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I've formed some opinions and so forth, but put them at the end, since I'm no expert. The most useful thing here is the quotes below.
Below is my bibliography and selected quotes. I haven't written much on the topic myself. I took the following notes, and decided to put them up on net for the convenience of researchers.
I've made all the titles links to where the books can be found at Booksense.com. This will hopefully cause concerned parties to view my quotes as useful rather than prejudicial to their interests. In addition, should these links be used to purchase said books, I should get a percentage of the price, which would be nice. Myself, I get books out of libraries, so I've also included call numbers.
I use two styles to differentiate actual quotes and my notes and paraphrasing. Additionally, some small interpolations for context and clarity are simply [bracketed].
I just bumped into this. Excellent short overview. It links to this companion piece on our once and probable future nemesis (barring substantial US foreign policy changes vis-a-vis the Islamic world), smallpox.
I just (circa 12/1/02) listened to this as an audiobook (very well read) so I can't quote it yet, but it is an excellent treatment of the whole smallpox question. Towards the end he investigates the engineered-smallpox possibility, with a case study in IL4-gene-added smallpox, and concludes that any technically competent person with a few thousand bucks or so and some smallpox to start with can make this particular variant, which can be expected to kill about everyone except perhaps those very recently vaccinated. He includes a history of the smallpox eradication program, told as is his usual style by developing the characters of some main participants and then telling their parts of the story. The result is a real chiaroscuro effect contrasting the beauty of the eradication program with the horror that may be unleashed when someone with the means finally gets crazy enough. One gets the impression he feels that the latter is only a matter of time, and given the combination of the Bush regime's belligerent and unintelligent imperial arrogance and their utter ineptitude if not unconcern with sensible defensive measures, it is hard to disagree.
This is fiction, but a great read. Referred to repeatedly in the non-fictional writings, it is apparently so well-researched that while a real page-turner as fiction, it is also quite informative about the bioterror threat.
(Hoover Institution Press, 1999) Based on papers presented at a conference held Nov 16-18,1998 at the Hoover Institution.
Chapter 2,
by Steven M. Block(Professor, Molecular Biology Department, Princeton University)
Although [Richard Preston's The Cobra Event] was fictional--right down to the impossible supervirus it described--many of the supporting details in the novel were well researched and scientifically accurate.
Modern bioscience has led to the development of many powerful tools for manipulating genes....[which] make...possible the creation of entirely new WMD,endowed with unprecedented power to destroy. It seems likely that such weapons will eventually come to exist, simply because of the lamentable ease with which they may be constructed. In contrast to nuclear weapons, BW do not require rare materials, such as enriched uranium or plutonium. They do not require rare finances: development and production are relatively inexpensive. They do not require rare knowledge: most of the techniques involved are straightforward,well-documented, and in the public domain. Today, thousands of biologists worldwide possess the requisite skills, and more are trained every day (most often at US universities). Finally, they do not require rare infrastructure;some BW can be produced by small terrorist groups almost as easily as through national biological warfare ` programs. Inevitably, someone, somewhere, sometime seems bound to try something.
In some respects, a case can be made that anthrax is already a nearly perfect biological weapon in its natural form--indeed, it has long been the weapon of choice for many of the identified biological warfare programs. The anthrax bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, is ubiquitous and easily cultured from soil in areas that support livestock. It is readily propagated on inexpensive media. When grown appropriately, anthrax forms highly stable spores that retain their potency for decades as a dessicated powder, ideal for weaponization. A mere gram of spores contains thousands of lethal doses. Although deadly once contracted, anthrax is only weakly communicable, making it less prone to spread to friendly forces.... Enough spores in the lungs can produce death within a few days (the incubation period is one to six days, with a mortality rate of ~80 percent). However, the initial symptoms of pulmonary anthrax infection are fairly unremarkable (low fever, hacking cough, and weakness) and may make early diagnosis more difficult.
Anthrax is by no means the perfect bioweapon, however, for several excellent but unrelated reasons. First and foremost, it is nontrivial to target a ground population with any airborne agent, due to the many difficulties of dissemination, that is, producing just the right aerosol, adjusting for the vagaries of wind and weather, and so forth. Second, prolonged exposure to sunlight kills most anthrax spores after release. Third, the minimal lethal dose for inhalation (reported to be 5,000 to 10,000 spores) is high compared with some other biological agents. Fourth, if diagnosed and treated early, anthrax may be cured with sufficient doses of penicillin-type antibiotics. Fifth, specific vaccines can be prepared that prevent infection by known strains of anthrax.
