write a term paper on biological weapons

Science and Technology to Counter Terrorism: Proceedings of an Indo-U.S. Workshop (2007)

Chapter: 14 twentieth-century legacy: the challenge of biological threats to twenty-first century bio-medical science and society, 14 twentieth-century legacy: the challenge of biological threats to twenty-first century bio-medical science and society.

Christopher J. Davis, O.B.E.

INTRODUCTION

Let me begin by stating that the phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD) is a misconception and in many ways quite confusing. It is said to have been a Soviet invention in the 1960s, coined for political purposes and to cause confusion. We are unfortunately saddled with it—unfortunately, because by no means can all chemical and biological weapons be classified as weapons of mass destruction. In fact, the entire purpose, especially of biological weapons, is to obtain an advantage without destroying anything but people (and animals of plants), however unpleasant that concept may be.

This paper offers a broad overview of the topic of bioterrorism. It attempts to cover the nature of biological weapons agents, industrial biological weapons programs, bioterrorism, bombs, and natural infections, and to offer a few examples of terrorist use of biological weapons and the kinds of lessons that can be drawn from them. It also discusses biodefense, a practical philosophy for moving forward, and the directions in which the United States is going and what some people in the United States are doing. Bioterrorism is fortunately an area where science and technology could have enormous positive impact and in which research on biodefense will also provide significant benefits for society at large in the realm of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases for which we are currently ill-prepared.

THE NATURE OF BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS: PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

First, there are lethal and nonlethal agents. Plague is an example of an organism that is highly lethal. Up to 100 percent of untreated victims of the plague will die.

Plague can be compared with tularemia, which comes in two forms. Today, the more well known form is considered a debilitating, incapacitating disease. The other form is the one originally developed as a weapon. It causes substantial mortality. Thus, the approaches to these two agents are quite different, the results they produce are quite different, and the way we must deal with them will be different.

There are also transmissible and nontransmissible agents. Smallpox, which is highly transmissible, can be compared with anthrax, which is not transmissible from person to person. The significance of this is great. One individual with smallpox will infect anywhere between 10 and 50 others, creating a mushrooming problem.

There are persistent and non-persistent agents. The classic Biological Weapon (BW) organism, anthrax, is persistent and hardy. Given the right conditions, it can survive in the environment for well over 100 years. Anthrax can be compared with Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis, a virus that is nonpersistent in the environment.

Of course, there are overarching classifications of living BW organisms, divided into bacteria and viruses. Brucella can be compared with Marburg virus, for instance, and there are many other examples. The big difference is whether or not vaccines and therapeutic treatment agents exist. On the whole, there are very few drugs available to treat viral diseases. This is a large hole in our defensive armamentarium.

There are living and nonliving agents. Plague, for example, is a living agent. Botulinum toxin and ricin, on the other hand, are clearly nonliving chemicals.

Finally, there are the even more general categories of human diseases versus animal diseases versus plant diseases. There are organisms that can attack any part of the living world that we depend upon, ranging from salmonella infections in humans, to foot-and-mouth disease in cows, and Bunt of Wheat in food crops.

So, biological weapons are a family of weapons. This must be emphasized. People talk about straightforward “ballistic” weapons, but they never confuse the use of a tank with the use of a handgun. Tanks and handguns are designed to do different jobs in the hands of different kinds of people. Similarly, it is important that the same distinction be drawn in talking about biological weapons, a family of weapons that can be used in circumstances that range from individual assassinations to mass killing of civilian populations.

THE LEGACY OF INDUSTRIAL OFFENSIVE BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS PROGRAMS

The modern era has seen several biological weapons programs, including two, in particular, that were very large. The United States had a very large offensive biological weapons program, which it unilaterally abandoned in 1969, in the lead-up to the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. The Soviet Union had a truly enormous offensive biological weapons program. 61 Now there are about a dozen countries that have been assessed as having, or are suspected of having, offensive biological weapons programs; without discussing details, suffice it to say that these programs and the people with the skills to run them do exist.

Some historical background may help provide an idea of the scale of these programs. The U.S. biological weapons program was completely destroyed in a very short period of time in 1969. Contrary to popular thinking perpetuated by government propaganda, it had been a very successful and extremely large program. By 1969, for instance, the part of the U.S. Navy dedicated to biological weapons trials at sea had grown to such a size that, had it been separated and given to a third country, it would have constituted the world’s fifth largest navy. This is an extraordinary fact given the size of the navies of the major sea powers at the time. A great deal had been achieved in the program, which the leadership of the time decided, for a very complex set of political, intelligence, and other reasons, to abandon completely. For instance, Sergeant tactical missiles with biological warheads packed with spherical bomblets were ready for use in the field; it was later discovered that the Soviets had produced very similar designs. Essentially, these were bomblets containing a liquid agent. The bomblets were designed to be released from the warhead. They were designed either to detonate at a certain height or, in the Soviet case, to bounce and split open a few meters aboveground, dispersing their contents in an aerosol along the way.

I could speak at length about the Soviet biological weapons program and still not exhaust the data, so large was the effort. I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time in London in late October 1989, when Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, a very senior official from the Soviet program, became the first BW expert to defect to the West; in this case to the United Kingdom. This allowed us to start to make serious political and diplomatic progress with this issue. What we learned, in addition to what we already knew, was that the Soviet program was both very large and extremely secret. The degree of secrecy accorded it was even greater than that for the nuclear program. The reasons for this are obvious. Not only was it a strategic weapons program, it was illegal, outlawed by an international convention to which the Soviet Union was not only a signatory but also a depository power. Indeed, the Soviet Union was one of the architects of the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. Their program was vast in scope, with enormous amounts of research and development and the highest political backing, and under military control ultimately, although most of the work was carried out in a front organization called Biopreparat. It was really the substitute for what countries in the West and many other countries in the world built in their biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. The result was that the Soviet Union became the world’s best bioweapons developer, while their biopharmaceutical industry could not produce enough standard antibiotics to meet domestic requirements. It was an extraordinary enterprise that consumed the best and most talented medical and biological minds of a generation. It drew the most capable an inventive people into this field, and they did some incredible work over a period of 15 to 20 years.

In a bold political move involving Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George H.W. Bush, taking Soviet leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Edward Shevardnadze to task, we addressed this problem, and were partly successful, in that at least the civilian side of the Soviet program was ‘dismantled.’ Alas, what remains of their program, or should I say the ‘core’ still lies within the confines of its origins in the Russian military establishments because of inspections impasses into which we were

drawn and the failure of our political and military leadership to realize the importance of this issue at a time when nuclear instability was the greater concern. The story of how this happened must wait for another occasion.

BIOTERRORISM, BOMBS, AND NATURAL DISEASE

How does the world of bioterrorism differ from the world of terrorism that we are used to? The world of terrorism is largely one involving guns and explosive devices. How is bioterrorism similar to or different from naturally occurring infectious disease? In the biological world, what we see are delayed effects. Even the most fast-acting toxin has a small delay, and living agents have to get into the body in order to multiply. Thus, whatever we are going to observe will be observed not at the time of the event but sometime after. The assumption is that our first warning of an attack will be the occurrence of sickness in the population.

Psychology plays an important role in bioterrorism. In psychological terms, infectious diseases have an enormous impact. This is especially true in the highly developed, so-called sophisticated societies of the West that regard themselves as largely invulnerable to infectious diseases. The fact that we cannot see biological weapons agents is another psychological factor. For humans the unknown is perturbing. People can understand and come to terms with bombs and bombers because they are visible. Chemical and biological weapons, on the other hand, have an undermining effect.

Re-load , a term coined by Richard Danzig, a former Secretary of the U.S. Navy, means that the person who produced the 10 grams of anthrax involved in the letter attacks in the United States could, with relative ease, increase the amount produced to 5 kilograms. Depending on how it is disseminated, 5 kilograms of dry powdered agent could do a great deal of harm. Moreover, an agent such as anthrax can inflict harm quite quickly. With 5 kilograms a perpetrator can inflict harm on multiple occasions.

First responders involved in a biological weapons incident are likely to be different from the first responders for most other terrorism incidents. With bioterrorism it is the people on the medical frontline—doctors and nurses—who produce the response. Indeed, they may become casualties themselves as a result of becoming involved with transmissible diseases or a persistent agent.

Bioterrorism also has the potential for many casualties and deaths . Terrorist attacks to date have caused relatively few casualties and deaths, but that is just an accident of history. Potentially, people could be killed in very large numbers, especially if transmissible agents such as plague or smallpox were used.

In the aftermath of a biological attack, diagnosis can be difficult and challenging, even for the most experienced physician. Everybody sees diagnosis as being straightforward, but on the whole, it is quite difficult to distinguish one agent from another on a clinical basis, particularly in the early hours of their disease development. In addition, most medical professionals are not well trained or well prepared to distinguish biowarfare diseases from other more common diseases. They may have rarely seen, or never seen, these kinds of diseases. There is also a technical aspect that is not always well appreciated. When people are exposed to large doses of a disease agent , the pattern of disease may be different from that which is seen in the natural world and

may not necessarily be recognized. Additionally, the disease may progress much more quickly with much larger inoculums of a biological agent.

In bioterrorism the pattern we see is in effect an instant epidemic. There are classic patterns for the emergence of any normal epidemic or for the emergence of a period of disease in society. Biological weapons do not follow this pattern.

Obviously, the impact from an apparently small bioterrorist event can be enormous. The well-known anthrax letters incident in the United States in 2001 illustrates this.

RECENT EXAMPLES OF BIOTERRORISM: LEARNING THE HARD WAY

There are in fact relatively few recent examples of bioterrorism. If we look closely at historical record, there have been approximately 200 incidents involving toxic biological materials in the last 100 years. Most of them were minor attempts at disruption. Therefore, history is not a good indicator of the future. History does tell us, however, that it is time to take this threat more seriously.

Accounts of these incidents reveal how society at large is learning the hard way about bioterrorism. Before the 1990s, most governments paid little or no attention to the problem of biological weapons, especially in terms of defense. There is a complex explanation for this. When I first came into the CBRN 62 defense business in 1980, biological warfare was thought to be passé and defensive research and development was not accorded much priority or funding. By the time we started openly discussing the Soviet problem in the early mid-1990s, the potential impact of biological warfare had become more widely accepted, but it had produced less of an impact at the political level than you might think. It took the whole issue of the ‘Amerithrax’ attack to focus attention and resources on biological weapons, bioterrorism, and biodefense.

I shall first address the Rajneeshee incident in the U.S. (Interestingly, the Rajneeshee sect moved from India to the United States in 1984. The next big incident to be examined will be the Aum Shinrikyo event in the 1990s in Japan. In 2001, of course, there was the more well-known attack with the anthrax-laden letters in the U.S.

The first case study is that of the Rajneeshees, who were trying to take over political control of the area where they lived in Oregon. They had a licensed medical facility on their commune and obtained samples of salmonella bacteria quite legitimately. They grew cultures of salmonella and spread the resulting material on salad bars in 10 restaurants in a place called The Dalles. Then they sat back and waited.

Many people suffered symptoms and became ill. There were an estimated 751 cases of salmonellosis. A few people were hospitalized, but fortunately no one died. The authorities, including the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), erroneously determined that the event was an ordinary outbreak of food poisoning, occasioned most probably by poor hygiene at one of the restaurants. They reached this conclusion even

though all of the signs, including the pattern of disease, indicated otherwise. In fact, there are many reasons people did not recognize this incident, and, in some ways, did not want to recognize it. However, the police later investigated other activities of the Rajneeshees, and eventually several individuals confessed to the crime. Ultimately, two people were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms for their involvement in the incident.

