the beans on the whole thing and implicate the Pentagon, CIA,
whoever is behind this. So this is where we are today, where
the FBI says well we are working on it, but of course, that is
ridiculous.
Anti-terrorism
and the Effective Death Penalty Act
As for my statute: when it came out that
the Reagan administration had authorized the 40 or so shipments
of weapons specific agents to Iraq, we never intended to impede
legitimate scientific research let alone the biotech industry.
So I never in the drafting of this assumed that American Type
Culture Collection would be complicit in shipping weapons specific
biological agents to Iraq at the behest of the Reagan administration.
So when this all came out my statute was amended by the Anti-terrorism
and Effective Death Penalty Act to deal with this problem, that
is to deal with legitimate scientific institutes like American
Type Culture somehow getting involved in biological warfare.
So it was amended and it is currently being amended again to
deal with the problem that you have so many people out there
who are capable of doing this type of work, or at least work
not as sophisticated as the Daschle and Leahy letters, but certainly
capable of producing a weapon and killing people.
Well, why don't I take any questions
that people might have.
Hijacker and
Anthrax in Florida?
The Daschle and Leahy letters were simply
to shut the government down, attack the government. There would
be very few people who would have the scientific knowledge, capability,
expertise and equipment to manufacture the super-grade weapons
anthrax behind the Daschle and Leahy letters. Not this hijacker.
Gulf War Syndrome
v. Agent Orange?
Well, the Pentagon still lies about Agent
Orange and you know it took them years to finally admit that
Agent Orange produced cancer and to provide proper medical treatment
to those Veterans. They are doing the exact same thing here.
One, it is the question of financial liability for these service
people in making sure they have proper medical treatment. And
two it gets back to the point that if you start getting into
this how did Iraq get weapons specific agents and why and who
was shipping it over there and clearly it was illegal, it violated
the treaty and although not yet the statute. I do not think the
Pentagon wants to get into any of that so the cover-up goes on.
But as I said the big expose in the UK: UK troops did take the
shots, like Americans, the French rejected it, no real Gulf War
Syndrome there. And for years the UK also denied it. But the
documentary called "The Dirty War" came out and I was
a consultant on it, independent station TV 4, came out all over
Britain and I was also in it. Finally as a result of that documentary
getting front page headlines in Britain, a spokesperson for the
British Ministry of Defense admitted that there was such a thing
as the Gulf War Syndrome.
Now let me make one more point. The danger
of the syndrome is in addition here in the United States it is
microbial. In other words it is being conveyed to next of kin,
and also to health care workers who treat it. So it can and is
slowly spreading through the population. Now the upside is however,
there was a private doctor who was denied government funds, it
is a government coverup here, nevertheless, with his own resources
investigated this stuff and concluded that there was a DNA genetically
engineered mycoplasm at work and it could be treated by antibiotics.
And so he has been successfully treating some of these people.
But as I said the last figure is about 50,000 Gulf War Vets suffer
from the Gulf War Syndrome which the government still denies
exists.
There are multiple symptoms because there
was also the use of depleted uranium as well. And DU is radiological,
toxic, and carcinogenic, the government still denies that too.
And so you have everyone getting these shots, and all these vaccines
were experimental, none had been approved by the FDA for this
purpose. It clearly violated the Nuremberg code on medical experimentation.
When Dr. Huett-Vaughn refused to give them, she was court-martialed.
And there were also bromide tablets for nerve gas attacks that
were given out. They had never been tested either for nerve gas.
What they did these tablets was interfere with the firing of
nerve synapses. So the theory here was that if you got hit with
a nerve gas agent take one of these tablets and it would interfere
with shutting you down and you would be able to resume what you
were doing. None of this had been tested or approved or anything
by anyone. Of course in addition you saw the fire and all the
oil in the air and you put all this together you have a lot of
very sick people out there.
The last time I showed "The Dirty
War" here I had Major Doug Rokke in who teaches here on
this campus and he handled the DU investigation for the Pentagon.