Recently, it was speculated in the Times of London that at least one country with a biological warfare program (Israel) was working on a bioweapon to target victims on the basis of ethnic origin. [note 13]U. Mahnaimi and M. Colvin, ``Israel Planning Ethnic Bomb as Saddam Caves In'' (London) Sunday Times (Nov. 15, 1999). The article contained the following text: ``Israel is working on a biological weapon that would harm Arabs but not Jews, according to Israeli military and western intelligence sources. The weapon, targeting victims by ethnic origin, is seen as Israel's response to Iraq's threat of chemical and biological attacks.... Porton Down, Britain's biological defence establishment, said last week that such weapons were theoretically possible.'' (this is also referred to in 'Plague Wars', which describes an earlier Apartheid-South-African program to design a BW to kill only blacks, saying that the Israelis cooperated closely with the S. African BW program and are believed to have carried on this sort of work after the fall of that regime.
[references Ken Alibek paper] There have been documented efforts to alter the properties of existing pathogens in such a way as to improve their effectiveness as biological weapons. Alibek supervised some 32k workers in some 40 facilities [60k in whole program]. Alibek is not at all sure program has stopped.
Insertion of plasmids into bacteria to add lethality, antibiotic resistance. E. coli strain O157:H7 naturally picked up a rogue plasmid coding for a Shigella-like toxin (SLT) that produces a potentially deadly form of hemorrhagic enteritis.... origin of plasmid, how it got into E. coli both unknown. This strain can also live in acid environments such as apple cider and cured sausage.
DNA sequences of many pathogens, including plague (Yersinia pestis known. It is or will soon be possible to create synthetic genes, viruses, even living organisms.
Gene therapy as weapon. Will soon be possible to use viral vectors to alter genetic code of people, possibly even of their descendents. This might be done without knowledge of target individuals or populations.
Stealth viruses. Possibility of creating viruses which have no effect until triggered by external or internal signal, could meanwhile spread widely in a population
external trigger could be f. ex. insect hormone ecdysone, already been done
example of designer BW: one that produces ligand for cellular apoptosis receptors, would then cause those cells to die, producing disease or death of organism.
Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg,1999, St. Martin's Press.
First half deals with USSR/Russian, then rest is Iraq, Rhodesia,S. Africa, Aum Shinrikyo cult.
Ken Alibek (with Stephen Handelman) 1999 Random House Library: UG447.8.A45 or 358 .3882 0947
This one was a real page-turner. The view from inside the Soviet System is interesting in its own right. The details of what the Soviets were making and in what quantity should satisfy anyone who wants either the facts or to just get Really Scared.
Anthrax takes one to five days to incubate in the body. Victims often won't know that an anthrax attack has taken place until after they begin to feel the first symptoms. Even then, the nature of the illness will not at first be clear. The earliest signs of trouble--a slight nasal stuffiness, twinges of pain in the joints, fatigue, and a dry, persistent cough--resemble the onset of a cold or flu. To most people, the symptoms will seem too inconsequential to warrant a visit to the doctor.
In this first stage, pulmonary anthrax can be treated with antibiotics. But it would take a highly alert public health system to recognize the evidence of an anthrax attack. Few physicians are trained to identify the disease, and the unremarkable nature of early symptoms makes an accurate diagnosis difficult.
.... A hundred kilograms of anthrax spores would, in optimal atmospheric conditions, kill up to three million people in any of the densely populated metropolitan areas of the United States.
The Soviet Government decided that the best agents were those for which there was no known cure. This shaped the entire course of our program and and thrust us into a never-ending race against the medical profession. Every time a new treatment or vaccine came to light somewhere, we were back in our labs, trying to figure out how to overcome its effects.
The most effective biological weapons go on killing long after they are used. Some viruses, such as Marburg, are so hazardous that casually inhaling as few as three microscopic virus particles several days after an attack would be enough to kill you. Biowarfare strategists often look beyond the immediate target to focus on the epidemic behavior of disease-causing agents.