The next case, that of the Aum Shinrikyo sect, occurred in Japan in the early 1990s. The incident, in which about 12 people were killed and thousands were affected to a lesser extent by the sect’s release of Sarin nerve agent on the Tokyo subway, is well known. However, members of the sect also undertook several unsuccessful attempts to use biological agents in the years preceding the subway incident. It was precisely because of these failures that they employed Sarin in the way they did.

The sect tried on a number of occasions to disseminate botulinum toxin by driving a car through the streets. These toxin attacks failed because of poor dissemination technique and possibly, as reported by the police, because the sect failed to produce active toxin from the Clostraidal culture they used.

In 1993, the sect failed in an attempt to disseminate liquid anthrax from the roof of a building they owned in Tokyo. Many people had complained to the police about the terrible smell coming from the building. The police could not do much about that and did not want to interfere. The anthrax they used was eventually identified as a non-virulent animal vaccine strain; a Sterne variant. Had they used a fully virulent strain of anthrax, the result, despite their poor dissemination technique, might have been a lot different. Fortunately, as it was, no one became ill.

In 1995, there was a sabotaged attempt to disseminate botulinum toxin in the Tokyo subway. The Aum Shinrikyo sect plotted to place cylinders of the material under the subway escalators. The person who was given the job, however, could not go through with it and filled the cylinders with water. As a result, the attack was foiled by one of the sect’s own members in a fit of conscience.

The third example of a biological weapons attack is the anthrax letter incidents in the United States. Five letters were sent through the mail to high-profile individuals. A highly virulent strain of anthrax called Ames was used; the strain was misnamed, by the way, because it does not actually come from Ames, Iowa. In all, an estimated 10 grams of spores were used. The first person to die was an Englishman who had become a U.S. citizen many years before. He received a lethal dose of spores by merely opening a letter. Since then there has been considerable debate as to the exact quality of the agent preparation and the extent to which its aerosol characteristics changed during the course of the attacks. Suffice it to say that, since much of the crucial evidence remains sub judice , the perpetrators of this incident produced dry particulate agent with good enough aerosol characteristics to cause illness and death despite the poor dissemination method. The overall effect was widespread contamination of the environment wherever the agent was released or leaked from the letters. The implication of this was that if the perpetrators could produce a few grams and have this result, then it would not be difficult for them to produce 1 kilogram or even 10 kilograms or more, the dissemination of which would result in concomitantly dire consequences.

When I was asked about identifying and finding the perpetrators, I replied with a great deal of caution, explaining that the intelligence community had always worried

about attribution of such an incident or even of a large state-inspired attack. Identifying the perpetrators of any biological weapons use, if they do not confess, could be much more difficult than anticipated, and maybe even impossible, as it was proved to be with the anthrax letters.

The economics of decontamination is important. There are two figures that are relevant. After the anthrax letter incidents, decontamination of the postal sorting office and the U.S. Senate office building alone cost an estimated $72 million, and this may be a conservative figure. This is a huge sum for just these two facilities. Decontamination took a large amount of time, effort, and material. The CDC itself committed significant resources, but even then the whole exercise got off to a confused and difficult start. At the height of the anthrax letters crisis, 2,000 of the CDC’s 8,500 staff were working full-time on the problem and most of the remaining personnel did some part-time work as well. All of this effort went into ameliorating the effects one very small incident, an outbreak of anthrax involving just 22 people of whom “only” five died. As yet, the person or persons responsible for the incidents remains unidentified by the authorities, although some commentators say that the perpetrator is known, but the evidence will not stand up in court.

Lessons Learned

What lessons should we learn from all this? When I was a young physician-in-training, we were told that “common things commonly occur.” In other words, before looking for some esoteric diagnosis, review the common causes of pathology. On the whole, this approach serves routine medicine well. Indeed, it has become the predominant pattern of thought in everyday life. It was responsible, in part, for the reaction to the Rajneeshee incident. After all, who would have thought of bioterrorism as the cause of the salmonellosis in an obscure location in the North West of the U.S.? And when they did, just how plausible would it have seemed at the time? Unfortunately, this higher degree of awareness is required if we are to operate effectively against bioterrorism threats and attacks. In medical diagnostics this is referred to as a ‘high index of suspicion.’ Without it, hoof beats will always signify horses and the zebra will be upon us before we can react. If we value our survival, we simply cannot afford for this to happen.

Technique is extremely important in matters of weapons and their use. Without technique you can easily fail at simple things, as happened in the Aum Shinrikyo incident. The members of the sect could have achieved their aims, but they made some silly mistakes. Luckily for the Japanese people, they did not have quite the right knowledge and the essential technique to launch a successful bioweapons attack.

Conversely, a simple idea well executed can be very effective. The Rajneeshees carried out a primitive form of attack, using a simple dissemination system, and caused significant illness in hundreds of individuals. Be it bugs or bombs, nothing in life is guaranteed; sometimes they work and sometimes they fail. Ill-informed commentators are inclined to say, “Oh, the Aum Shinrikyo sect with all their money and scientists failed, so it just goes to show how difficult it is to use bioweapons,” or alternatively that “bioweapons must be ineffective or useless as weapons and are not therefore a problem.” Alas, this is the wrong conclusion to draw from these incidents.

Having lived in the U.K. through 30 years of ‘classical’ terrorism — something with which our Indian colleagues are very familiar — when the Provisional Irish Republican Army used a variety of devices on a regular basis, we learned that bombs did not always detonate properly. Sometimes they killed their perpetrators. The same is true with biological weapons. Even cruise missiles and other sophisticated weapons are not 100 percent reliable. It is unwise to tempt fate by judging our chances of survival by the failure rate of the weapon or the operator.

When bioweapons work, as the anthrax letters did, whole societies change their behavior. That is exactly what we have observed in the United States. Sometimes a society “gets lucky.” Five people paid the ultimate price to wake us up to a whole series of problems and to prompt us to start to address them.

USING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY TO COUNTER BIOTERRORISM: DEFENSE IN BREADTH AND DEPTH

From the historical perspective, bioterrorism is a low-probability, high-impact event. A little bioterror can have a big effect. That is the view we must take about how to deal with it and how much money and other resources to invest in defensive measures. The use of just 10 grams of anthrax has caused enormous changes. In the aftermath of the anthrax letters incidents, large amounts of money were spent and attitudes of the U.S. public changed completely.

In events involving infectious diseases, preparation and prevention are key to managing outbreaks. If such events catch a society unprepared, even more time and money will be spent, and even more lives will be lost than if it had been thought through in advance.

We do not understand a lot about what we thought we understood. There are many accepted dogmas about biological agents themselves, their effects, about the organisms and their physiology, pathology and effects: for many years people have taken them for granted. On the whole, these areas of science have been much neglected during the last 30 or 40 years. Scientists considered them to be boring and unproductive, and opted to do what they perceived as more exciting experimental work. After all, who wanted to look at the metabolism of some obscure bug that was no longer of importance to us when it was a simple matter to treat the problem with an antibiotic? Scientists want to do work that will build an interesting and productive career, and allow them to write papers, receive large grants, be at the cutting edge of research, and be respected by their peers. A few scientists continued to study infectious diseases, but it was not very popular. Society has suffered as a result, because there is much that is not understood, even about common diseases. Fortunately, and not a moment too soon, this parlous state of affairs is changing fast.

What we need is biological defense in breadth and depth, and I will outline the kind of actions that must be undertaken in order to achieve this. It is important to put in place widely dispersed local (point) and stand-off bioaerosol detection in order to be able to monitor the atmosphere continually and detect aerosols of biological agents. It is a very tough technical challenge. In the United States, point detection is being attempted at 36 sites across the country, but it is far from a perfect system. It is possible to develop

stand-off detection—a sort of biological radar—but this is even more difficult to goal to achieve. It may be possible in the future, but right now. More practical in the short term is infectious disease tracking in real time. In other words, systems of detection and information exchange need to pick up changes in behavior in real time.

Stockpiles of prophylactic and therapeutic agents, and doing research and development on new vaccines and therapeutics are also needed. Decisions about the tactics and the strategies to counter a wide range of organisms must be made, which is by no means as simple as it first appears. There is no multivalent vaccine that will cover everyone against everything with one shot and with no side effects. Since we lack such a vaccine, we need to be able to respond with therapeutic agents. In any case, even with effective, safe vaccines, we would probably not be able to vaccinate everyone throughout their life. Lifetime vaccination would probably be unacceptable to society at large, because the likelihood of an attack is considered to be quite small. Therefore, therapeutic agents are at least one avenue we should consider since they allow us to adapt to differing circumstances and may be used prophylactically or in response to obvious infection.

We also need real-time diagnostics for infectious diseases. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals need tools that can be used when something unusual is occurring, but they do not know what it is. For example, if an odd cluster of people exhibit similar symptoms—temperature, aches and pains, cough, and so forth—medical professionals need to distinguish the cause of this pattern from the common cause of such a pattern. Some science and technology should focus on this area.

There must be a robust public health system. It is well recognized that, even in the United States, this is a neglected area. Public health professionals are poorly paid and receive few thanks for their efforts. Public health care systems were built to protect us from infectious diseases in an era when people feared infectious diseases. Today, people do not fear infectious diseases, unless a resistant organism affects them or a relative, or if AIDS is an issue. In such instances, attitudes begin to change. We need trained and knowledgeable medical and nursing staff and paramedical first responders. These are the people on the frontlines, and they do not know as much as they need to about infectious diseases and biological threats.

Finally, I have to emphasize the importance of planning and of thinking the unthinkable. It was very difficult to persuade people to do this before 2001. In the end, planning is the best chance that we have to save ourselves from potential catastrophe. Political awareness and public participation are fundamental motivations for planning. Ultimately, it is the citizens who pay the bills and decide how our taxes should be spent.

ASSESSING NATIONAL CAPABILITIES

Richard Danzig, former Secretary of the U.S. Navy, was asked to write a monograph assessing national capabilities for addressing bioterrorism. He looked at the problems and suggested some approaches and solutions, proposing a list of key topics by which to judge preparedness. Danzig asked two key questions: how can we assess how we are doing, and what is our scorecard? For example, when assessing our response to anthrax, how well prepared are we today? To cope with anthrax, smallpox, or other infectious diseases, he suggested a useful list of categories to use to evaluate our

progress. This list includes detection, drugs, vaccines, decontamination, interdiction, intelligence, surveillance and diagnosis, simulation, modeling, gaming, alleviation, counterproliferation, civilian preparation, and consequence management. This list is a practical tool to use to assess what needs to be addressed.

National Preparedness: The U.S. Approach

In 2003, John H. Marburger, senior science advisor to the President, stated that the anthrax incidents sent two unambiguous messages: our society is vulnerable to bioterrorism, and we are not prepared. He said that in the intervening 2 years since the anthrax incidents, however, important steps had been taken to protect and prepare the nation for a broader range of threats. A substantial framework has been created, clear directions have been established, and very basic things have changed.

In former years, the CDC was not very involved or interested in addressing biological threats. It now has a new director and is much more involved and much more focused on the business of emerging diseases and the potential of bioterrorism and biological weapons.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have never had large amounts of money to do research in this area. In recent years, however, the U.S. Congress has appropriated a lot of money to NIH to act as the agent for driving forward biodefense and biomedical basic research and development. The NIH has a very big job assigned to it and the new mission will present quite a challenge to its prevailing culture.