He came in to talk about it, he can verify everything I am telling
you. He himself suffers from the Gulf War Syndrome. So you have
tens of thousands of Vets out there not getting proper medical
treatment because of the government cover-up. Indeed, it used
to be you could go to a Veteran's hospital with the symptoms
and they were instructed to say that this was just stress, it's
all in your mind.
Iraq Today?
I think Scott Ritter has put this out
correctly and also Ray Zalinskas. Ray was a biowarfare guy, and
an independent biowarfare expert. Part of the insidious nature
now of the anthrax investigation is that the FBI is going out
and saying to microbiologists, all right we want you involved
in the investigation, we are going to give you something to analyze
but you have got to sign a pledge of secrecy. So they are running
around pledging everyone to secrecy so no one can talk about
this and it is being done deliberately.
But to get back to your question, both
Ritter and Zalinskas who were UNSCOM inspectors have publicly
stated their position that Iraq's biological weapons capability
is dismantled. So if we do go back to war against Iraq, which
I certainly hope we do not, I would not think this is going to
be a significant problem. A lot of the rest of this is just propaganda,
just between you and me. Ritter was just here on campus by the
way, saying the same thing. And Zalinskas after he came back,
his UNSCOM service was over, he said it is all gone. So I would
not anticipate that would be a big problem this time.
But the last time it was. I have reputable
sources where generals say yes, we gave Iraq weapons specific
biological agents and we knew what we were doing, figuring they
were going to use it against Iran. But then they were prepared
to use it against us. Now when we blew up some of these factories
to do this, it spewed all this stuff in the air and some of our
people over there also inhaled this. So you have the vaccine,
you have the particles of this stuff in the air, you have chemical
weapons in the air, you have depleted uranium. And as I said
today 50,000 people suffering from Gulf War Syndrome and it is
slowly moving into the population. I have not seen any recent
studies on it that but there are cases of it being conveyed to
immediate family relatives, and health care workers, which indicates
a biological agent at work.
Dr. Huett-Vaughn?
As I said we were the first to raise
this issue in the Huett-Vaughn court martial. She refused to
go, she was a medical doctor, one of the reasons she said: I
do not want to give these vaccines, they are clearly experimental,
they violate the Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation, it
would be a war crime, and it violates the Hippocratic oath. We
defended her in the court martial, she was the highest ranking
officer, refused to go, desertion, five years. It would have
been the death penalty if it was a formally declared war by Congress.
In the Article 32 hearings at Ft. Leonard Wood, there was satellite
dish there. I first publicly accused these guys of inflicting
a Nuremberg crime upon our own troops. That did go out. Later
Senator Jay Rockefeller held hearings and at the end of the hearings,
he publicly stated the same thing.
Dr. Huett-Vaughn was convicted after
a total kangaroo court proceeding, taken away in chains, to Leavenworth,
in medium security. We were able to get her out eight months
later. Then they tried to strip her of her medical license. This
is a woman who spent her whole life -- she first worked in the
Bronx -- treating poor black people, community medical services.
Then she moved down to Kansas City, and there doing the same
thing and also she was one of the first doctors to treat AIDS
patients. You know, at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic doctors
were not even treating them. They tried to strip her of her medical
license. I was not involved in that one but she is still practicing
medicine in Kansas City. But at the formal court martial itself
she was stripped of all of the witnesses but me and then I was
shut down.
Loophole in
BWC?
Well two things. My legislation was intended
to close that loophole. That is why I put life imprisonment in
there. We publicized it to scare the hell out of any life science
researcher that was going to get involved in this type of stuff.
Second, internationally the loophole was to be closed by means
of the verification protocol. So that if a government said we
are just doing legitimate defensive prophylactic research, you
would have qualified experts able to come into that lab, and
look at precisely what was going on. That is why Bush Jr. just
rejected it in Geneva.
Bios v. Gas
in WWI?
On the gas, in 1925 the Geneva Gas Protocol
prohibited any use of any chemical weapons except in retaliation.
