The invisible nightmare

Biological weapons are not that hard to produce, says a chilling new book written before Sept. 11 -- and they're getting easier all the time.

By Andrew Leonard

Oct. 3, 2001 | As Americans struggled to find their psychological footing in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, no single news report was more chilling than the revelation that the hijackers had at one point expressed interest in crop dusters. The implications needed little elaboration. What could be more horrifying than the specter of small planes equipped for spraying pesticides raining down upon an unsuspecting populace a hellish payload of biological poison: anthrax, Ebola, smallpox or some new recombinant DNA atrocity cooked up by rogue scientists from the former Soviet Union?

Authorities were quick to pooh-pooh the possibility that the terrorists had actually planned to use crop dusters for acts of biological warfare. It was more likely, they said, that the men planned to use the small planes in the same way that they later used passenger jets -- as kamikaze-guided bombs. Not only were the pesticide sprayers ill-equipped for delivering germs, they pointed out, but the manufacturing of so-called "weaponized" anthrax or smallpox is exceedingly difficult.

But just how true is the latter point? A close reading of the recently published "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War" reveals a certain schizophrenia on the topic. Written by three New York Times reporters, Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, who have been reprising their findings in the pages of the daily Times ever since the attacks, "Germs" summarizes its contradictory conclusions succinctly at the very end: "Is the threat of germ weapons real or exaggerated? Our answer is both."

So on the one hand, "Germs" tells us how in the summer of 2000, a Defense Department team "armed with $1.6 million in funding and commercial catalogues of lab equipment" was able to "easily assemble an anthrax factory from off-the-shelf materials. The results suggested that with precious little money and off-the-shelf equipment, a state, or even a group of terrorists could build and operate a small-scale germ weapons plant, probably without the intelligence agencies' knowledge."

Readers are also treated to a detailed account of how followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh successfully poisoned thousands of people with salmonella in 1984 in rural Oregon. Chapters devoted to the operations of a vast (and secret) Soviet industrial infrastructure devoted to germ warfare, along with the clearly documented attempts by Iraq to manufacture anthrax and other poisons are equally distressing. Both countries, we are told repeatedly, manufactured enough germs and toxins to "kill every human being on the planet." (As did the United States.)

But at the same time, the authors note that even the well-funded Aum Shinrikyo cult, which killed 17 people in Japan with sarin gas in 1995, failed repeatedly in its attempts to commit acts of bioterrorism. (Sarin is a chemical, not a biological agent. Chemical weapons are easier to utilize, but also easier to defend against and generally less deadly.) And they concede that "Terrorists have blown up buildings, hijacked scores of airplanes, and murdered indiscriminately in the past three decades. Only a handful of groups have attempted biological attacks and fewer still have succeeded."

Further muddying the waters, on Sept. 24, a New York Times editorial, clearly written with the input of the three reporters who authored "Germs," declared: "Despite loose talk that a college chemistry major could whip up a lethal weapon in his garage, the historical record suggests that it is nowhere near that easy. Selecting and growing a potent biological agent, maintaining its virulence, making the germs hardy enough and stable enough for widespread dissemination and finding an efficient means of spreading them around all pose obstacles that have frustrated even well-financed state weapons programs." The editorial was distinctly more reassuring than the book.

So which is it? Should we be living in dread, or can we collapse back into complacency?

The answer, unfortunately, is far closer to the former than the latter. "Germs" is a sober, informative, detailed account of the history of germ warfare and its present state-of-the-art capabilities. It has two messages, both of them clear and unequivocal: First, a skilled scientist with enough money can make biological weapons; second, the public health infrastructure in the United States is woefully unprepared for manmade epidemics. And the fact that it was written well before the terror attacks makes these ominous findings impossible to ignore.

We'd like to believe that certain acts are so intrinsically evil that they simply could not be carried out. But after Sept. 11, those beliefs have been blown to smithereens. Over the smoking ruins of lower Manhattan, it is no longer possible to assume that just because successful acts of bio-warfare haven't occurred in modern times they won't happen in the future. The historical record may show that bio-warfare is hard. But it's also getting easier all the time.

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