Funding is of course a crucial element. Very large figures are involved. Nearly $1 billion was appropriated for research and development on science and technology in 2004, with a large increase in funding going to the NIH for research during the coming years. It is quite difficult for the NIH to absorb this amount of money and to build new programs. It is all very well having the money, but it is a challenge to spend it sensibly and effectively.

Overall, the response to bioterrorism has been organized into three broad interagency initiatives: (1) Project BioWatch, or early warning using atmospheric monitoring—36 sites are now being used in this experimental project; (2) Project BioSense, or biomedical data collection and fusion to detect pattern anomalies in human disease occurrence; (3) Project BioShield, which places more emphasis in the public health domain and covers the accelerated research, development, and procurement of medical countermeasures.

Unintended Consequences

A few things can happen to a society when it is threatened, as was the United States with biodefense, and U.S. reactions have caused some unpleasant things to occur. Consider, for instance, the issue of biosecurity, where measures, including registration, have been put in place to increase physical control and accountability over highly pathogenic microorganisms. This has caused great difficulty for many scientists in the U.S. who work with these organisms, and has become a challenge to the way scientific

pursuits have always been conducted. Scientists who once worked with microorganisms under little scrutiny, now face Draconian penalties if they make mistakes with paperwork or physical accounting procedures.

This also affects international cooperation. The United States and the United Kingdom have a history of close collaboration in this area. In both countries, even within government circles where the network of people doing research and development on “Select Agents” is small and very tight, shared projects have come under pressure because of these new rules. No one has yet solved this problem as we continue to crack a walnut. We must be very careful about how we implement protective rules without knowing the ramifications of our actions.

The question of the dual-use dilemma on misuse of technology for destructive purposes was addressed by the National Academies’ Committee on Research Standards and Practices to Prevent the Destructive Application of Biotechnology. 63 How do we, as scientists and technologists, police ourselves against the kind of science that we think may be dangerous to our society? Can we indeed do this? When science poses danger to society, should it be confined to special sites, should the results be vetted before publication or should we abandon it altogether? These questions are very sensitive and are under debate.

THE WIDER WORLD

Out there is a big wide world in which some bad things are happening. The question of new and reemerging infectious diseases is now recognized as a rising global issue as well as a security threat. Infectious disease accounts for 25 percent of the deaths that occur annually worldwide. Since 1973, 20 well-known diseases have reemerged or spread geographically. More than 30 new diseases have been identified since that time. Tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and HIV/AIDS continue to surge. TB is likely to become the largest cause of death in the developing world by 2020.

In the United States, the price of public complacency about infectious disease is high. Annual infectious disease rates have doubled to more than 170,000 per year since 1980, and these figures are 3 years out of date. Four million Americans are Hepatitis C carriers, Influenza kills 30,000 Americans annually, and foodborne illnesses are in the millions, with 9,000 deaths per annum. Even in the U.S. TB has made a comeback and is still increasing. Highly virulent and antimicrobial-resistant pathogens are major sources of hospital-acquired infections, killing 14,000 patients annually. Interestingly, however, it took just five anthrax deaths to change behavior towards infectious disease in the United States.

A SILVER LINING

Despite these challenges, let me end on a note of optimism. One high profile incident of bioterrorism caused five deaths, drove U.S. society and its leaders to re-

examine the issues and focus on the problem of biowarfare and the related, but larger everyday problem of infectious disease. The complacency that is largely born of the era of antibiotics is slowly being rolled back. Already this new awareness has produced a better response to new challenges, such as Severe Acute Repertory Syndrome (SARS). Unquestionably, the CDC reacted in a much more publicly acceptable, professional, and speedy way in response to SARS when it was informed of the outbreak by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO, in turn, had picked up from its network what had happened when an infected Chinese gentleman moved into Vietnam with the disease. Clearly, the situation is improving, and people are less complacent.

PAYING THE INSURANCE PREMIUMS

Ultimately, these efforts are going to cost a lot of money, but I think this kind of expenditure is best viewed as paying insurance premiums. So, why pay insurance premiums? I believe in a defense strongly constructed in breadth and depth and openly declared. I applaud the way that the United States deals with biodefense in this respect. Its approach stands in contrast to the more secretive approach of the United Kingdom. There the view favors keeping plans secret, to be revealed only when necessary in response to an event. Actually I do not want the day of the event to come. I do not want the perpetrator to challenge my defenses. Rather, I believe it is better to show potential perpetrators what they are up against and use this as a deterrent.

Regarding bioweapons, we have no means of retaliation, and possibly no means of attribution. We have not even found the person or persons who sent the anthrax letters. We would not have caught the Rajneeshees had there not been a confession, and had the Aum Shinrikyo not been so inept, we would not have found them either. Defense is the only answer for us, especially since we are not in the business of biological retaliation. If there is a deliberate attack, of course, defense pays enormous dividends. It will ameliorate effects and minimize long-term damage. The defense systems that are proposed at the moment will not give us 100 percent protection, but then again no defensive system is 100 percent effective.

Unlike most other costly defensive or weapons programs, preparedness for bioterrorism will pay dividends everyday because it increases our ability to combat the growing hazards of “ordinary” infectious disease. Therefore, if we can deal with the very unpleasant and highly unlikely problem of weapons, at the same time we will help the people who have real, everyday needs for dealing with infectious diseases. By spending the money in one place, it will flow across to help in several other areas.

This is an area where science and technology will almost certainly prove decisive; in increasing the capability of society to ameliorate the effect of an attack or even to prevent such an attack from taking place by raising the bar of defense so high that adversaries look for more vulnerable targets. Because of the wealth of intellectual capability that India has to offer in the fields of biotechnology, engineering, and information science, prospects are good for creating fruitful partnerships between the United States and India in this sphere of endeavor.

I am not the world’s greatest optimist, but on this occasion, I think that together we have a chance to make a difference where it counts.

This volume presents the papers and summarizes the discussions of a workshop held in Goa, India, in January 2004, organized by the Indian National Institute of Advanced Science (NIAS) and the U.S. Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC). During the workshop, Indian and U.S. experts examined the terrorist threat faced in both countries and elsewhere in the world, and explored opportunities for the U.S. and India to work together. Bringing together scientists and experts with common scientific and technical backgrounds from different cultures provided a unique opportunity to explore possible means of preventing or mitigating future terrorist attacks.

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Applying Genetic Engineering to Biological Weapons

• First Online: 16 December 2022

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• Katherine Paris 2  

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Concerns over the potential misuse of genetic engineering date back to the early-1970s. Over the years, many scholars and studies have identified various desirable attributes of agents that nefarious actors may want to target via genetic engineering for hostile purposes. There are several obstacles—technical, social, organization, and management—that have made it difficult in the past for actors to genetically engineering more dangerous agents. Security experts worry that recent advancements in genome editing technologies may diminish, or even remove, some of these barriers to biological weapons. The purpose of this chapter is to layout the history of concerns over the general threat of genetic engineering, and, more specially, how people worry genome editing technologies could be intentionally misused.

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Concealed knowledge is knowledge that is intentionally or unintentionally left out, which is illustrated by a scientist who intentionally leaves out tricks of the trade or unintentionally leaves out knowledge from publications due to space limitations.

Mismatched salience occurs when communications are mismatched such as the case when scientist A does not realize scientist B should be directed to do things a particular way, and scientist B does not know what to ask scientist A so that knowledge is transferred.

Unrecognized knowledge occurs when scientists are unaware that they are performing procedures in a certain way; other scientists may unknowingly acquire the habit when working with scientists who know how to perform the procedure—both parties may be unaware that any knowledge was even transferred.

Ostensive knowledge is knowledge that can be codified, such as through words and diagrams; however, this form of knowledge is too complex to be fully conveyed explicitly and requires some sort of demonstration or pointing to understand.

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Biological and Chemical Weapons

By Bastian Herre and Max Roser

Chemical and biological weapons are organisms, toxins, and chemicals used to cause death or harm through their poisonous properties. Alongside nuclear weapons , biological and chemical weapons are weapons of mass destruction because they can kill or injure large numbers of people and cause environmental damage.

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Chemical and Biological Weapons: Use in Warfare, Impact on Society and Environment

1. Introduction

Since the end of World War II there has been a number of treaties dealing with the limitations, reductions, and elimination of so-called weapons of mass destruction and/or their transport systems (generally called delivery systems). Some of the treaties are bilateral, others multilateral, or in rare cases universal. In the present paper only the chemical and biological weapons will be discussed, with emphasis on the Convention to eliminate them (CBWC).

The term “ Weapons of Mass Destruction ” (WMD), used to encompass nuclear (NW), biological (BW), and chemical weapons (CW), is misleading, politically dangerous, and cannot be justified on grounds of military efficiency. This had been pointed out previously by the author [1] and discussed in considerable detail in ref. [2]. Whereas protection with various degrees of efficiency is possible against chemical and biological weapons, however inconvenient it might be for military forces on the battlefield and for civilians at home, it is not feasible at all against nuclear weapons. Chemical weapons have shown to be largely ineffective in warfare, biological weapons have never been deployed on any significant scale. Both types should be better designated as weapons of terror against civilians and weapons of intimidation for soldiers . Requirements on their transport system differ vastly from those for nuclear warheads. They are able to cause considerable anxiety, panic, and psychosis without borders within large parts of the population. Stockpiling of biological weapons is not possible over a long time scale [3, 4]. Only nuclear weapons are completely indiscriminate by their explosive power, heat radiation and radioactivity, and only they should therefore be called a weapon of mass destruction.

However, if one wants to maintain the term “ Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) “, it is a defendable view to exclude chemical and biological weapons, but put together with nuclear weapons all those that actually has killed millions of people in civil wars since World War II. These are mainly assault rifles , like AK47s, handguns , and land mines , to a lesser extent mortars, fragmentation bombs, and hand grenades.

This paper gives in Chapter 2 an overview on the history of chemical warfare, addresses in Chapter 3 the inventory of chemical weapons, discusses in Chapter 4 the elimination of chemical weapons and possible problems resulting for the environment (CW), reviews in Chapter 5 some non-lethal chemical weapons and chemical weapons which may be on the borderline to conventional explosives, and describes in Chapter 6 some of the old and new biological weapons (BW). Chapter 7 evaluates and compares the use of biological and chemical weapons by terrorists and by military in combat. The present status and verification procedures for the Chemical and Biological Weapons Convention (CBWC) are addressed in the conclusions in Chapter 8.

The Greeks first used sulfur mixtures with pitch resin for producing suffocating fumes in 431 BC during the Trojan War. Attempts to control chemical weapons date back to a 1675 Franco-German accord signed in Strasbourg. Then came the Brussels Convention in 1874 to prohibit the use of poison or poisoned weapons. During the First Hague Peace Appeal in 1899, the Hague Convention elaborated on the Brussels accord by prohibiting the use of projectiles that would diffuse “asphyxiating or deleterious” gases ( Laws and Customs of Wars on Land ). This Convention was reinforced during the second Hague conference in 1907, but prohibitions were largely ignored during World War I. At the battle of Ypres/Belgium, canisters of chlorine gas were exploded in April 1915 by Germany, which killed 5,000 French troops and injured 15,000. Fritz Haber, a Nobel price winner in 1919 for invention of ammonium fixation, had convinced the German Kaiser to use chlorine gas to end the war quickly. History taught us about a different outcome. During World War I all parties used an estimated 124,000 tons of chemicals in warfare. Mustard gas – “the king of battle gases” – then used on both sides in 1917 killed 91,000 and injured 1.2 million, accounting for 80% of the chemical casualties (death or injury). Chemical weapons caused about 3 percent of the estimated 15 million casualties on the Western Front [3, 6]. To put these numbers into perspective, the total loss of Allied lives was ³ 5 million, of the Central Powers 3.4 million, and the total of all wounded soldiers 21 million. Despite of its intensive use, gas was a military failure in WW I. The inhuman aspect and suffering was soon recognized and the year 1922 saw the establishment of the Washington Treaty, signed by the United States, Japan, France, Italy and Britain. In 1925 the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the use in war of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and Bacteriological Methods of Warfare was signed, and it had been a cornerstone of chemical and biological arms control since then. The Geneva Protocol did neither forbid the stockpiling or the research on chemical weapons.