Unlike nuclear weapons, which pulverize everything in their target area, biological weapons leave buildings, transportation systems, and other infrastructure intact. They should properly be called mass casualty weapons, not weapons of mass destruction.
... Scientists at Obolensk successfully transferred the gene for myelin toxin to Yersinia pestis . A toxin-plague weapon was never produced before the Soviet Union collapsed, but the success of this experiment set the stage for further research on bacteria-toxin combinations. Soon, scientists were studying the feasibility of inserting the genes for botulinum, the most lethal naturally occurring toxin, into bacteria.
I have no way of knowing whether a combined Ebola-smallpox agent has been created, but it is clear that the technology to produce such a weapon now exists. To argue that these weapons won't be developed simply because existing armaments will do a satisfactory job contradicts the history and the logic of weapons development, from the invention of the machine gun to the hydrogen bomb.
Lauri Garrett, 2000 Call numbers: RA 441 .G37 2000 -or- 362.1 [see also The Coming Plague]
Most of this excellent book deal with what the title implies. Because of the Biowar chapter, it turned up on a library search. That one chapter provides, in clear and concise form, an excellent grounding in this area. Expanded a bit, it would make one of the best books on the subject.
D.A. Henderson runs the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health, smallpox expert, preeminent public health expert
Mike Osterholm, Minn. state epidemiologist, briefed King Hussein of Jordan on biowar in Jan. 1999. One week after, the dying king changed succession to Prince Abdullah, a Jordanian military leader. Hussein wrote a letter to Prince Hassam, the former designate, discussing at length the biowar threat.
Echoing lessons learned in his hours with Osterholm, Hussein described bioweapons as a terrible new resource for the stateless terrorist or rogue nation. Realizing his letter would be published in Jordanian newspapers and resonate across the Arab world King Hussein pointedly warned that there could be no winners in a world of man-made epidemics."
Harvard's Matthew Meselson calculated that Russia's lethal accident at Yekaterinberg/Sverdlovsk involved less than one gram of anthrax spores.... "So along comes Yekaterinberg and there you are with cases coming down what-- forty-two days," Henderson recalled. "So I talked to [anthrax] experts and said 'What's the probability this is resuspended particles in the air?' And they were adamant that couldn't happen. Since that time Friedlander at USAMRIID has exposed monkeys to low-dose anthrax. One monkey came down at fifty-nine days postexposure. And the more awesome thing: is it possible we don't have an endpoint for exposure?"
Clostridium botulinum toxin: 10 ng ingested lethal, 10ng/Kg inhaled lethal. No treatment. Death in 2-4 days. About seventeen pounds of a concentrated liquid suspension of the toxin would be enough to kill about half of all people living in a 27,710-acre target area, assuming they were exposed.
Smallpox, Henderson thought, was the ultimate weapon of mass destruction or, in military-speak, WMD.
"In the absence of the vaccine in London about 10 percent of all deaths in any given year were due to smallpox, Australian smallpox expertFenner began, referring to eighteenth-century documents. "The death rate among those who got infected was 25 percent for adults and 40 to 50 percent in children. There was a time when they wouldn't give names to children unless they had survived smallpox." ....in the summer of 1999 the U.S. Congress released a report claiming that both Iraq and North Korea were in possession of secret smallpox stockpiles.
"It's very difficult to discuss this topic. It's a very sensitive discussion," Alibek said nervously. "I know what kind of weapon could be developed just using regular rooms. For me, I need to have just a very simple lab, equipment. Even without any agent developed by any cell culture house. I can go outside, take just soil samples. I can manufacture weapons." He would be referring to Clostridium botulinum, and perhaps Bacillus antracis, and God knows what else... A paper published by Obolensk facility Biopreparat scientists A.P. Pomeransev et al. said Using sophisticated genetic engineering techniques the Obolensk team inserted virulence genes from a humanly harmless species, Bacillus cereus, into Bacillus anthracis... and bred for antibiotic resistance. The result, it appeared, was an entirely new form of anthrax that was, indeed, resistant to penicillin and vaccines and was capable of residing dangerously inside human cells in ways never previously seen with anthrax.
....18 repositories, located in fifteen countries, traded in plague bacteria. These repositories were located not only in the United States and Europe, but also in China, Bulgaria, Iran, Turkey, Argentina, and sixty other nations. Some such repositories did business over the Internet, offering overnight shipment of microbes for nothing more than a credit-card number--no proof of scientific credentials was required.