By the way biological weapons too were added. That was generally
observed in the European theater in the Second World War. The
Nazis did not resort to it, we did develop anthrax, and the British
did too. Indeed, a lot of our munitions are still left over here
in Terre Haute, Indiana. Fortunately, they are downwind from
us. And a lot of that was left over from World War II is still
here, they do not know how to get rid of it. They are saying
we are going to have a super-incinerator and we are going to
burn it and again if you are living downwind, do not worry about
it, that will take care of it. But you will have to burn everything
and completely incinerate it for it to be safe. They do not know
what to do with all this.
So the problem with the Biological Weapons
Convention in 1972 then came the technology thereafter, the DNA
genetic engineering technology that would give you the capability
to develop a brand new agent using DNA genetic engineering as
well as the vaccine because the technology is the same. Indeed,
if you look at what they are doing now they will say: Oh yes
there are all these exotic diseases out there and we have to
develop vaccines against them. But if you look at how that happens,
of course they develop the offensive agent and then they develop
the vaccine and then all you would need is the aerosolization
of the product and you have a weapon. We are doing this now.
The Pentagon just laid out a contract
to Battelle now to develop anthrax that will be resistant to
any type of treatment. Right now fortunately what we are dealing
with in Washington can be treated by conventional antibiotics.
What we are now developing by the government at Battelle, it
is a matter of public record, you can read about it in the Wall
Street Journal, anthrax that would be antibiotic resistant.
This then led to the Statement that we
released at the Council of Responsible Genetics Workshop at Harvard
that was signed by Professor King, Dr. Susan Wright of the University
of Michigan, the CRG Executive Director Dr. Martin Teitel and
myself opposing this. And we are starting a campaign to try to
stop this type of work. There is another organization called
the Sunshine Institute that also works against this type of research.
And the Federation of American Scientists, Dr. Rosenberg runs
that program for them.
So this is very dangerous stuff. You
have proliferation of technology and weapons capability that
can be turned against the American people and the American government.
Third World
v. Pentagon and CIA?
Well sure, but the real problem, it has
always been the problem, what about the Pentagon and the CIA?
And so far Congress has not been prepared to reign them in and
to stop this very dangerous, lethal research. It is still going
on as we speak today. That in my opinion, is still the real problem
and I believe that type of work is what is behind this recent
anthrax attack on our government. It is not some crazy people
in the third world, it was far too sophisticated for that. This
was not the type of stuff you could put together in a university
lab. That is why I do not believe the guys who hijacked the airplanes,
had anything at all to do with it. The only people who had that
capability, they all worked for the government or have worked
for the government in these biowarfare programs.
Federal Regulations?
They are dealing with the problem that
the movement of these agents had been unregulated for the most
part. As you know there is federal legislation on hazardous materials
but this is super-hazardous and it needs very stringent regulation
on all these agents for scientific purposes. Now scientists say
you cannot interfere with what we are doing. Well I never intended
to interfere with legitimate science but it turns out legitimate
science can be perverted and so there will have to be more regulation
not to stop the science but to regulate where is this agent and
what is being done with this agent, and even if we hear from
a legitimate lab and we send an agent out to the lab, where is
the guarantee that someone out there at that scientific research
institute is not going to turn this for weapons purposes? This
is the problem they have to deal with now. It is a very big problem.
But we have to distinguish that from
the anthrax attack on the government. Clearly this was a deliberate
attack designed to shut down Congress, the House and the Senate,
which they pretty much did, at a critical time. And it was by
people affiliated with Pentagon, CIA. I do not believe that at
all was any coincidence. Beyond that I cannot say, I can only
go with the facts in the public record. And as I said unfortunately
many of the microbiologists who have been given jobs to do by
the FBI have now been sworn to secrecy. And the Daschle and the
Leahy letters are all at Ft. Deitrick. Which is like putting
the foxes in charge of the chicken coop.
Francis Boyle
is human rights lawyer and a professor of law at the University
of Illinois. He is the author of The
Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, recently published
by Clarity
Press. He can be reached at: FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU
Copyright Francis A. Boyle.
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