Despite the conventions, banning chemical weapons, Italians used them during the war 1935-36 in Ethiopia, the Japanese in China during World War II (1938-42), and they were used also in Yemen (1966-67). Various new chemicals were developed for use in weapons. Sarin, Soman, and VX followed Tabun, the first nerve gas, discovered in 1936.

During the Vietnam War (1961-1973), the US was accused of using lachrymatory agents and heavy doses of herbicides (defoliants) in much the same manner as chemical weapons. Some international organizations consider Napalm, its trade name, to be a chemical weapon, others put it on equal level with flame throwers, and consequently not falling under any of the articles of the CWC.

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iraqi civilians as well as against Iran soldiers between 1980 and 1988. It is estimated that of the approximately 27,000 Iranians exposed to Iraqi mustard gas in that war through March 1987, only 265 died. Over the entire war, Iraqi chemical weapons killed 5,000 Iranians. This constituted less than one percent of the 600,000 Iranians who died from all causes during the war [6].

The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling, and Use of Chemical Weapons And on Their Destruction (CWC) [7], entered into force in 1997 after deposit of 65 ratification documents, and is signed as of May 1999 by 122 states-parties. There are 46 non-ratifying signatories, and 22 non-states parties [8, 9].

3. The Inventory of Chemical Weapons

Chemical weapons have been produced during the twentieth century by many countries and in large quantities. They are still kept in the military arsenals as weapons of in kind or flexible response. Old ammunition is partially discarded in an environmental irresponsible way.

3.1 Military value of chemical weapons

By their nature, chemical arms have a relatively limited range: they create regional rather than global security problems, and slow the tempo of operations. In this, they are militarily more akin to conventional arms than to nuclear or biological weapons.

Even extended use of chemical weapons had no decisive impact on outcome of wars, had only local success, and made wars uncomfortable, to no purpose. For this and other reasons it is difficult to see why they are around in the first place. However, they had been produced in enormous quantities and mankind has to deal with their very costly elimination.

Should scientists be held responsible for their invention, production, use, and also for the elimination of chemical weapons? Certainly not entirely, since military and politicians demanded their production. However, we need the help of scientists for the difficult job of neutralising or eliminating them.

3.2 Classification of chemical weapons

Binary munitions contain two separated non-lethal chemicals that react to produce a lethal chemical when mixed during battlefield delivery. Unitary weapons, representing the by far largest quantity of the stockpile, contain a single lethal chemical in munitions. Other unitary agents are stored in bulk containers. The characteristics of chemical warfare agents and toxic armament wastes are described in detail in ref. [10]. The reader is referred to this article, which summarises the chemical and physical characteristics of blister, blood, choking, nerve, riot control, and vomiting agents, as well as their effects on the human body.

3.3 Abandoned Weapons

The easiest – say cheapest – way to eliminate (?) chemical weapons in the aftermath of World War II appeared to dump them into ocean [11]. There had been a worry that, after their defeat in 1945, Germans could be tempted to use part of their arsenal, which totaled 296,103 tons. Therefore, the weapons were captured and dumped into the sea. There are more than 100 sea dumping of chemical weapons that took place from 1945 to 1970 in every ocean except the Arctic. 46,000 tons were dumped in the Baltic areas known as the Gotland Deep, Bornholm Deep, and the Little Belt. According to The Continental Committee on Dumping the total was shared by 93,995 tons from the US, 9,250 tons from France, 122,508 tons from Britain, and 70,500 tons from Russia.

The US dumped German chemical weapons in the Scandinavian region, totaling between 30,000 and 40,000 tons, nine ships in the Skagerrak Strait and two more in the North Sea at depth of 650 to 1,180 meters.

The Russians alone have dumped 30,000 tons in an area, 2,000 square kilometers in size, near the Gotland and Bornholm Islands.

Between 1945 and 1949, the British dumped 34 shiploads carrying 127,000 tons of chemical (containing 40,000 tons mustard gas) and conventional weapons in the Norwegian Trench at 700 meters depth.

The chemical weapons at the bottom of the Baltic Sea (mean depth of the Baltic Sea is 51 meters) and the North Sea represent a serious danger for the aquatic life. The shells of the grenades corrode and will eventually start to leak. The corrosion of these weapons is already so advanced that identification of the former owners is virtually impossible. Consequently, nobody can be made nowadays responsible for the ultimate elimination.

The US is responsible for 60 sea dumping totaling about 100,000 tons (equal to 39 filled railroad box cars), of chemical weapons filled with toxic materials in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of New Jersey, California, Florida, and South Carolina, and near India, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Japan, and Australia.

Some of the above figures appear to be not entirely coherent and do not add up well to the total, demonstrating among other things that no careful bookkeeping had been done during this inadmissible actions.

During the 1950s, the US conducted an ambitious nerve gas program, manufacturing what would eventually total 400,000 M-55 rockets, each of which was capable of delivering a 5-kg payload of Sarin [11, 12]. Many of those rockets had manufacturing defaults, their propellant breaking down in a manner that could lead to auto ignition. For this reason in 1967 and 1968 51,180 nerve gas rockets were dropped 240 km off the coast of New York State in depths 1’950 to 2,190 meters, and off the coast of Florida.

The CWC does not cover sea-dumped chemical weapons; in fact it makes a clear exception for them (CWC, Article III, § 2). The CWC does not provide the legal basis to cover chemical weapons that were dumped before 1985. They remain an uncontrollable time bomb.

3.4 The existing arsenal

The arsenal of chemical weapons has to be subdivided into two categories: (i) The “stockpile” of unitary chemical warfare (CW) agents and ammunitions, comprising the material inside weapons and chemicals in bulk storage, and (ii) The “non-stockpile” material, including buried chemical material, binary chemical weapons, recovered chemical weapons, former facilities for chemical weapons production, and other miscellaneous chemical warfare material.

3.4.1 The stockpile of unitary chemical warfare agents and ammunition

The D efence I ntelligence A gency (DIA) in the US reports [13, 14]:

Middle East

Non-persistent nerve gas agents: Tabun (GA) and Sarin (GB) and their thickened products (TGA and TGB) Mustard agents (H, HD and HT) Lewisite (L) Persistent nerve agent (VX)

Methylphosphonic difluoride (DF) Isopropyl alcohol and isopropylamine (OPA) Ethyl 2-diisoprpylaminoethyl methylphosphonite (QL)

Tables 1. US Unitary and Binary Chemical Stockpiles

The above tables give the location of the nine depots and the variety of chemical weapons stored, which is an indication for the complexity for their elimination or transport problems.

The locations of the Soviet chemical weapons are spread over large parts of the West-European and Asian part of Russia at seven sites (Table 2 [18]). About 80 percent are weaponized and consist mostly of organophosphorus nerve agents. The remainder of the material is stored in bulk at two sites – Kambarka and Gornyi.

3.4.2 The non-stockpile material

Data on non-stockpile material are scarce. Some estimates are available for the US [12]. All the material recovered in the US thus far contains only hundreds of tons of agent and could, in theory, be placed in a single 8-metre-by-25-metre storage building [12]. A considerable amount of money will be required for the destruction of all former facilities for chemical weapons production constructed or used after January 1, 1946.

Abandoned chemical weapons do represent a safety risk. Between 1985 and 1995 Dutch fishermen reported more than 350 cases where chemical weapons, dumped into the Baltic Sea, were caught in fishing nets, some resulting in serious burns.

In China during World War II the Japanese left 678,729 chemical weapons. Recent negotiations resulted in Japan’s agreement to collect and destroy these weapons.

The most persistent agents – mustards and lewisite – can remain dangerous for decades. Even after lewisite breaks down, the resulting arsenic compounds can remain in soil and contaminate ground water [19].

Recovery of ammunitions from World War I still continues. Annual collections by France amount to about 30-50 tons along the old front line, by Belgium to 17 tons (c. 1,500 items) [20].

4. Elimination of Chemical Weapons

The CWC not only prohibits the use, production, acquisition and transfer of chemical weapons, but also requires the states-parties to destroy their existing weapons and production facilities. For the US the deadline is April 29, 2007. The CWC prohibits disposal by dumping into a body of water, land burial or open-pit burning, and requires that the chosen technology destroy the chemical agent in an irreversible manner that also protects the safety of humans and the environment.

4.1 Program, costs and status of the destruction of the existing active arsenal

Since the weight of a typical chemical weapon is roughly ten times that of the agent it contains, and other nations may have as much as 10-15 percent of the combined Russian and US stockpile, the mass of the material to be destroyed comes to roughly 500,000 tons – nearly 100,000 truckloads of material.

In general, the ignition part of ammunition has to be removed or inactivated prior to destruction. Then starts the main part of elimination of the weapon. The US choose high-temperature incineration and chemical neutralization as its preferred destruction technique, which has to destroy the chemicals together with the metal casing. The cost of this procedure can outrun the cost of agent destruction many fold – in some cases by 10-20 times.

The process of elimination is a slow, tedious one, with rising costs as time passes by. A bilateral US – USSR agreement in June 1990 to destroy at least 50 percent of their stockpiles by 1999 and to retain no more than 5,000 tons of agent by 2002 is long outdated [21].

Since 1985, the US Army’s cost estimate for the stockpile disposal program has increased from estimates in 1985 of $1.7 billion to $15.7 billion as of today, and its projected completion date has slipped from 1994 to 2007 [16, 12]. At the end of 1999 about 22 percent of its chemicals had been incinerated [8, 9].

The destruction of the Russian arsenal faces both, financial and technical challenges [17] and is seriously behind schedule. The first deadline imposed by the CWC – destruction of 1 percent of stockpiles by April 29, 2000 – has already been missed. Under the revised program approved by the Russian government in July, this milestone will not be achieved until 2003, while the entire destruction process is scheduled to last until 2012. Russia does not want to copy the well-proven American incineration technology. Its own neutralization-bituminization program has not been developed beyond the laboratory bench, and therefore had destroyed only a few thousand weapons [22]. The idea of incineration of their chemical weapon arsenal by nuclear explosion is studied in Russia’s former weapons laboratories [23]. This procedure, even if it is feasible deep underground, is not compatible with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and will find also serious resistance from environmentalists.

Most estimates for Russia’s costs are in the $6 billion to $8 billion range [18].

4.2 The abandoned weapons

Chemical weapons are buried on land, dumped into the sea and simply lost at many places on our globe [20]. Finding, collecting and destroying them might be as difficult, dangerous and time consuming as those of land mines.

The non-stockpile disposal program is currently projected to cost $15.1 billion – nearly the cost of the stockpile disposal program – and will take until 2033 to complete [12]. There the major cost factor arises from the difficulties of detection of scattered chemical weapons, due to insufficient book-keeping, the necessity to design and built new mobile disposal systems, and last not least overcoming the public opposition of destruction or transporting lethal CW in the vicinity of habitats. The provisions in the CWC will not apply to weapons buried on its territory before 1 January 1977.

