Time to talk about the dark side of discovery. In January 2004, Georgetown's Acumen Jounral of Life Sciences ran an article by Mark Williams called Biowarfare: The Looming Threat [PDF excerpt | full version in HTML, no pictures]. The descriptions by former Soviet researchers re: pathogens they have already engineered are chilling, and the article is worth a read for that background alone:
"If the scenario was plague plus Venezuelan equine encephalitis, for instance, the first symptom would be plague itself, and the victim's fever would be treated with something as simple as tetracycline," said Dr. Popov. "But that tetracycline would itself be the factor inducing expression of a second set of genes, which could be a whole virus or a combination of viral genes."
Were there, I asked, any limits for such recombinant pathogens? "Essentially, the combinations are unlimited," Dr. Popov explained matter-of-factly. If the combination is plague-Ebola, treatment with tetracycline could trigger an Ebola gene that remained dormant until that point. A recombinant agent could first be introduced into a target population using an aerosol. Then victims would enter other major population centers, fall ill, and become walking Ebola bombs. "It's ugly," he added. "But the person who suggested this in 1987 got promoted."
Now consider this excerpt in light of an Islamist ideology that preaches suicide-murder, demands the subjugation of all non-Muslim peoples, and continues to search for new and better weapons - even as the difficulty of engineering bioweapons continues to fall.
We've run a number of articles on bioterrorism here before, from a big picture bioterrorism overview in the TCS article "Toxic Terror Tick Tock" to a 10-point platform for change, articles covering the necessity of molecular fingerprinting (there's a small effort underway in Puerto Rico), and even the potential for Emeril's anthrax vaccine marinara. I'll acknowledge right up front that pulling off an effective bioterrorism attack has been difficult ths far - but as I point out in Toxic Terror Tick Tock, there's no guarantee that this will remain true into the future:
"Thus far, the record of chemical and bio-terror is actually rather unimpressive. The weapons take real technical skill to manufacture safely, and especially to "weaponize" into a form that is highly potent, disperses widely, and causes significant casualties. Simpler strategies using just explosives and nails are far more reliable, and their physical effects more severe. Witness Oklahoma City, or the death toll from suicide bombers in Israel over the past few years.
This record of past failure does not, however, translate into the certainty of future failure. When modern terrorism was first introduced on an international level by the Palestinian movement in the 1970s, the death tolls were low. As expertise was gained and terrorists learned to aim higher, methods were refined and the death tolls changed for the worse. Simple scenarios could do the same for chemical and biological terror. After all, the first World Trade Center attack failed, too."
If reading this stuff concerns you, good. It probably ought to. I don't want to end on a downer note, so here's one small but positive thing you can do: write a letter to Congressman U.S. Rep. Chris Shays (R-CT), whose work on the bioterrorism front both before and after 9/11 has been tireless and largely unacknowledged. Thank him for his efforts, include a link to our 10-point platform for change, and ask how you can help Rep. Shays and other interested legislators move this issue forward.
UPDATES:
- FuturePundit has also been following this area for a while, and the Threats & Biowarfare category archive contains a treasure trove of scientific links. See esp. CIA Panel on our Darker Bioweapons Future.
- Part of my article covering The Bush Doctrine looks at bioterrorism as the most serious long-term proliferation threat. A venture capitalist who follows the biotech area looks at what's going on, and says there's an "event horizon" of about 20 years until engineered bioterrorism becomes a threat to be taken very seriously. With likely "3 Conjectures" level results - after all, unlike nuclear weapons, the retaliation options tend to be rather fewer and broader under those circumstances.
Mike McQuay's excellent 1984 novel Jitterbug
should be mentioned here. He died much too young...
Joe: Grrrreat! First Trent raises my hair all day yesterday with the spectre of thermo-nuclear war, and now you are tellin' me that not only me, but my beloved horse is going die a horrible death from a recombinant virus based on equine encephalitis! Captain Trips for horses! What a world!
