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By John Carey
Easily produced, germ weapons could wreak
even greater chaos than suicide pilots in hijacked planes
As devastating as the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks
have been, a different kind of terrorist strike could be worse
-- much worse. Try to picture tens of thousands, or millions,
of Americans dead; commerce, even the routine delivery of
food, paralyzed across the nation; and neighbor set against
neighbor as society's institutions crumble.
That's the scenario that could play out if
terrorists were to unleash a biological weapon
such as smallpox, anthrax, or other devastating agents of
disease. And currently there's little we can do to prevent
it -- or contain it once such an epidemic begins. Oklahoma
Governor Frank Keating grasped this chilling reality in late
June when he participated in a war-game exercise.
"It not only stunned me how horrific a biological attack
could be," he says, "but also how woefully unprepared
we are."
To be sure, some security experts have considered a biological
attack to be extremely unlikely. They figure most terrorists
don't have the capability to grow and deliver deadly viruses
or bacteria. Besides, anyone who unleashes a plague is guaranteed
to provoke unprecedented moral outrage and retaliation.
And even terrorists know that biological
assaults are notoriously unpredictable. Disease
epidemics could sweep the planet, indiscriminately killing
terrorists' families along with Christians, Muslims, Jews,
and everyone else.
But most experts fear that the threat is real and growing.
"Bioterrorism will be the next event," predicts
Dr. Bertram S. Brown, co-founder of the Potomac Institute
for Policy Studies.
Intelligence agencies were stunned in 1993 when a defector
from the Soviet bioweapons program revealed that the Soviet
Union had made tons of smallpox virus for delivery in missiles,
in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Another
nasty shock came in 1995, when Saddam Hussein's son-in-law
defected with news of Iraq's unexpectedly sophisticated bioweapons
program.
Growing Club
Now, there's evidence that Iraq, Iran, Libya, China, North
Korea, Russia, Israel, Pakistan, and Taiwan have biological
arsenals, and the group is growing. Only one or two of these
nations is presumed to possess the most dangerous of the scourges,
smallpox. But verifying that is difficult -- which highlights
another dimension of the problem.
The facilities for breeding bioweapons, from small factories
down to a laboratory bench, are almost
impossible to pinpoint or track.
Without more defectors, "the amount
of hard information as to who has what is minimal," says
Dr. D.A. Henderson, director of Johns Hopkins University's
Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies and leader of the successful
global effort to eradicate smallpox.
Indeed, because of modern biotechnology, brewing up a pot
of deadly germs is easier than ever. "The same fermenter
used to make beer or a drug can grow anthrax an hour later,"
says a Capitol Hill national security aide. In addition, gene-splicing
makes it theoretically possible to engineer supergerms deadlier
than anything nature has created.
Even if terrorists can't make the stuff themselves, they might
buy it from Saddam Hussein or hire a few of the tens of thousands
of former Soviet bioweapons scientists cast adrift when the
country's facilities shut down.
According to some reports,
Osama bin Laden has been trying to create a bio arsenal.
And Sept. 11 proved that hate and extremism
have swept aside the political and moral restraints that once
discouraged terrorists from mass slaughter. "Today, we
talk about flying bombs," says Yonah Alexander, director
of the Potomac Institute's International Center for Terrorism
Studies. "Tomorrow, we will talk about scientific bombs."
War games have helped the U.S. security experts and politicians
flesh out the gory details. In June, Colonel Randall J. Larsen,
director of the nonprofit ANSER Institute for Homeland Security,
conducted a simulation with Johns Hopkins, the Center for
Strategic & International Studies, the Oklahoma City National
Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, Governor
Keating, and others.
In this exercise, dubbed Dark Winter, Iraqi-financed Afghan
terrorists spray smallpox viruses into shopping malls in Oklahoma
City, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. The act goes unnoticed until
nine days to two weeks later when people start showing up
in emergency rooms in Oklahoma City complaining of fever and
rash.