4.4 A Comparison of chemical weapons agents with other waste

Our civilization produces a great variety of waste products, with differing degrees of danger for the environment and people. They range from household waste, electronic waste from the information age, to toxic waste from chemical factories, by-products of the mining industry, coal and oil firing, and last not least to those from military and civil use of nuclear energy. Among these waste products is a largely unknown environmental hazard due to the one-to-two-hundred tons of Mercury, that have been discharged into nature during the manufacturing of nuclear weapons in the US (mainly at Oak Ridge, also at Hanford/Washington). Its impact on the food chain can become catastrophic on a regional level [24]. Even the most widely used propellant of weapons, Trinitrotoluol or TNT, is a threat to the environment because of its persistency and its ability to enter easily into ground water.

A crude estimate of the importance of the chemical weapon waste relative to other human waste production can be made taking data from the annual production of waste in kilogram per inhabitant in France:

And by assuming that waste production per person in France (population 58 million) and the United States (population 267 million) is comparable (probably an underestimation of the US figures), the total waste of these categories can be estimated for the US in tons per year:

Table 3 Crude estimate of annual waste production in the US

It is assumed that the 30,000 tons of US chemical weapons material were accumulated over ~60 years, i.e. on the average 500 tons produced per year. The above order of magnitude estimate shows, that nuclear and chemical weapons wastes are in the same ball part, but are hundred thousand times smaller than the other toxic/dangerous waste. Due to the complexity of the toxic items, a qualitative comparison of present and future dangers for mankind and environment by taking only the quantitative aspects into consideration can and should not be made since it may lead to wrong conclusions.

5. Non-lethal chemical weapons

All weapons are made out of chemical elements, be it the metal shell of a grenade, sometimes made of depleted uranium, the explosive agent to propel it or the material filled into its encasing. The dangers of highly toxic, volatile rocket fuel on the delivery systems of nuclear warheads in Russia may be very high [26]. For this simple reason alone it is difficult to come up with an all-encompassing definition for chemical weapons.

Are chemicals still material of weapons if they are used in very low concentrations? The latter point may be illustrated by the double use of Zyklon B (or Cyclon B in English), that is used as fumigant for the purpose of pest and vermin control. It had been applied in low concentration in a beneficial way in the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, while utilized in high concentration in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, it lead to one of the most criminal acts committed in the twentieth century [27].

Dozens of technologies are being studied or developed under the elastic rubric of “non-lethal weapons” [28]. They include infrasound, supercaustics, irritants like tear gas, and all those that could be aimed at non-human targets – such as combustion inhibitors, chemicals that can immobilize machinery or destroy airplane tires. The text of the CWC does not give always an unambiguous answer or definition what is a chemical weapon agent. It could be asked if the following agents fall into the category of chemical weapons, some of them old as war [10], like (i) Military Smoke Agents , (ii) Incendiaries producing fires and burns of skin? Where do the recently used or newly developed ones belong, like (iii) Sticky Foam, Super Lubricants (“slickums and stickums”), or (iv) Pulsed Chemical Laser Beams? A special case takes (v) Depleted Uranium Ammunition , which can be considered a biological or a radiological weapon.

The preamble to the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed To Be Excessively Injurious or To Have Indiscriminate Effects (CCW), and less formally referred to as the “Inhuman Weapons Convention” , expressed the wish for amendments [30]. Among those was the elimination of laser weapons, which are now banned by the Protocol IV , which was adopted by the Conference of the States Parties to the Convention and entered into force on 30 July 1998 [28, 29].

Other weapons are being negotiated, like submunitions in the form of bomblets assembled in clusters and delivered by aircraft or by artillery, rockets or guided missiles, be equipped with devices making them harmless if they fail to explode. One canister may contain 50 bomblets, or 600, or even as many as 4,700, depending on the model, and may cover a ground area from 100 to 250 meters in diameter. The bomblets, when fitted with delayed action fuses, are effective area-denial weapons. Usually about 30% fail to explode and remain as mines, like many in Kosovo after the 1999 war.

Depleted Uranium (DU) [31], which draw a lot of public attention in the recent decade, is a by-product of enriching natural uranium – increasing the proportion of the U235 atom which is the only form of uranium that can sustain a nuclear reaction and is used in nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons. The remaining depleted uranium has practically no commercial value. The Department of Energy in the US (DoE) has a 560,000-metric-ton stockpile, with very limited civilian use as a coloring matter in pottery or as a steel-alloying constituent [32]. Depleted uranium is chemically toxic like other heavy metals such as lead, but can produce adversary health effects being an alpha particle emitter with radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years.

In the 1950’s the US became interested in using depleted uranium metal in weapons because it is extremely dense, pyrophoric, cheap, and available in high quantities. Kinetic energy penetrators do not explode; they fragment and burn through armour due to the pyrophoric nature of uranium metal and the extreme flash temperatures generated on impact. They contaminate areas with extremely fine radioactive and toxic dust. This in turn can cause kidney damage, cancers in the lung and bone, non-malignant respiratory decease, skin disorders, neurocognitive disorders, chromosomal damage, and birth defects [33]. Depleted uranium weapons are proliferating and are likely to become commonly used in land warfare. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Egypt, Thailand, Taiwan and Pakistan are possessing or manufacture depleted uranium weapons. Many NATO countries may follow suite. These weapons were used in large quantities first in the 1991 Gulf War [33, 34], and then again during the Kosovo War in 1999 [35]. The question can be asked if DU is mainly a chemical, or a radiological weapon? An immediate answer is not to be expected before classified material becomes available, and the medical reason for the Golf-War Syndrome is identified, which shows up in thousands of American soldiers. It appears that effect of the radioactive by inhalation of small doses will have only a small impact on risk to die of cancer, whereas the heavy metal effect seems to dominate [36]. Be it as it might be, depleted uranium is dangerous, but is pales in comparison with the other direct and indirect effects of war.

Due to their double use properties, some chemical weapons may be masked as pesticides, fertilizers, dyes, herbicides, or defoliants. Between 1962 and 1971 more than 72 million liter herbicides were distributed over South Viet Nam [37], thereof more than 44 million liter were the defoliant agent orange , containing about 170 kg dioxin. American scientists developed a means of thickening gasoline with the aluminum soap of naphtenic and palmitic acids into a sticky syrup that carries further from projectors and burns more slowly but at a higher temperature. This mixture, known as Napalm , can also be used in aircraft or missile-delivered warheads against military or civilian targets. A small, high explosive charge scatters the flaming liquid, which sticks to what it hits until burned out. Is Napalm still only a herbicide even when used in too large a quantity, and then accidentally affecting humans?

White phosphorous is used as a shell and grenade filler in combination with a small high-explosive charge. It is both an incendiary and the best-known producer of vivid white smoke. Small bits of it burn even more intensely than Napalm when they strike personnel.

Herbicides are not covered by the Convention but they are banned under the Prohibition of Military or any other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD), adopted by the UN General Assembly on the 10th of December 1976 and entered into force the 5th of October 1978 [38].

In order to curb the production of chemical weapons, require their identification, e.g. by trace elements in ammunition!

6. Old and New Biological Weapons

The use of biological agents as weapon has always an even more adverse world opinion than chemical warfare. A SIPRI Monograph describes among other topics the changing view of biological and toxin warfare agents, the new generation of biological weapons, the changing status of toxin weapons, a new generation of vaccines against biological and toxin weapons, and the implications of the BWC [39].

Claims that biological agents have been used as weapons of war can be found in both the written records and the artwork of many early civilizations [40]. As early as 300 BC the Greeks polluted the wells and drinking water supplies of their enemies with the corpses of animals. Later the Romans and Persians used the same tactics. In 1155 at a battle in Tortona, Italy, Barbarossa broadened the scope of biological warfare, using the bodies of dead soldiers as well as animals to pollute wells. In 1863 during the US Civil War, General Johnson used the bodies of sheep and pigs to pollute drinking water at Vicksburg. The use of catapults as weapons was well established by the medieval period, and projecting over the walls dead bodies of those dead of disease was an effective strategy for besieging armies. In 1763 the history of biological warfare took a significant turn from the crude use of diseased corpses to the introduction of specific decease, smallpox (“Black Death”), as a weapon in the North American Indian Wars. This technique continued with cholera or typhus infected corpses. In 1915, during World War I, Germany was accused of using cholera in Italy and plague in St. Petersburg. There is evidence Germany used glanders and anthrax to infect horses (1914) and cattle, respectively, in Bucharest in 1916, and employed similar tactics to infect 4,500 mules in Mesopotamia the next year.

The period 1940 – 1969 can be considered the golden age of biological warfare research and development. Especially the 1940s were the most comprehensive period of biological warfare research and development.

The US had signed the Geneva Protocol, but the Senate voted only in 1974 on it. Detailed information on the history of the US Offensive Biological Warfare Program between 1941 and 1973 can be found in ref. [41].

It has been reported recently that the US tested a Soviet-designed germ bomb and assembled a germ factory in the Nevada desert from commercially available materials, in particular to produce potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax, a deadly disease ideal for germ warfare [42]. It is debatable if such a research is consistent with the treaty banning biological weapons.

The Former Soviet Union had an important biological weapons program, which might have extended well into the period after its dissolution [43].

For a decade after 1972 there was hope that the problem of Biological Warfare was going to be eradicated. However, the last two decades have produced indications that some eight developing nations, in addition to China and Israel, have initiated biological weapon development programs of varying degrees.

Biological warfare (BW) agents, or biological weapons, are ‘living organisms, whatever their nature, or infectious material derived from them, which are intended to cause disease or death in man, animal, and plants, and which depend for their effects on their ability to multiply in the person, the animal, or plant attacked’ . BW agents, however, might be used not only in wars, but also by terrorists. One should therefore refer to living organisms ‘used for hostile purposes’ .

The B iological W eapons C onvention (BWC) prohibits bacteria such as salmonella being used against soldiers. It would permit bacteria, that eat petroleum or rubber for the destruction of equipment for peaceful purposes, but prohibits their use for hostile application.

6.2 Toxic warfare agents and other chemical warfare agents

Toxins are poisonous substances usually produced by living organisms. Toxin warfare (TW) agents, or toxic weapons, are toxins used for hostile purposes. TW agents unequivocally are types of chemical warfare (CW) agent. CW agents, or chemical weapons, are chemical substances whether gaseous, liquid, or solid, which are used for hostile purposes to cause disease or death in humans, animals or plants and which depend on their direct toxicity for their primary effect.

TW agents, like all other CW agents, are inanimate and are incapable of multiplying. They are CW agents irrespective of whether they are produced by a living organism or by chemical synthesis or even whether they are responsible for the qualification of that organism as a BW agent.

Nevertheless, TW agents are often mistakenly considered to be biological weapons, and definitions of biological warfare (BW) occasionally include TW agents. New chemical weapons agents, who are 5 to 10 times more dangerous than VX, the most dangerous toxic gas known today.

The successful control of biological weapons is a daunting task [44]. Ensuring safety from biological and toxin weapons is a more complex issue than totally prohibiting chemical or nuclear weapons. This is due to the character of the relevant technologies. More than those, biotechnology is of dual-use, i.e. the same technology can be used for civilian and permitted military defensive purposes as well as for prohibited offensive or terrorist purposes.