Clearly, were smallpox released the majority of the world's population would be vulnerable and, given smallpox's 30 percent kill rate, nearly two billion people could die. Cited in footnote 95: http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/battle/bftoc.html
Recognition that a bioterrorist attack has occurred was the key, regardless of whether the agent was bacterial or viral. And if Navy Commander Campbell was correct, the modern bioterrorist wasn't likely to issue warnings, claim credit, or in any way acknowledge the event.
...regardless of whether or not anyone determined the details of the biowar attack it is the public health system that would track down and treat the patients, determine who should receive prophylactic antibiotics and dispense the drug, conduct epidemiology that could determine whether the new anthrax outbreak was spreading from person to person, and analyze the organism to see what special attributes it might have.
Khidhir Hamza with Jeff Stein, 2000, Call #s UA 853.I72 H35 -or- 355.02
An amusing read. Probably loaded with propaganda.Interesting because he makes remarks from economic and sociobiological perpectives, and for a distinctive touch of black humor.
.... The threat of nuclear warfare carried with it twin levels of destruction. It wipes out both human beings and capital stock. The switch to biological warfare (to use a little ecotalk) is that is can be used primarily to destroy "human capital" leaving the physical capital stock intact. Thus, the survivors in a world with reduced population could be potentially richer, not poorer, on a per capita basis than the nuclear war survivors, if they can prevent the capital stock from deteriorating. This last remark is made partly facetiously, but there is a deep anthropological problem which cannot be dismissed merely because it appears to be in bad taste. Is there a sociobiological aspect to war? Could this be the way that our species, with its limited intelligence, keeps an upper bound its population? Prior to World War II, the anthropology of war received some attention. {Find quote of Toynbee about civilizations dying by suicide not murder}
There still appear to be technical problems in the military use, and clean delivery and control, of chemical and biological weapons; in my estimation the more immediate danger lies elsewhere. All but one of the technical problems calling for innovation have legitimate, peaceful, productive reasons for solution. They are better transportation, packaging, and materials handling of deadly substances. The one purely hostile problem is weapons delivery, and it is in the self-interest of a small country to solve the delivery problem. It is likely that all of these will be solved in a relatively inexpensive manner. When they are, the potential for cheap, clandestine manufacture and delivery of chemical and biological weapons will show the characteristics of the American economic dream. It will become a growth industry, with ease of entry; more and more room for small individual entrepreneurs with capital requirements no more complex than a mini-brewery; many "promising" alternative products, a high level of innovation, and falling costs in procurement, manufacture, and delivery.
... There is good evidence that a considerable percentage of the airline bomb scares were calls put in by individuals who would miss their plane unless they could delay it for an hour or two. {just for humor...}
Anthony Lake, 2000, HV6432 .L34 -or- 363.3 He was Clinton's NS advisor 1993-1997
(describing terrorists with WMD and cyber-terror) This is not futurology or science fiction or nail-biting fiction. It is not scare-mongering or hysteria. It is not deductions from the present time, extended to the future. This is the present. It is now. It is here. We have crossed the threshold to the era of high-tech terror, including the use of weapons of mass destruction. At 8:05 A.M. on March 20, 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) launched a WMD terrorist attack on the crowded Tokyo subway.....
Jeanne McDermott, 1987, UG447.8 M43 -or- 358.38
A bit dated in a fast-moving field, but still interesting.
In the phrase of the day, uttered by a poison gas pioneer, Fritz Haber, as he received his Nobel Prize, they were a "higher form of killing." Speaking about CBW, circa 1920
Until this century, one rule held throughout the history of armed conflict: natural disease took a greater toll on soldiers' lives than any man-made weapon.
Harvard Biologist and Government BW consultant Matthew Meselson said "It was not the low military utility of biological weapons that led us to renounce them. The real reason was their disutility. It is in the interests of the United States for war to be very very expensive. It would be in the interests of the United States for war to be so expensive that only the United States could do it. It was to limit the number of players in the game. That is the essential argument."
