Real Men Should Start to Worry About Germ Warfare

When it comes to matters of the heart, we’ve been sold the premise that men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Maybe, maybe not. But when it comes to thinking the unthinkable, the sexes are most definitely from different planets.

At a dinner party in Los Angeles last week, six men and six women sat around a beautifully laid-out table. While the setting evoked an escapist fantasy, the conversation dwelt on the inescapable realities of the moment. Which means it centered on the likelihood of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, this time involving deadly chemicals or killer germs.

The Martians--Alpha males all--kept pooh-poohing the idea of preparing for chemical or germ warfare. “Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Russia have all been developing biowarfare programs for years,” offered one of them, a film executive active in national politics. “And they haven’t used it against Israel or us, have they?” It seemed that none of these masters of their universes could imagine being in a situation over which they had so little power.

The Venusians, meanwhile, were busy setting up crisis networks, discussing the proper way to equip a safe room and trading tidbits on the best antibiotics to stock up on. One of the women, Irena Medavoy, has been organizing an anti-terrorism task force to sponsor lectures by experts on bioterrorism and infectious diseases. “Traditionally,” she explained, “women and children were always the first to be saved. This time they were among the first to be slaughtered, and the weakest will obviously be most affected by a germ attack. So it’s hardly hysterical to try to be as prepared as possible.”

The only man who broke ranks with his gender and agreed with her was producer Arnold Kopelson. He agreed because he knew too much not to--partly because he had produced “Outbreak,” the Dustin Hoffman thriller about a rampaging virus. And partly because, prior to Sept. 11, he was eerily in the midst of working on a new film about bioterrorism when reality became more terrifying than any disaster movie.

To explain his dissent, Kopelson pulled out a copy of “Germs,” an utterly horrifying book about germ warfare by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad. He started to read. It was like an apocalyptic version of “Masterpiece TheatrE,” laced with tales of untraceable killer germs and Nobel laureates devoting their lives to perfecting bioweapons.

“Our research [for the film],” said Kopelson, “found that the former Soviet Union had manufactured enough anthrax, smallpox and plague to kill everyone on Earth--and that much of it disappeared when the Iron Curtain fell. Even more disturbing, many of the Soviet scientists are now working for rogue states.”

I wondered aloud how the men would have reacted if this were, say, 1938 in London and someone raised the specter of Hitler and his master plan to exterminate millions of Jews in gas chambers. Would the “what-me-worry?” Alpha males have been equally dismissive? (“Oh, they’ve had that ability for years, but they’ve never used it, have they?”)

In a telling admission of the failure of their imaginations, last week U.S. Army intelligence specialists recruited the creative forces behind such movies as “Die Hard” and “Fight Club” to help them brainstorm about what the next terrorist assault might look like.

Some people, of course, find it easier to integrate the terrible into their normal lives, often because their lives have been touched by tragedy. “When my mother was 17,” said Medavoy, “the Nazis invaded Russia. She was captured and sent to a labor camp in Germany. None of the men in her family survived. And many of them had thought, when the war had started, ‘Oh, they’ll never come all the way to Krasnador.’ So I have no trouble believing that the unthinkable can happen.”

“None of us,” said President Bush this week, epitomizing the prevailing failure of imagination, “could have imagined what was to come.” Why not? How could anyone who has lived in a century that included the Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag Archipelago and the killing fields of Cambodia say that?

The Alpha-male leaders we’ve entrusted with our national security should have a long talk with the women in their lives. In the meantime, hand me my gas mask and pass the Cipro.