6.3 Biological Warfare against Crops

Intentionally unleashing organisms that kill an enemy’s food crops is a potentially devastating weapon of warfare and terrorism [45]. All major food crops come in a number of varieties, each usually suited to specific climate and soil conditions. These varieties have varying sensitivities to particular diseases. Crop pathogens, in turn, come in different strains or races and can be targeted efficiently against those crop brands. This way it might be possible to attack the enemy’s food stock, but preventing damage to the own. However, such a strategy may not work for neighboring countries, where agricultural conditions are similar to the aggressor. The spread of those organisms holds the risk of worldwide epidemic, and the use of these weapons may very well be counter productive. Any such warfare would be directed primarily against the civilian population. Due to the delays involved it would not affect immediately the outcome of a war.

Nevertheless, many countries developed during the twentieth century anticrop substances.

Iraq manufactured from the 70s onward wheat smut fungus, targeting wheat plants in Iran. France’s biological weapon program by the end of the 1930s included work on two potato killers. During the Second World War the British concentrated on various herbicides. Germany investigated during the same period diseases like late blight of potatoes and leaf-infecting yellow and black wheat rusts, as well as insect pests, such as the Colorado beetle. Japan’s World War II biological weapons program is not too well known, but it contains pathogens and chemical herbicides. The American efforts were substantial. They centered on products attacking crops of soybeans, sugar beets, sweet potatoes and cotton, intended to destroy wheat in the western Soviet Union, and rice in Asia, mainly China. Between 1951 and 1969 the U.S. stockpiled more than 30,000 kilograms of the fungus that causes stem rust of wheat, a quantity probably enough to infect every wheat plant on the planet [45]. According to another source [46] 36,000 kilograms of wheat stem rust, and additional quantity of stem rust of rye, only 900 kilograms of rice blast were produced and stockpiled. The U.S., using the “feather bomb” and free-floating balloons developed ingenious distribution and transport systems.

7. WMD: Warfare, Terrorism, Comparative Perspective

The concept of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) should be revisited, as pointed out in the Introduction of this article. Physical efficiency and psychological effect of these weapons may differ considerably when they are used in warfare on soldiers or in peacetime by terrorists. Industrialized countries can develop reliable and sophisticated technologies, which may not be available to small groups.

7.1 Weapons in Warfare

The efficiency of weapons in warfare is closely related to the time parameter :

• Number of enemy casualties in a given period,
• Number of weapons employed to obtain the desired result,
• Delivery time of weapons,
• Possibility for stockpiling over extended periods,
• Infrastructure affected by its use,
• Avoidance of negative impact upon own troops and civil population,
• End a war quickly,
• No efficient defense against weapons on short or long term.

Evidently, nuclear weapons are “superior” to any other weapons on all these points. Is a specific weapon category useful in conflicts between countries and/or in civil war? Can it serve as a deterrent? Does its use have long term effects on the crop area?

The efficiency of chemical and biological weapons depends heavily on its dispersion, upon the weather condition, determining the exposure and lethality for the combatants. A presumptive agent must not only be highly toxic, but also ‘suitably highly toxic’ , so that it is not too difficult to handle by the user. It must be possible to store the substance in containers for long periods without degradation and without corroding the packaging material. Such an agent must be relatively resistant to atmospheric water and oxygen so that it does not lose its effect when dispersed. It must also withstand the shearing forces created by the explosion and heat when it is dispersed. Transport of these agents by long-range missiles and efficient distribution will face enormous difficulties, causing their decomposition, mainly due to the heat development of the warhead at re-entry into the atmosphere. A few developed countries may already be capable to overcome these hurdles [47].

Finding an answer to these questions can be facilitated by evaluation of previous wars.

In World War I an average of one ton of agent was necessary to kill just one soldier . Chemical weapons caused 5 percent of the casualties. The use of chemical weapons did not end the war quickly as had been predicted. During the war between Iraq and Iran through March 1997 27,000 Iranians were exposed to chemical grenades, only 265 died. During the entire war between these two countries chemical weapons killed 5,000, out of the total 600,000 from all causes, i.e. less than 1 percent [6].

The efficiency of chemical/biological weapons in future wars is difficult to predict. Estimates cover a wide range, as shown below.

Under ideal conditions 1 ton of Sarin dropped from an airplane could produce 3,000 to 8,000 deaths, however, under breezy conditions only 300 to 800 [6]. To obtain a sensible effect requires that airplanes fly at very low altitude (less than about 100 meters), and consequently the zone of lethality that could be covered remains small. Furthermore, agent particles larger than 10 micrometers do not reach the non-ciliated alveolar region in the lungs, and those, with a size of about 1-micrometer are exhaled. The optimal size is somewhere between 10 to 5 micrometers, which can not be obtained easily. Sunlight kills or denatures most biological agents. Anthrax efficiency may drop by a factor of thousand when the agent is used during a sunny day. Therefore, the agents have to be sprayed during nighttime.

Chemical weapons depend more than other armament upon atmospheric and topographical factors, whilst temperature, weather and terrain are important factors in determining the persistence of a given chemical agent. Chemical attacks can contaminate an area for between several hours and several days. Weight-for-weight, biological weapons are hundreds to thousands of times more potent than the most lethal chemical weapon [47. 48]. Contamination time is between several hours and several weeks.

A Scud missile warhead filled with botulinum could contaminate an area of 3,600 square kilometers, or 16 times greater than the same warhead filled with the nerve agent Sarin [49].

A United Nations study [50] compared the hypothetical results of an attack carried out by one strategic bomber using either nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. A one-megaton nuclear bomb, the study found, might kill 90 percent of unprotected people over an area of 300 square kilometers. A chemical weapon of 15 tons might kill 50 percent of the people in a 60 square kilometer area. But a 10-ton biological weapon could kill 25 percent of the people, and make 50 percent ill, over an area of 100,000 square kilometers.

If a ballistic missile hits a city delivering 30 kilograms of anthrax spores in a unitary warhead against a city with no civil defense measure could result in lethal inhalation dosage levels over an area of roughly 5 to 25 square kilometers. With no treatment, most of the infected population would die within a week or two. For typical urban population densities this could result in the deaths of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people [51].

Exaggerated, counterproductive, essentially incorrect, and even dangerous remarks by a US high-ranking official have been made. He claimed that about 2.5 kilograms of anthrax if released in the air over Washington, DC, would kill half of its population, that is, 300,000 people (TV, Nov.1997). In March 1988, four of the most qualified experts on anthrax serving in the US government published a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine which used a different estimate: 50 kilograms of anthrax released over a city of 500,000 people could kill up to 95,000 people, and possible fewer, depending on urban atmospheric conditions. The first estimate was approximately 100 times higher [46, 52].

These above efficiencies assume, however, that chemical and biological agents can be spread over a large surface and reach the ground level, whereas nuclear weapons can be exploded at any predetermined altitude and on ground level with the desired efficiency.

7.2 Weapons for Terrorists

There is a largely unjustified fear of the public concerning terrorist attacks with chemical or biological agents, their impact on daily life, their frequency, and number of people possibly affected.

Between 1960 and 1980 there have been 40,000 international terror incidents (according to CIA), but only 22 out of them were performed with chemical or biological agents, showing a tiny ratio of 1/2,000. From 1900 till today there occurred 71 terrorist acts worldwide involving the use of biological or chemical agents, resulting in 123 fatalities, among those only one was American, hit by a cyanide-laced bullet. These acts produced 3,774 nonfatal injuries (784 Americans, 751 out of them by salmonella food poisoning by an Oregan-based religious sect). During the first nine decades of the 20th century there have been 70 biological attacks (18 by terrorists), causing 9 deaths [6].

The Aum-Shinrikyo sect in Japan had about $1 billion (another source gives $1.2 to 1.6 billion) at its disposal for development of chemical and biological weapons.

• Aum had appropriate equipment (even more than it was necessary).
• Aum had used commercial front companies to buy the equipment.
• Aum may have spent about $10 million in their effort to produce biological agents.
• Several of the individuals had post-graduate degrees.
• Aum had gathered a research library.
• Aum had sufficient time – four years – for their attempts.
• Aum had attempted to purchase expertise in Russia and obtain or purchase disease strains in Japan.

However, Aum failed to produce either of two biological agents , Clostridium botulinum, to obtain Botulinum toxin, and anthrax, and also did not manage to “disperse” them. Despite its efforts, spending $10 million on the development of biological agents. Aum sprayed botulinum toxin over Tokyo several times in 1990, and conducted similar activities with anthrax spores in 1993, but without any known effects. Actually, the cult had used a relatively harmless anthrax vaccine strain and the aerosolizer had no sufficient efficiency [53, 54].

There are two well-publicized Aum attacks with chemical agents (Matsumoto, 3 kg of pure Sarin, 1994; Tokyo subway, 6-7 kg 30% pure Sarin, 1995), the latter made in a confined area, limiting a detrimental effect of air current. Nevertheless, the Matsumoto assault killed only seven non-targeted innocents, and in Tokyo only twelve people died from direct contact with the liquid and not from fumes [54].

A more detailed description of risk assessment by terrorism with chemical and biological weapons can be found in [54]. This article provides results from computer simulation for dispersion of chemical and biological agents under various atmospheric conditions and their impact parameters on human health.

7.3 Comparative Perspective

Analysts have defined Mass Casualty as anything between 100 and 1,000 individuals arriving at hospitals. The numbers in the previous section are related to deaths, and a factor of up to about ten has to be applied to encompass individuals suffering non-lethal injuries. Evidently, similar factors have to be used for victims of conventional weapons in war.

In the discussion of biological agent terrorism as a potential mass casualty event it is quite revealing to look at the annual mortality in several public health sectors in the USA [53]:

Compared with these data, the impact of biological and chemical agents terrorism in the past is negligible and will remain probably (hopefully!) small.

8. Implementation of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Convention and Conclusions

Like most scientific and industrial developments there is the possibility to apply them for the good or for the bad. The responsibility of the scientists, as well as the politicians and military, is challenged. The production of the basic material for military or civilian application is closely intertwined. This makes any inspection and accusation of intended military use extraordinary difficult. In addition manufacturers fear for their patents and are worried about industrial espionage.

Production of biological warfare agents can be done in any hospital or basement rooms in small quantities by qualified personal, for chemicals it requires larger plants. The 121 States Parties and 48 signatory states of the Chemical Weapons Convention have an implementation body, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which is operational since two years from The Hague [7]. It performed already more than 500 inspections. The OPCW has about 500 staff members, consisting of 200 inspectors and 300 administrative staff. Out of these 300 administrators most are verification experts and inspection planers. Among the most important old issues are: guidelines for low concentrations, the usability of old and abandoned chemical weapons. As mentioned above the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) does not cover sea-dumped chemical weapons.

There has not yet been progress in the establishment of an analogue organization for Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC). It might be placed in The Hague or in Geneva. Work on the protocol to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention, as well as the verification protocol is still in its initial state, and a success of the 5 th BWC Review Conference to be held in Geneva in November 2001 is not at all assured [46]. Of the 141 States Parties to the BWC only around 60 send delegations to the Ad Hoc Group (AHG). Not all of the AHG accept the concept of random visits. The establishment of an international organization to oversee the implementation of the BWC protocol is estimated to consist out of a staff of 233 people and an annual cost of approximately $30 million. There might be eventually about 70 inspectors carrying out approximately 100 visits per year. One of the disputed topics is related to new forms of biological weapons, caused by the biotechnology revolution [38]. The delivery system or the efficiency of these new agents has not changed, but their capability to manipulate human life processes themselves. Biological weapons should now be seen as a global threat to the human species, but not as an efficient weapon in warfare.

Inspections of biological agents will hit more resistance by the pharmaceutical and bio-technical industry than the one in the chemical industry.