If vaccines do not offer a good defense, what do they offer? Not surprisingly, they offer a good offense. If a country wanted to strike first with biological weapons, it would develop vaccines to protect its own troops, vaccinating them well before the planned attack so they would be protected if the weapon happened to drift their way. She goes on to discuss the possibility of aerosol vaccines being used to secretly vaccinate friendly troops and civilians before a biowar attack; this was in '87 and I've heard nothing else about aerosol vaccines, so it maybe didn't pan out, but I seem to recall talk of genetically engineering food to provide vaccination.
Biowar is not the main topic, but gives good information about al- Qaeda (which means 'the base'). The best analysis seems to come from the National Security community, not the politicians.
America might eventually capture and jail Osama bin Laden, just as it captured and imprisoned Ramzi Yousef. But others will follow in their wake, because the two men are just the first of a new breed of terrorist unleashed against the West. Poisoned by political hatred and religious fervour, these 'New Jackals' have no qualms about mass killing and are as deadly and committed as any group of terrorists the world has ever faced.
During construction of the [WTC] safety and union officials had wanted the stairways pressurized, so the air pressure inside would be higher, preventing smoke entering during a fire. Their advice was ignored: now tens of thousands of people had to escape from one of the world's tallest buildings through thick smoke and down blackened stairways. [writing about first bombing]
It is Yousef's anger at the interminable suffering of the Palestinian people that has been the central anger driving him to terrorism, and he will happily produce evidence to back his claim that crimes have been committed against 'his people'. 'The numbers of Palestinians in 1917 according to United Nations publications was about 1.1 million,' he said. 'And now after more than 80 years there are less than 700,000 and the rest of them were either killed, deported, or living now in temporary shelters and camps in overseas countries as foreigners, and you [America] have been supporting all of this killing and deportation throughout the 80 years.'
[Mullah Omar's] personal bravery is unquestionable. He has been injured seriously four times in the last 20 years. One legend relates how he was wounded in the eye by shrapnel when a Soviet shell hit his mosque during the Afghan war. The mullah felt blood trickling down the side of his face, knew the eye was useless and would soon be infected, and tore it out of its socket with his own fingers.
There are many more bin Laden fighters living freely in the West, prepared to attack if their leader is threatened. 'The reason we don't talk about [sleeper agents] is because it would scare the hell out of people. There may be a large number of people that we are not aware of,' said Marvin Cetron, a terrorism expert and the author of the Pentagon's highly classified 'Terror 2000' report.
However, even if they fail to get the [Soviet nuclear] suitcase bombs [they are believed to have] working, bin Laden, or rather, his supporters, are believed to have already successfully obtained chemical and biological weapons.
'Egypt will fall soon enough,' said a veteran American intelligence official. 'Everything Mubarak does [to stop the Islamists] is just delaying the inevitable. .... We were victorious against communism, but this will be the struggle for liberty that dominates world politics well into the next century, and I think we've lost the fight already,' said the man wearily. 'It's just a matter of time.'
The team behind Terror 2000 was convinced that the world is witnessing the dawn of a new age of 'superterrorism', when men with no moral restrictions on mass killing will use weapons of mass destruction. 'We expect biological attacks in the future,' confirms Marvin Cetron. 'You're talking about taking large numbers of people out because that becomes theatre, because it attracts attention.'
[Pentagon Terrorism expert Probst] says intelligence agencies must start working to separate hard-core terrorists from the members of their gang and from their recruiting pool. ' There are several ways to do that,' says Probst, who is now saying the previously unthinkable: 'Many terrorist groups have legitimate grievances. Where these grievances can be legitimately met, go ahead and try to meet them. Meet legitimate demands to try to steal the terrorist's thunder.....'
'Carlos the Jackal and Abu Nidal were essentially fighting for a place at the table. They wanted recognition for their movement, they wanted recognition for their demands, whereas Osama bin Laden and Ramzi Yousef...want to punish and destroy, they're not looking for a place at the table - they want to destroy the table, and maximize casualties', said Oliver 'Buck' Revell. [former deputy director, FBI]
100 kg anthrax could kill 1-3 million, H-bomb could kill 570,000 to 1.9 million in DC according to OTA
anthrax incubation may be 40-50 days
....conversations with national security officials confirmed that everything [Ken Alibek] told us was true.
More than four years ago, the Department of Defense began looking into creating a new smallpox vaccine and building a stockpile for the military, but the effort is so enmeshed in politics and grant jockeying that one military officer described it to author Richard Preston as "a fucking disaster."
