Just How Bad Can It Get?
Just how serious are the threats of bioterrorism and biological weapons? Since Sept. 11, public anxiety has spread in the wake of anthrax contaminations in New York, Washington and elsewhere. To properly assess the current predicament and the threat biological weapons pose, a little history is useful. There are four reasons--aside from the obvious--why biological weapons development compels serious attention among policy-makers and ordinary citizens.
* Between 1989 and 1992, two senior-level research and managerial officials in the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program defected to the West. Their detailed disclosures, and additional information which subsequently became available, revealed their country’s enormous, covert and illegal biological weapons program, which probably continued at least until early 1993. By contrast, the United States’ biological weapons program was unilaterally ended under President Richard M. Nixon in 1969 and had been dismantled by 1972. That year, more than 100 nations signed the Biological and Toxins Weapon Convention, with the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom as initial signers and treaty repository nations. The treaty banned the development and possession of biological weapons. Nevertheless, the Soviet biological weapons program expanded enormously, a violation of the treaty, the only instance in the postwar period that Moscow so utterly and blatantly violated an arms control treaty it had signed.
* Despite having signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned the use of either chemical or biological weapons, Iraq used chemical weapons extensively in its war with Iran, particularly between 1984 and 1988. This fact was well known. Nevertheless the international community was silent and did nothing. At the time of the Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991, intelligence agencies of several countries were convinced that Iraq was producing biological weapons, but details and evidence remained hidden until the summer of 1995, when the United Nations Special Commission discovered the specifics of Baghdad’s biological weapons program.
* That same summer, Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese quasi-religious group, released a chemical agent, a poor grade of the nerve agent Sarin in the Tokyo subway. Twelve people died, and of the 5,000 or so who went to hospitals, between 400 and 900 suffered varying degrees of injury. The same group had also released the same agent a year before in the city of Matsumoto, killing seven and injuring several hundred. Aum Shinrikyo had apparently spent four years attempting to produce two biological agents, botulinum toxin and anthrax. It was a very serious attempt: no financial limitations, well-equipped laboratories, some technically trained staff, concerted efforts to purchase knowledge. Fortunately, their efforts to produce biological agents failed. Nonetheless, the group’s initiative prompted concern. Many U.S. policy-makers believed that bioterrorism was not “a matter of if, but when,” with many predicting its use “within five years.”
* When the 1972 biological weapons treaty was signed, four nations had offensive biological weapons programs (the Soviet Union and three other unidentified countries). Arms control specialists believed proliferation could be curbed, even eliminated. However in 1988 and 1989, U.S. government officials reported to Congress that in the intervening years, six nations had joined that list, making 10 in all. Several of those nations, such as Iraq, were signatories of the 1972 treaty. Today, the U.S. government claims there are 13 countries with offensive biological weapons programs. It has released the names of 10; the remaining three have yet to be publicly identified.
It isn’t clear, however, whether the problem is getting worse. Most of the nations now believed to have embarked on offensive biological weapons programs began their research and development 20 or so years ago. Even the three added since 1997 are not “new.” It is not always easy for the intelligence community to decide if a suspect nation’s biological weapons program is a legitimate and permissible defensive program under existing international law or an illegal offensive one, as was the case with the three newly included nations. It was not that their programs were new, only that U.S. intelligence agencies had reached a consensus assessment after years of internal debate.
The renewed attention to the subject has produced many books: Ken Alibek on the Soviet program, Ed Regis on the U.S., Brian Balmer on the United Kingdom, Tim Trevan and 23 United Nations Special Commission reports on Iraq, Jonathan Tucker on smallpox, Gina Kolata on the 1918 flu pandemic, an edited volume by Joshua Lederberg and another by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In addition, dozens of monographs and reports were written, more than 20 from the General Accounting Office, as well as several Presidential Commission reports.
“Germs,” written by a trio of veteran New York Times reporters, is the latest of these and includes an impressive list of at least 100 individuals interviewed or consulted by the authors. It also contains a useful bibliography. The book is well written, in a fast-paced style with substantial detail, “inside” information and relatively few errors. Some of the “inside” stories, however, are not altogether accurate; others are convenient glosses peddled by their sources or sweetened by the authors. The book portrays several key scientists and government officials whose involvement with biological weapons is woven into a narrative that runs the length of the book. They are portrayed as heroes. A more critical evaluation might have made them appear a bit less so. In one case, the authors unnecessarily repeat a bit of a biological weapons “cookbook recipe” provided by one of those heroes at a closed-door U.S. government conference.