The dangerous leftovers from the chemical weapons race, like the ones from nuclear weapons construction, not to forget the land mines, will be still with us for a long time. Ethics, politics and international security should be closely interlaced to remove these inhuman weapons from Earth. There is an excellent opportunity for fruitful collaboration between defense conversion sector and the environmental community.

The CBWC has certainly the beneficial effect in reducing the arsenal of old weapons, but will not give a guarantee that new, clandestine developments in various countries will go on unnoticed.

The difficulty to use these weapons efficiently is in general underestimated, but their impact exaggerated. This combination causes unjustifiable fear of the public and leads policy makers to wrong conclusions, among them to designate them as WMDs and keep nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

The critical, comparative assessment of the three types of weapons (one may want to include radiological weapons) presented in this article are not intended to slow down efforts for the elimination of chemical and biological weapons. The CBWC should remain an important treaty and negotiations on enforcement provisions should be accelerated, so that it can be eventually fully implemented. In particular, the arsenal of unused weapons, being in storage or “ disposed ” in the oceans or elsewhere, presents a considerable danger on short and long term for humans and the environment. Anybody killed by these weapons is one too much. However, we have to put these weapons and the ratified conventions in the right quantitative perspective.

In the view of the author most of the conventional weapons, in particular small arms, are weapons of Mass Killing: According to a Red Cross inquiry [57] Assault Rifles, like AK47s, Handguns, and Land Mines, caused 64%, 10% and 10% of civilian casualties, respectively. The remaining 16% are almost equally shared between Hand Grenades, Artillery (including fragmentation and incinerating bombs), Mortars, and Major Weapons . During the 20th century these weapons had been used to kill 34 million soldiers in combat, 80 million civilians, plus soldiers who died from wounds, accidents or disease. The world was “ fortunate ” that only two nuclear bombs have been dropped in warfare until now. They killed “ only ” ~200,000 people. Nevertheless, the nuclear arsenal has to be on the top of the WMD-category, since it has the potential to erase humans from our planet in almost no time.

Maintaining nuclear weapons by the Nuclear Weapon States (NWSs) to deter production and stockpiling of chemical and biological weapons, mainly in countries of concern , can only be interpreted as an unjustifiable, unreasonable pretext to keep nuclear weapons indefinitely in stock. Is it politically wise to change the unfortunate, misleading definition of weapons of mass destruction (WMD = NW + CW + BW) , repeated again and again in the media, and deeply engraved into the mind of people? Will a new definition distract from the importance of the two, universally ratified treaties? Might it be counterproductive to do so in a time, where scientists are under increasing scrutiny and attack?

The author felt that informing the educated public and policy makers on a re-definition of WMD warrants the change and outweighs possible negative repercussions.

Acknowledgements

I like to thank Professor W.K.H. Panofsky for carefully reading a previous version of this article, and for valuable criticism and useful suggestions. Dr. Milton Leitenberg is thanked for providing a lot of relevant literature and sharing with me his profound knowledge and insight into the problem of biological warfare and terrorism. I profited much from participation in workshops in Como/Italy and Rome, organized by Professor Maurizio Martellini, and thank him for the kind invitation to these events. The opinion expressed in this article is those of the author and under his sole responsibility.

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[42] Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and Willaim J .Broad, “A New Treaty Issue: U.S. Germ Labs”, International Herald Tribune, September 5, 2001.

[43] Milton Leitenberg, “The Biological Weapons Program of the Former Soviet Union”, Biologicals, Volume 31, Number 3, pp. 187-191, September 1993.

[44] Iris Hunger, “Successful Biological Weapons Control is a Comprehensive Task and the Responsibility of All”, Statement of the INES Working Group on Biological and Toxin Weapons Control, prepared for the Fourth Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention 25 November – 6 December 1996, Geneva. and Iris Hunger, “Improving Biological Security: The Process of Strengthening the BTW Convention”, First Forum of the International Scientific Panel on the Possible Consequences of the Misuse of Biological Sciences, Science for Peace Series, UNESCO, volume no.6, 1997, pp. 367-388.

[45] P. Rogers, S. Whitby and M. Dando, “Biological Warfare against Crops”, Scientific American, June 1999, pp. 62-67.

[46] Milton Leitenberg, “Biological Weapons in the Twentieth Century: A Review and Analysis”, 7th International Symposium on Protection against Chemical and Biological Warfare, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2001, http://www.fas.org/bwc/papers/bw20th.htm

[47] Andrew M. Sessler. John M. Cornwall, Bob Dietz, Steve Fetter, Sherman Frankel, Richard L. Garwin, Kurt Gottfried, Lisbeth Gronlund, George N. Lewis, Theodore A. Postol, David C. Wright, “Countermeasures: A Technical Evaluation of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned US National Missile Defense System”, Union of Concerned Scientists, MIT Security Studies Program, April 2000.

[48] “Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction”, US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, OTA-ISC-559 (Washington, D.C.: US Printing Office, August 1993), pg. 73.

[49] “Biological Weapons”, Center for Defense and International Security, http://www.cdiss.org/bw.htm

[50] K. Clements, Malcolm Dando, “A Wall against These Living Weapons”, International Herald Tribune, 3.9.1993.

[51] Steve Fetter, “Ballistic Missiles and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” International Security Vol.16 (Summer 1991).

[52] Milton Leitenberg, “Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction”, ISPAC, International Scientific and Professional Advisory Council of the United Nations Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Program, International Conference on Countering Terrorism Through Enhanced International Cooperation, Courmayeur, Mont Blanc, pp. 1-33, 22-24 September 2000.

[53] Milton Leitenberg, “An Assessment of the Threat of the Use of Biological Weapons or Biological Agents”, Paper presented for Landau Network – Centro Volta Conference, Rome, September 18-19, 2000.

[54] Jean Pascal Zanders, Edvard Karlsson, Lena Melin, Erik Näslund and Lennart Thaning, in SIPRI Year book 2000 , Oxford University Press, Appendix 9A. “Risk assessment of terrorism with chemical and biological weapons”.

[55] Milton Leitenberg, “Biological Weapons: A Reawakened Concern”, The World & I, pp. 289-305, January 1999.

[56] Milton Leitenberg, “Biological Weapons Arms Control”, Project on Rethinking Arms Control, Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, PRAC Paper No. 16, May 1996, http://www.puaf.umd.edu/CISSM/publications/bwarmscon.pdf

[57] Jeffrey Boutwell and Michael T. Klare, “A Scourge of Small Arms”, Scientific American, June 2000, pp. 30-35.

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The history of biological warfare

Friedrich frischknecht.

1 Friedrich Frischknecht is at the Malaria Biology and Genetics Unit, Department of Parasitology, Institut Pasteur, 25–28 Rue du Dr Roux, 75015 Paris, France. rf.ruetsap@ydderf

Human experimentation, modern nightmares and lone madmen in the twentieth century

During the past century, more than 500 million people died of infectious diseases. Several tens of thousands of these deaths were due to the deliberate release of pathogens or toxins, mostly by the Japanese during their attacks on China during the Second World War. Two international treaties outlawed biological weapons in 1925 and 1972, but they have largely failed to stop countries from conducting offensive weapons research and large-scale production of biological weapons. And as our knowledge of the biology of disease-causing agents—viruses, bacteria and toxins—increases, it is legitimate to fear that modified pathogens could constitute devastating agents for biological warfare. To put these future threats into perspective, I discuss in this article the history of biological warfare and terrorism.

During the [Second World War], the Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks

Man has used poisons for assassination purposes ever since the dawn of civilization, not only against individual enemies but also occasionally against armies ( Table 1 ). However, the foundation of microbiology by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch offered new prospects for those interested in biological weapons because it allowed agents to be chosen and designed on a rational basis. These dangers were soon recognized, and resulted in two international declarations—in 1874 in Brussels and in 1899 in The Hague—that prohibited the use of poisoned weapons. However, although these, as well as later treaties, were all made in good faith, they contained no means of control, and so failed to prevent interested parties from developing and using biological weapons. The German army was the first to use weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical, during the First World War, although their attacks with biological weapons were on a rather small scale and were not particularly successful: covert operations using both anthrax and glanders ( Table 2 ) attempted to infect animals directly or to contaminate animal feed in several of their enemy countries ( Wheelis, 1999 ). After the war, with no lasting peace established, as well as false and alarming intelligence reports, various European countries instigated their own biological warfare programmes, long before the onset of the Second World War ( Geissler & Moon, 1999 ).

It is not clear whether any of these attacks caused the spread of disease. In Caffa, the plague might have spread naturally because of the unhygienic conditions in the beleaguered city. Similarly, the smallpox epidemic among Indians could have been caused by contact with settlers. In addition, yellow fever is spread only by infected mosquitoes. During their conquest of South America, the Spanish might also have used smallpox as a weapon. Nevertheless, the unintentional spread of diseases among native Americans killed about 90% of the pre-columbian population ( McNeill, 1976 ).

Category C includes emerging pathogens and pathogens that are made more pathogenic by genetic engineering, including hantavirus, Nipah virus, tick-borne encephalitis and haemorrhagic fever viruses, yellow fever virus and multidrug-resistant bacteria.

1 Does not include time and place of production, but only indicates where agents were applied and probably resulted in casualties, in war, in research or as a terror agent. B, bacterium; P, parasite; T, toxin; V, virus.

In North America, it was not the government but a dedicated individual who initiated a bioweapons research programme. Sir Frederick Banting, the Nobel-Prize-winning discoverer of insulin, created what could be called the first private biological weapon research centre in 1940, with the help of corporate sponsors ( Avery, 1999 ; Regis, 1999 ). Soon afterwards, the US government was also pressed to perform such research by their British allies who, along with the French, feared a German attack with biological weapons ( Moon, 1999 , Regis, 1999 ), even though the Nazis apparently never seriously considered using biological weapons ( Geissler, 1999 ). However, the Japanese embarked on a largescale programme to develop biological weapons during the Second World War ( Harris, 1992 , 1999 , 2002 ) and eventually used them in their conquest of China. Indeed, alarm bells should have rung as early as 1939, when the Japanese legally, and then illegally, attempted to obtain yellow fever virus from the Rockefeller Institute in New York ( Harris, 2002 ).

The father of the Japanese biological weapons programme, the radical nationalist Shiro Ishii, thought that such weapons would constitute formidable tools to further Japan's imperialistic plans. He started his research in 1930 at the Tokyo Army Medical School and later became head of Japan's bioweapon programme during the Second World War ( Harris, 1992 , 1999 , 2002 ). At its height, the programme employed more than 5,000 people, and killed as many as 600 prisoners a year in human experiments in just one of its 26 centres. The Japanese tested at least 25 different disease-causing agents on prisoners and unsuspecting civilians. During the war, the Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks. Japanese planes dropped plague-infested fleas over Chinese cities or distributed them by means of saboteurs in rice fields and along roads. Some of the epidemics they caused persisted for years and continued to kill more than 30,000 people in 1947, long after the Japanese had surrendered ( Harris, 1992 , 2002 ). Ishii's troops also used some of their agents against the Soviet army, but it is unclear as to whether the casualties on both sides were caused by this deliberate spread of disease or by natural infections ( Harris, 1999 ). After the war, the Soviets convicted some of the Japanese biowarfare researchers for war crimes, but the USA granted freedom to all researchers in exchange for information on their human experiments. In this way, war criminals once more became respected citizens, and some went on to found pharmaceutical companies. Ishii's successor, Masaji Kitano, even published postwar research articles on human experiments, replacing 'human' with 'monkey' when referring to the experiments in wartime China ( Harris, 1992 , 2002 ).