This is the newest and one of the best books I found on the topic. Two things stand out. The first is that this is the only place I found mention of the DTRA feasibility study of small-scale clandestine anthrax production described below (p 297-298), which was an intelligent project showing that the threat is real. Secondly, the authors take a critical perspective, suggesting that the threat, while very real, may have been overhyped by some.
In August 1970 [Josh Ledergerg] delivered a speech in Geneva to the U.N.'s Committee on Disarmament that was seen decades later as a turning point. Recent advances in science promised an arms race, he warned, "whose aim could well become the most efficient means for removing man from the planet."
Working on a [pentagon contract in the mid '80s, Stanford biologist Stanley] Falkow and a colleague moved a dangerous gene into Escherichia coli, the common microbe of the human gut, creating a superbug that attacked human cells. The donor pathogen was Yersinia Pseudotuberculosis... Maybe work like this created E. coli 0157:H7?
(regarding possible Iraqi use of BW during the Gulf War) "If we had a loss of 200,000 soldiers, how could we not nuke them?" asked Larry Seaquist, whose report for the Pentagon's top policy officials raised the specter of such loss.
[U.S. diplomat] Weber's mission to Stepnogorsk had proved that what Pasechnik and Alibek had told the West about the former Soviet germ-warfare program was true."
[Bill Patrick, former U.S. Bioweaponeer and current BW expert]: "My conclusion today [speaking in 1995] is not if terrorists will use a biological weapon but when and where."
The United States would not begin testing aerosol vaccination techniques until the late 1990s, but aerosol protection had been routine in the Soviet Union.
Aum's failures were instructive: they showed that making a biological weapon was harder than some experts had claimed... Aum had invested lavishly in laboratory gear, had even dreamed of doing recombinant experiments. The group's scientists had taken graduate courses in modern universities. Yet they couldn't master the engineering challenge of producing a terror weapon from pathogens.
[Richard Preston] discussed the outline of [The Cobra Event] with an FBI source, who asked him to reconsider. The threat from anthrax was too real. It would not serve the public to have a book appear that vividly described its powers. And so the author revised his story line to focus on a less plausible germ: a biologically engineered superbug.
"[President Clinton] was extremely knowledgeable [about BW] already. He said thruout history the biggest changes have come when there were new offensive weapons without defensive ones, and he was worried that we were entering such a period."
The [1997] GAO reports underscored the singular nature of the bioterrorist threat. Despite huge investments in intelligence and readiness, there was probably no way to predict with confidence the source of an attack, its target, the agent that would be used, or, therefore how best to defend the nation.
In March 1996, armed with $1.6 million in funding and commercial catalogs of lab equipment, a small team of DTRA [Defense Threat Reduction Agency] employees quietly began buying new and secondhand equipment to build a small-scale germ facility at the Nevada Test Site. Within weeks, officials had acquired almost everything it needed....By the summer of 2000, the team had built a functioning facility that had turned out two pounds of "product" --anthrax simulants-- in test runs. The low-tech plant produced Bacillus thuringiensis...and Bacillus globigii....The dried particles...were the ideal size for germ weapons.... 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.
Sergei Popov, former Soviet Bioweaponeer, who defected to Britian in 1992, designed organisms to trigger autoimmune responses while still at Vector in the Fmr. Soviet Union. The aim was to trick the body's defenses into self-destruction, as happens slowly in such diseases as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis or more suddenly in cases of anaphylactic shock..."Sometimes just small, very tiny quantities of foreign substances are enough," he said, to make the immune response "quite devastating." (His team modified Legionella, the Legionnaires' disease agent, by adding genes coding for fragments of myelin protein, to induce multiple sclerosis, and tested it on guinea pigs.) After the Legionella microbe and its mild aftermath came and went, and all signs of infection were gone, the metabolic reaction to the myelin fragments began a second, more pronounced wave of sickness. The guinea pigs first suffered brain damage and paralysis, then died, with the mortality rate close to 100 percent....With normal Legionella, many thousands of bacteria are required to sicken lab animals. But the recombinant Legionella was active with only a few cells. [Alibek said] "We all recognized the implications....A new class of weapons had been found. For the first time, we would be capable of producing weapons based on chemical substances produced naturally by the human body. They could damage the nervous system, alter moods, trigger psychological changes, and even kill."