There also are examples of the routine and meaningless gee-whizzery and exaggeration that are staples of this subject, although in their conclusions, the authors criticize U.S. government officials for needless, even damaging, exaggeration. The authors describe the U.S. production in the 1950s of an anthrax strain so potent “that a single gallon held up to eight billion lethal doses, enough to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet,” and they recount how “U.S. scientists learned how to make botulinum toxin so concentrated that a pound of it, properly dispersed, could in theory kill a billion people.” There is also reference to the Soviet production of sufficient anthrax to kill everyone on Earth four times over. These statements are of course horrific and frightening, but they are also sensational and meaningless. They are based on theoretical calculations of the quantities of the agents that can be lethal. In the real world of the weapons that would deliver those agents, of the configuration of their targets and of the environmental conditions under which the agents would be delivered, all those astronomical capabilities disappear. The reality is quite bad enough, but it would more likely take hundreds of pounds of these materials to produce anywhere from zero to hundreds of thousands of casualties, depending on the conditions.
The book contains sufficient stories of substance, however, to provoke thought. One of the first is an excellent example of the positions that major U.S. policy-makers frequently take when they are in office and the positions they adopt after leaving office. The discrepancy is revealing and sobering. For example, Dr. Herbert York and Dr. George Kistiakowsky served among President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s senior security advisors. York held the No. 3 position in the Department of Defense, and Kistiakowsky was the president’s science advisor at a time when that role was particularly important. In the years after their government service, they were among the most important figures in U.S. arms control circles, and they often dissented from prevailing policy, favoring instead the nuclear test ban treaty and greater arms control.
As advisors to Eisenhower, however, they strongly urged Washington to develop incapacitating biological and chemical weapons--weapons that were not intended primarily to kill (even though it was expected that 2% to 3% of a target population would die). Eisenhower approved their recommendations. By the early 1960s, American scientists devised a biological weapons “cocktail,” a combination of three incapacitating agents: a bacterium, a virus and a toxin derived from another bacterium. The developers of this “cocktail” proposed its use to prepare the way for any invasion of Cuba with the disease agents timed to attack the population in sequence. The scientist who devised the scheme told his superiors that mortality likely to result from the “cocktail” would be 1%. Used in sequence, however, the second and third diseases would hit an already debilitated population, raising the likely mortality to 10% of the target population.
Other examples in the book providing further insights into the operation of the U.S. government include one case of ineptitude and another of systematic bureaucratic processes that led to the inability to act when action was needed. In June 1988, a classified intelligence report identified Iraq as having already produced biological weapons. Unfortunately, several years before, a U.S. firm had sold many strains of pathogens to Iraq, something which was legal at the time. Nevertheless, the report, which noted that fact, was not passed to the Department of Commerce, which was responsible for issuing export licenses. Only three months later, in September 1988, Iraq was able to obtain 11 additional strains from the United States, including four more of anthrax, one of which the United States had developed years before in its biological weapons program. Belatedly, the export of pathogens to Iraq was ended in February 1989.
On the other hand, as recently as mid-1997, after half a dozen years during which Washington was eager to obtain routine access to major former Soviet biological-weapons facilities, when two mid-level U.S. officials conceived of a way this could be achieved, they had to act on their own initiative. To have obtained proper authorization for their proposal would have taken weeks of negotiating U.S. interagency positions, and there was a good chance that nothing would have happened at all.
Discussion of biological weapons and the threat they pose is often accompanied by exaggeration by government officials, members of Congress and some scientists, with scenarios of death raging across the country in hundreds of thousands, millions and even tens of millions. One of the more notorious instances was Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s proclamation on a Sunday morning TV network show in November 1997 that if the five-pound bag of sugar he held in his hand were anthrax, it would kill half the population of Washington, D.C.
“Germs” contains an interesting depiction of how this incident came to pass. To begin with, it would take approximately 225 pounds to kill a quarter as many people, and even then only under a long list of very particular conditions, and only with the grade of anthrax that the United States or the Soviet Union had managed to produce after decades of work. By 1991, Iraq, after many years of work, had not succeeded in making that kind of anthrax. Scientific advisors had explained this to Cohen and his assistants, but it would have been rather inconvenient for the secretary of defense to appear on TV with a sack weighing hundreds of pounds, so it became five pounds. In the following years, despite the known correction, Cohen even increased his estimate of deaths rather than correcting it. Nevertheless, the authors of “Germs” dismiss Cohen’s critics and praise him for providing a necessary publicizing of “the threat” by means of a useful “misstatement.”
It is hard to fault the Cassandra figure, warning the nation of potential and real danger. Yet there are unsettling elements in this story, especially when it comes to the way Washington made policy decisions on this issue. It is clear that a few key individuals, barely more than half a dozen, played instrumental roles over the course of the last decade. Some had been key figures in the earlier U.S. biological weapons program and had never really given up their belief in its validity. Others were personally involved in commercial aspects of the program. As late as mid-2000, the General Accounting Office reported that no real “threat assessment” of the subject had ever been prepared for the U.S. government.
