Bring on the plague years

The last thing the world needs right now is a global bioweapons race. Yet President Bush seems determined to start one.

By Alan H. Goldstein and Kate Braverman

Oct 28, 2004 | Historians joke that those who remember the past are also condemned to repeat it. On Dec. 28, 1984, President Ronald Reagan had a vision to eliminate nuclear terror from the skies of America. His vision was the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars." Reagan said, "Through the SDI research program, I have called upon the great scientific talents of our country to turn to the cause of strengthening world peace by rendering ballistic missiles impotent and obsolete."

The Great Communicator envisioned an umbrella in the sky that would protect America from nuclear missiles. The Strategic Defense Initiative, with its estimated price tag of $50 billion to $100 billion in 1984 dollars, was never implemented. A major argument against SDI was that is violated the spirit, if not the exact terms, of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT). By building a defensive system that made existing offensive systems obsolete, we would force the Soviet Union to generate a next generation of offensive weapons.

This same argument can be applied to the Bush administration's strategic biodefense initiative. Unfortunately, the American scientific community is apparently too terrified to mention it. As a result, American science is now leading the way into the next global arms race in bioweapons.

No one talks much about ICBM attacks any more. It is beyond irony that 20 years later, our fear of nuclear attack is focused almost entirely on a low-tech dirty bomb generally depicted as a suitcase containing some plutonium and a couple of sticks of dynamite. The moral of the story is clear: Technology does not equal security. Yet here we go again. Last year President Bush ordained Project Bioshield to protect us from dangers yet to be identified. In 2005 the United States will begin in earnest to build the "Star Wars" technology for this strategic biodefense initiative. The same xenophobic faith-based agenda that propelled us into Iraq has led this administration to declare war on medical research. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Our country has never been attacked by biological agents. Yet the president has decreed "biodefense" to be America's top R&D priority.

How did we get here? How did biodefense become the R&D priority No. 1 for the United States? Why are we pushing the envelope to create sixth-generation countermeasures when there is no evidence that terrorists have even second-generation bioweapons? The answer is that our president is convinced that the fate of the free world is balanced on a single vial of doomsday microbes. And, as we know, once George W. Bush has made a decision, there is no turning back. The tragic result is that America is conducting the wrong research for the wrong reasons on the wrong diseases.

But beneath the monumental waste of resources, something far more horrible has been created. By turning our immense R&D machine toward the development of "biodefense" systems, Bush has declared that America intends to unilaterally explore the bioweapons potential of every tool in our vast technology arsenal. Our president justifies himself as a wartime leader acting in defense of our country. But the bleak reality is that the world sees America in relentless pursuit of bioweapons technology. Their reasoning is simple and correct: It is not possible to create an ultra-sophisticated biodefense network without the offensive systems to test it. Given America's isolationism and policy of preemptive warfare, those who fear us most will be compelled to compete. The result will be a new arms race ultimately dwarfing the nuclear horror of the Cold War.

The foundation for this new policy was presented in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he said, "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

This policy, worthy of Dr. Strangelove himself, is cosmically circular. If, in fact, our enemies can manufacture biologicals so deadly that one vial will cause mass destruction, then a fail-safe defense is impossible. In a rational, fact-based world such a policy would be viewed as a ghastly mistake, a breakdown of logic. But our president uses his "gut" instead of logic ... and he does not make mistakes. He has a pathologically uncomplicated vision that we are under attack by evildoers armed with the most sophisticated bioweapons imaginable. He knows that to be saved, our nation must be rendered "in-vial-ate," and he has issued directives to make it so.

Billions of dollars have been consigned to convert our national borders into filtering systems capable of withstanding Class 4 biohazards and beyond. Bush demands that we prepare for everything from salmonella-based attacks on the nation's salad bars to the release of genetically engineered Ebola virus in Grand Central Station. These policies are the emperor's new clothes, and his arrogant certainty makes him impermeable to a reality check. In fact, no country has the capability to generate the advanced bioweapons we are frenetically devising countermeasures for. As for making America "in-vial-ate," we can't even keep thousands of illegal aliens, human beings substantially larger than microbes, from crossing our borders with impunity every week.

Next Page: Paranoid hallucination is now policy

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