One thing that you have to bear in mind is that if you’re going after facilities which have biological agents is that you don’t want to blow them up in a way which disperses the stuff into the wide blue yonder.

It would cause huge problems because there’s very little defence people can put up against them other than physical protection wearing masks and taking vaccinations in advance. But you’ve got to know what the agent is and many of the countries around Iraq, of course, have no protection at all.

Would hitting a biological site cause many Iraqi civilian deaths? Very difficult to say. The US would probably try to avoid that.

The whole essence of the military operations during the Gulf War and thereafter have been on precision strikes. They could make a precision strike on a single building; but they want to do so in a way that there isn’t a release of agents.

If one takes the Tomahawk attack on the Sudan recently, that building was destroyed by a number of Tomahawks coming in. There doesn’t appear to be a major leakage of chemicals from that plant. But there’s some risk. Some of these agents persist on the ground for a long period of time. Brits dropped anthrax on a Scottish island; it wasn’t decontaminated for over 40 years.

Really, you have to find bombs that implode on their target. They employed some of those bombs last time round; the trouble was they didn’t always know where to drop them. For example, the famous Baghdad baby milk factory was in fact a baby milk factory. It wasn’t a biological site as Colin Powell claimed at the time.

So you really have to have pretty good intelligence if you’re going to eliminate targets as small as that with any precision.