Although some US scientists thought the Japanese information insightful, it is now largely assumed that it was of no real help to the US biological warfare programme projects. These started in 1941 on a small scale, but increased during the war to include more than 5,000 people by 1945. The main effort focused on developing capabilities to counter a Japanese attack with biological weapons, but documents indicate that the US government also discussed the offensive use of anti-crop weapons ( Bernstein, 1987 ). Soon after the war, the US military started open-air tests, exposing test animals, human volunteers and unsuspecting civilians to both pathogenic and non-pathogenic microbes ( Cole, 1988 ; Regis, 1999 ). A release of bacteria from naval vessels off

...nobody really knows what the Russians are working on today and what happened to the weapons they produced

the coasts of Virginia and San Francisco infected many people, including about 800,000 people in the Bay area alone. Bacterial aerosols were released at more than 200 sites, including bus stations and airports. The most infamous test was the 1966 contamination of the New York metro system with Bacillus globigii — a non-infectious bacterium used to simulate the release of anthrax—to study the spread of the pathogen in a big city. But with the opposition to the Vietnam War growing and the realization that biological weapons could soon become the poor man's nuclear bomb, President Nixon decided to abandon offensive biological weapons research and signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in 1972, an improvement on the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Although the latter disallowed only the use of chemical or biological weapons, the BTWC also prohibits research on biological weapons. However, the BTWC does not include means for verification, and it is somewhat ironic that the US administration let the verification protocol fail in 2002, particularly in view of the Soviet bioweapons project, which not only was a clear breach of the BTWC, but also remained undetected for years.

Even though they had just signed the BTWC, the Soviet Union established Biopreparat, a gigantic biowarfare project that, at its height, employed more than 50,000 people in various research and production centres ( Alibek & Handelman, 1999 ). The size and scope of the Soviet Union's efforts were truly staggering: they produced and stockpiled tons of anthrax bacilli and smallpox virus, some for use in intercontinental ballistic missiles, and engineered multidrug-resistant bacteria, including plague. They worked on haemorrhagic fever viruses, some of the deadliest pathogens that humankind has encountered. When virologist Nikolai Ustinov died after injecting himself with the deadly Marburg virus, his colleagues, with the mad logic and enthusiasm of bioweapon developers, re-isolated the virus from his body and found that it had mutated into a more virulent form than the one that Ustinov had used. And few took any notice, even when accidents happened. In 1971, smallpox broke out in the Kazakh city of Aralsk and killed three of the ten people that were infected. It is speculated that they were infected from a bioweapons research centre on a small island in the Aral Sea ( Enserink, 2002 ). In the same area, on other occasions, several fishermen and a researcher died from plague and glanders, respectively ( Miller et al., 2002 ). In 1979, the Soviet secret police orchestrated a large cover-up to explain an outbreak of anthrax in Sverdlovsk, now Ekaterinburg, Russia, with poisoned meat from anthrax-contaminated animals sold on the black market. It was eventually revealed to have been due to an accident in a bioweapons factory, where a clogged air filter was removed but not replaced between shifts ( Fig. 1 ) ( Meselson et al., 1994 ; Alibek & Handelman, 1999 ).

Anthrax as a biological weapon. Light ( A ) and electron ( B ) micrographs of anthrax bacilli, reproduced from the Centers of Disease Control Public Health Image Library. The map ( C ) shows six villages in which animals died after anthrax spores were released from a bioweapons factory in Sverdlovsk, USSR, in 1979. Settled areas are shown in grey, roads in white, lakes in blue and the calculated contours of constant dosage of anthrax spores in black. At least 66 people died after the accident. (Reprinted with permission from Meselson et al., 1994 © (1994) American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

The most striking feature of the Soviet programme was that it remained secret for such a long time. During the Second World War, the Soviets used a simple trick to check whether US researchers were occupied with secret research: they monitored whether American physicists were publishing their results. Indeed, they were not, and the conclusion was, correctly, that the US was busy building a nuclear bomb ( Rhodes, 1988 , pp. 327 and 501). The same trick could have revealed the Soviet bioweapons programme much earlier ( Fig. 2 ). With the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of these programmes were halted and the research centres abandoned or converted for civilian use. Nevertheless, nobody really knows what the Russians are working on today and what happened to the weapons they produced. Western security experts now fear that some stocks of biological weapons might not have been destroyed and have instead fallen into other hands ( Alibek & Handelman, 1999 ; Miller et al., 2002 ). According to US intelligence, South Africa, Israel, Iraq and several other countries have developed or still are developing biological weapons ( Zilinskas, 1997 ; Leitenberg, 2001 ).

Detecting biological warfare research. A comparison of the number of publications from two Russian scientists. L. Sandakchiev (black bars) was involved, as the head of the Vector Institute for viral research, in the Soviet project to produce smallpox as an offensive biological weapon. V. Krylov (white bars) was not. Note the decrease in publications by Sandakchiev compared with those by Krylov. The data were compiled from citations from a PubMed search for the researchers on 15 August 2002.

Apart from state-sponsored biowarfare programmes, individuals and non-governmental groups have also gained access to potentially dangerous microorganisms, and some have used them ( Purver, 2002 ). A few examples include the spread of hepatitis, parasitic infections, severe diarrhoea and gastroenteritis. The latter occurred when a religious sect tried to poison a whole community by spreading Salmonella in salad bars to interfere with a local election ( Török et al., 1997 ; Miller et al., 2002 ). The sect, which ran a hospital on its grounds, obtained the bacterial strain from a commercial supplier. Similarly, a right-wing laboratory technician tried to get hold of the plague bacterium from the American Tissue Culture Collection, and was only discovered after he complained that the procedure took too long ( Cole, 1996 ). These examples clearly indicate that organized groups or individuals with sufficient determination can obtain dangerous biological agents. All that is required is a request to 'colleagues' at scientific institutions, who share their published materials with the rest of the community ( Breithaupt, 2000 ). The relative ease with which this can be done explains why the numerous hoaxes in the USA after the anthrax mailings had to be taken seriously, thus causing an estimated economic loss of US $100 million ( Leitenberg, 2001 ).

These examples clearly indicate that organized groups or individuals with sufficient determination can obtain dangerous biological agents

Another religious cult, in Japan, proved both the ease and the difficulties of using biological weapons. In 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo cult used Sarin gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 train passengers and injuring more than 5,000 ( Cole, 1996 ). Before these attacks, the sect had also tried, on several occasions, to distribute (non-infectious) anthrax within the city with no success. It was obviously easy for the sect members to produce the spores but much harder to disseminate them ( Atlas, 2001 ; Leitenberg, 2001 ). The still unidentified culprits of the 2001 anthrax attacks in the USA were more successful, sending contaminated letters that eventually killed five people and, potentially even more seriously, caused an upsurge in demand for antibiotics, resulting in over-use and thus contributing to drug resistance ( Atlas, 2001 ; Leitenberg, 2001 ; Miller et al., 2002 ).

One interesting aspect of biological warfare is the accusations made by the parties involved, either as excuses for their actions or to justify their political

Cuba frequently accused the USA of using biological warfare

goals. Many of these allegations, although later shown to be wrong, have been exploited either as propaganda or as a pretext for war, as recently seen in the case of Iraq. It is clearly essential to draw the line between fiction and reality, particularly if, on the basis of such evidence, politicians call for a 'pre-emptive' war or allocate billions of dollars to research projects. Examples of such incorrect allegations include a British report before the Second World War that German secret agents were experimenting with bacteria in the Paris and London subways, using harmless species to test their dissemination through the transport system ( Regis, 1999 ; Leitenberg, 2001 ). Although this claim was never substantiated, it might have had a role in promoting British research on anthrax in Porton Down and on Gruinard Island. During the Korean War, the Chinese, North Koreans and Soviets accused the USA of deploying biological weapons of various kinds. This is now seen as wartime propaganda, but the secret deal between the USA and Japanese bioweapons researchers did not help to diffuse these allegations ( Moon, 1992 ). Later, the USA accused the Vietnamese of dropping fungal toxins on the US Hmong allies in Laos. However, it was found that the yellow rain associated with the reported variety of syndromes was simply bee faeces ( Fig. 3 ; Seeley et al., 1985 ). The problem with such allegations is that they develop a life of their own, no matter how unbelievable they are. For example, the conspiracy theory that HIV is a biological weapon is still alive in some people's minds. Depending on whom one asks, KGB or CIA scientists developed HIV to damage the USA or to destabilize Cuba, respectively. Conversely, in 1997, Cuba was the first country to officially file a complaint under Article 5 of the BTWC, accusing the USA of releasing a plant pathogen ( Leitenberg, 2001 ). Although this was never proven, the USA did indeed look into biological agents to kill Fidel Castro and Frederik Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo ( Miller et al., 2002 ).

Hmong refugees from Laos, who collaborated with the American armed forces during the Vietnam War, accused the Soviet Union of attacking them with biological or chemical weapons. However, the alleged toxin warfare agent known as yellow rain matches perfectly the yellow spots of bee faeces on leaves in the forest of the Khao Yai National Park in Thailand. (Image reprinted with permission from Seeley et al., 1985 © (1985) M. Meselson, Harvard University).

We are witnessing a renewed interest in biological warfare and terrorism owing to several factors, including the discovery that Iraq has been developing biological weapons ( Zilinskas, 1997 ), several bestselling novels describing biological attacks, and the anthrax letters after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. As history tells us, virtually no nation with the ability to develop weapons of mass destruction has abstained from doing so. And the Soviet project shows that international treaties are basically useless unless an effective verification procedure is in place. Unfortunately, the same knowledge that is needed to develop drugs and vaccines against pathogens has the potential to be abused for the development of biological weapons ( Fig. 4 ; Finkel, 2001 ). Thus, some critics have suggested that information about potentially harmful pathogens should not be made public but rather put into the hands of 'appropriate representatives' ( Danchin, 2002 ; Wallerstein, 2002 ). A recent report on anti-crop agents was already self-censored before publication, and journal editors now recommend special scrutiny for sensitive papers ( Mervis & Stokstad, 2002 ; Cozzavelli, 2003 ; Malakoff, 2003 ). Whether or not such measures are useful deterrents might be questionable, because the application of available knowledge is clearly enough to kill. An opposing view calls for the imperative publication of information about the development of biological weapons to give scientists, politicians and the interested public all the necessary information to determine a potential threat and devise countermeasures.

...virtually no nation with the ability to develop weapons of mass destruction has abstained from doing so

Intimate interactions of hosts and pathogens. ( A ) The face of a smallpox victim in Accra, Ghana, 1967. (Photograph from the Center of Disease Control's Public Health Image Library.) ( B ) A poxvirus-infected cell is shown to illustrate just one of the many intricate ways in which pathogens can interact with, abuse or mimic their hosts. The virus is shown in red, the actin skeleton of the cell in green. Emerging viruses rearrange actin into tail-like structures that push them into neighbouring cells. (Image by F. Frischknecht and M. Way, reprinted with permission from the Journal of General Virology .)

The current debate about biological weapons is certainly important in raising awareness and increasing our preparedness to counter a potential attack. It could also prevent an overreaction such as that caused in response to the anthrax letters mailed in the USA. However, contrasting the speculative nature of biological attacks with the grim reality of the millions of people who still die each year from preventable infections, we might ask ourselves just how many resources we can afford to allocate in preparation for a hypothetical human-inflicted disaster.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to P. Baldacci, G. Frazzetto, B. Janssens, U. Kornak and R. Menard for comments on the manuscript. My research is supported by a long-term fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program.

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