Trying to contain and fight the outbreak, Keating shuts the
state's airports, closes the borders, and orders vaccinations
for all medical personnel. The actions anger federal authorities
and the military, who want to save limited vaccine supplies
for the armed forces. But it's too late, anyway. By then,
each victim has infected at least 10 others, some of whom
are already spreading contagion in other states.
Vaccine Shortage
As the horror spreads, everything spins out of control. Commerce
comes to a halt; even food deliveries stop. Nationwide air
travel and the stock market shut down. With no treatment,
the only way to fight the disease is with vaccines, which
quickly run out or can't be delivered, and quarantines, which
can't be enforced without heavy-handed military muscle.
"All of a sudden, the house of cards falls down,"
says Larsen. Within three weeks, 16,000 people are sick, and
more than 5,000 of them will die. After two months, 3 million
are stricken, and 1 million will die. And still, the epidemic
continues to grow.
As the Dark Winter participants learned, preparations for
biowarfare are frighteningly inadequate. The US has only a
fraction of the vaccine needed to respond to a smallpox attack.
In 1972, a single case of
smallpox in Yugoslavia touched off an outbreak that required
20 million vaccinations and mass quarantines to
stamp out the disease.
The US, in contrast, has only 15 million doses of old vaccine,
made before 1982. "If we don't prepare for such an awful
event, we may put our very democracy at risk," warns
Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Committee
on Foreign Relations.
Of the myriad biothreats, smallpox presents the gravest danger
because it's so contagious and because the general population
in the US hasn't been vaccinated since 1972.
Health authorities decided then that the risks of vaccination
were greater than the danger posed by a disease being wiped
out globally. But in a twist of history, we could be victims
of the same scourge that Europeans -- sometimes intentionally
-- unleashed in the New World centuries ago, decimating Native
American populations.
There are plenty of other threats, as well. A suspected accidental
release of just milligrams' worth of anthrax from a Soviet
facility in Sverdlovsk in 1979 killed more than 65 people.
Iraq
has admitted to producing vast amounts of anthrax.
And after the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo
killed people on the Tokyo subway with a nerve gas in 1995,
authorities learned that the group had been planning a more
deadly attack using large quantities of the bacterium.
Without prior vaccination or quick administration of antibiotics,
anthrax is almost always fatal.
"If terrorists went Johnny Appleseed and distributed
it here and there across the country, there would be chaos,"
says Hopkins' Henderson.
National Stockpile
The sliver of good news is that the
US has begun to face this potential horror. In
1999, the Clinton Administration launched a bioterrorism initiative.
Among other things, the effort has beefed up laboratories'
ability to quickly identify suspected biological agents and
created a national stockpile of antibiotics and drugs that
can be rushed to fight a nascent epidemic.
Also, in September, 2000, the government signed a $343 million
contract with biotech company Acambis PLC to make 40 million
doses of smallpox vaccine by a new production method. "It
will be packaged in nice kits, ready to go," says Dr.
Thomas P. Monath, Acambis vice-president for research and
medical affairs.
Meanwhile, states have set up offices to handle the complex
coordination among hospitals, rescue teams, law enforcement,
and others needed to fight a terrorist bioweapons attack.
"We have a ways to go, but we're better prepared now
than we've been before," says Dr. Julie A. Casani, medical
coordinator for emergency preparedness and response for the
state of Maryland.
Not only will such plans lessen
the toll from bioterrorist attacks, their existence
"will discourage the use of the organisms in the first
place," Henderson believes. After all, if the US is capable
of nipping epidemics in the bud, why bother even launching
a bio attack?
There's another benefit: Boosting public-health capabilities
will improve America's ability to respond to nature's own
outbreaks, such as West Nile virus or tomorrow's equivalent
of AIDS. But experts warn that current preparations are just
a start.
Unless the US and the rest of the world
step up efforts to combat bioterrorism, the toll next time
may be so high that even the horror of Sept. 11 will pale
in comparison.
Business Week October 1,
2001 58-59
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