In February 2001, Australian scientists announced they had inadvertently killed dozens of mice by making a virus that had crippled their immune system. At first the scientists informed only the Australian government and military about the experiments....But after intense debate, they decided to publish their findings. Others needed to know of the potential danger in case such discoveries were turned against people....The agent they were experimenting with was....a mousepox, a cousin of the human smallpox virus. The scientists had inserted into the virus a mouse gene that controls the production of interleukin-4. IL-4 is an immumological activator. They were attempting to use the immune system to sterilize mice, by having the mousepox-virus which carried the IL-4 gene produce extra IL-4, to cause immune rejection of ova. Apparently too much IL-4 was produced, or perhaps there was an amplified effect because of the presence of the mousepox infection....the mice not only became infertile, they died. The scientists were surprised to find that even mice vaccinated against mousepox died.
Because people also have the IL-4 gene, it was clear that the same result might occur in human subjects. Worse, the Australians realized, a rogue state or terrorist group might be able to achieve this result with smallpox....Just as the super-mousepox had defeated the mousepox vaccine, so might genetically enhanced smallpox defeat the human vaccine, the only existing protection should the disease re-emerge.
In the future, Meselson said, germs might be designed not only to kill but to manipulate all the life process---cognition, development, reproduction, everything. They would, in short, bestow the power to change what it means to be human.
Various DARPA-funded biodefense projects are promising. One involves breaking up the DNA/RNA of a pathogen (possibly using restriction enzymes?) into fragments, then assaying the fragments for immunization-potential. The technique is called Expression Library Immunization. This technique, especially if the animal-trial stage can be eliminated, could result in the rapid development of a vaccine, which could be used in the event engineered agents are used in an attack. Another approach is called gene shuffling, which sounds like the genetic algorithm, evolutionary in nature, used in artificial-life computer simulations. If at least an effective first-level trial can be developed to indicate possible immunological interest for a given fragment, then a technique based on breaking pathogenic DNA/RNA into components, then shuffling the components, and screening the vast numbers of resulting sequences for possible activity would appear to have potential as a rapid technique for developing powerful vaccines.
Back in the months before 9/11/01, I went thru a period of studying WW II, reading things like Churchill's history of it, a few books about the Eastern Front and Stalingrad, etc. After 9/11, I realized that as interesting as conventional warfare might be, it was profoundly inapplicable to the current situation (it would appear the Bush administration disagrees with me, as they have waged a mostly conventional-war response), and that intelligence and special operations and in general unconventional, asymmetrical and clandestine activities were a much better model to use.
Accordingly, I went to the library to find interesting books on these topics. Nothing really caught my eye, and meanwhile I had books with titles like Plague Wars leering suggestively at me from the next shelf. This was after the anthrax letters had appeared, and browsing thru books like The New Terror: Facing The Threat Of Biological and Chemical Weapons quickly convinced me that biological weapons, hereinafter referred to following the MilSpeak convention as "BW", while of limited conventional use, were or would soon be more accessible than nuclear or chemical weapons, and had many characteristics making their eventual employment by non-state-actors probable.
Given their ease of concealment and transportation, and increasing ease of development and manufacture, BW would at least for the time being appear to far outstrip possible defenses. Vaccines can be defeated by alteration of the antigenic proteins of the pathogen; bacteria can be made antibiotic-resistant. Organisms either can or will soon be engineerable to have desired characteristics of latency, lethality and communicability.
In addition, it may become possible to target ethnic or other genetically distinguishable population groups. It will likely also be possible to engineer viruses which, instead of killing infected individuals, change their genetic material. The techniques of gene therapy have obvious BW potential, and if germline therapy is mastered, it then might be possible to create a viral agent which would produce changes not only in a target population but in all their descendents. This could change warfare beyond recognition. Instead of killing a population, a bioweaponeer might simply alter them to taste, changing human evolution in the process.
The application of biotechnology to biological weaponry is called "Black Biology". Brave new world, indeed.
The best defense is to not have deadly enemies, and a poor second is prevention by some sort of global SWAT team empowered to use all possible means to detect development of BW and conduct search-and-destroy operations at suspect locations. The first option, which would involve radically changing US foreign policy regarding for example the Middle East, seems unlikely; the second will at best delay an attack, but not indefinitely prevent it, and could make eventual deliberate release of a true Doomsday disease more probable.