A large and important part of the biological weapons story is almost entirely missing from “Germs.” Only one page in a 384-page volume is devoted to the story of the last 10 years of diplomatic negotiation to provide for increased international control of biological weapons. This was the effort to achieve a verification protocol that was to be added to the 1972 biological weapons treaty. No compulsory inspection, compliance or verification mechanism existed in the treaty. From 1990 on, several U.S. administrations had resisted rigorous on-site inspection requirements. Last spring a compromise draft text was proposed by the chairman overseeing the negotiations for such a protocol. The United States was the only country that opposed the presentation of the draft. On July 25, 2001, the United States informed its negotiating partners in Geneva that it could not accept it under any circumstances and would not negotiate any further on the basis of it, even to achieve its modification. Ten years of diplomatic effort were wiped out overnight.
The United States claimed that such a verification protocol would not be capable of identifying a treaty violator. That may be true, but exactly the same holds for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 and the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. The United States championed both of those treaties and is a major and forceful treaty participant in both cases. The United States does not suggest removing itself from them, although it is known that some member states of both treaties are currently violating both. The primary reason for Washington’s opposition to the verification protocol was the desire by officials to preserve the burgeoning U.S. biodefense research programs that have emerged since 1996. Washington was not willing to trade U.S. access to the facilities of other nations, even ones it wanted to know about, in exchange for international access to its own.
The authors of “Germs” learned of the Bush administration’s decision to scuttle the verification protocol at about the same time as people in arms control circles in Washington did. But the authors had also learned something else. The 1972 biological weapons treaty permits defensive but not offensive research and bans entirely the development or production of biological weapons. However, the treaty does not define “offensive” or “defensive” and how to distinguish between them.
Within the burgeoning U.S. biodefense program, the book’s authors learned, were several projects that straddled the distinction or perhaps overstepped the boundary. These projects are described in the last chapter of the book. If the boundary had been crossed, the United States would be in technical violation of the 1972 treaty. One of the projects--to build and test a model biological weapon, a model of a Soviet biological bomblet--was being carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency. Publication of the jointly written news report in the New York Times of what they had learned about the administration’s decision to reject the verification protocol, as well as about the controversial projects, did not appear until after the official U.S. representative had formally rejected the protocol in Geneva at the end of July. Whether publication would have prompted the Bush administration to reconsider its contemplated rejection is unlikely. But it would have made it more difficult politically.
The CIA took upon itself weapons assessment tasks that should have been the responsibility of Defense Department facilities, and it pushed its project aggressively. Oversight within the government was poor, and some of the disputable projects were not even reported to National Security Council officials. Those that were reviewed received approval: In the mood that prevailed, it was known that the president and other senior officials strongly supported the biodefense programs, and there were few naysayers.
The United States biological weapons program serves defensive purposes, but one thing seems almost equally certain: If the United States found the same projects taking place in Russia, Iraq, Iran or any of several other countries, it would consider them to be part of an offensive biological weapons program.
Today, as more reports confirm additional anthrax contaminations, it is clear that after more than 1,000 biological weapons hoaxes stimulated by overheated rhetoric in the preceding five years, someone has succeeded in producing anthrax, or has obtained it from a state program, and is using it. So far, though, these incidents appear not to be a form of terrorism designed for mass casualties. As individual postal mailings, the public health consequences can and are being adequately controlled. At this writing, the perpetrators remain unknown.
How serious is the biological weapons threat? In the short term, the critical questions are who is behind the current anthrax incidents, how much material (and of what quality) do they have to distribute, did they produce it themselves and, if so, what degree of professional training did they have? Or did they have assistance from a state-sponsored biological weapons program, and if so, what country provided that assistance? Technical details becoming known this past week strongly suggest the likelihood of state sponsorship.
In the long term, the most serious threat is from the proliferation of state-sponsored programs. The verification protocol would have applied to states and state programs; it would not have had direct effect on freelance terrorists not affiliated with a government. However, it would have strengthened international norms and practices against biological weapons and required member states to pass national legislation to implement those practices. It would have isolated and stigmatized non-signatories.
If the events in the United States demonstrate that nonaligned terrorists have established a precedent by using biological weapons, then states may feel emboldened to engage in such warfare, perhaps at first in small covert operations. Research and development will be stimulated, led by the major states, the United States and Russia, with the rationale of anticipating possible threats. Further discoveries in molecular genetics in the area of civilian, nonmilitary research may be adapted for the purpose of biological warfare, transforming presently innocuous organisms that the human species has adapted to over the centuries into virulent pathogens. And then a truly horrific Pandora’s Box will have been opened.