I'm not sure worrying would be terribly helpful at this point - any molecular biologist worth their weight in Evil is already well aware of the efficacy and potential application of Interleukin-4 overexpressed in murine pox virus to a nasty novel human pathogen, not to mention the mutant/aggressive TB strains discussed here: http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/cat_dangers_biowarfare.html. - The latter would decimate any area lacking a modern/industrialized public health infrastructure, and there's no real defense against the former, save that no rational actor would create such a thing (note though, that the murine version of IL-4/mousepox has already been created, a fact I find deeply troubling, given the cross species promiscuity of some viral families).
Perhaps the most comfort one can get from the fact that bioweapon design is currently far ahead of countermeasures is that:
1) US researchers and the Feds are well aware of the threat that biowweapons entail after the anthrax mailings and federal granting agencies have been gearing up to fund research to rapidly diagnose and counter novel biowarfare agents (via diagnostic microarrays, lab-on-chips, optical sequencers, synthetic siRNA therapies, etc.). Pardon if this last bit is jargon heavy, but feasibility stuidies to identify rapid responses to biowarfare agents are certainly under study at this time.
2) Madrassas don't produce molecular biologists. Though rogue states (or a truly demented group with resources in the 10-100 million range) could hire the expertise and supplies needed for a working bioweapons lab, really exotic/novel bioweapons aren't really necessary if the goal is terror or economic damage. There're plenty of nasty microbes out there that are fairly trivial to culture (assuming the lab technicians are expendable) that would acheive this.
IMO, this puts bioweapons research on par with dirty bombs, in terms of the strategic issues involved (proliferation of specialized capabilities, difficult but not impossible to obtain starting materials, limited expertise required, use of non-deterrable proxy agents to deliver the weapon, application as a terror weapon rather than a WMD, etc.).
We need to remember that the term "rogue state" is a bit redundant in this instance. Both the US and the USSR spent hundreds of millions of dollars brewing up Ye Liveliest Awfulness for use on the other's civilians.
And of course work on improving the species-ending IL-4 based viruses continues today at Ft. Detrick. If that doensn't make the US a "rogue state" I don't know what does.
T.J.
Anti-statist nomenclature aside, it may also be useful to distinguish between the (parastate) amateurs and the pros. One has the motives, the other has the means.
Bioweaponeers lacking a state sponsor are going to be most effective using natural pathogens, but that still takes considerable expertise. Aum Shinrikyo, a well funded, scientifically literate doomsday cult, cultured and experimented with botulin toxin, anthrax, cholera, and Q fever, and tried to scare up some ebola as well. Fortunately, they were extremely ineffective in deploying them (from http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol5no4/olson.htm).
Graduates from the madrassas of radical Wahabbism will likely be orders of magnitude less competent than graduates of Tokyo and Tsukuba's science and engineering Universities, even under the supervision of a formally trained scientist. I believe this argues that, as with nukes, the only likely role of terrorists in bioweapon use will be as a delivery vehicle, and even there, their role is suspect. It's far more rational for a state intelligence officer to be deployed to fake a terrorist footprint before releasing a bioweapon than for any state to turn over large batches of Plague 2.0 to a bunch of suicidal/homocidal amateurs.
OTOH, the resources of a nation state can generate unimaginably horrific bioweapons, sure -but it's far more likely to be deterrable. Even then, the main threat is accidents due to ignorance or incompetence, a threat that's easy to underestimate. The Sverdlovsk anthrax disaster, Russian/Biopreparat open-air testing of novel biowarfare agents on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, that sort of thing. On the US side, if you follow the futurepundit link above with regards to the tuberculosis upgrade comes the following quote: "These findings came as a complete surprise to us". That sort of thing might get us all into a lot of trouble.
>>Even then, the main threat is accidents due to ignorance or incompetence, a threat that's easy to underestimate.
Indeed. The crazy idiots working on developing this stuff for US/ex-USSR are far more likely to get us killed through dumbass then Morons From Madrassas are through malice.
More importantly, the problem of irresponsible bioweapons research is something we might be able to do something about, since some of it is nearby.
As for "deterrable," the problem here is false-flag operations. Tracing bioweapons attacks back to their source might be difficult -- or might lead to the wrong source. The anthrax attacks traced back to strains from Ft. Detrick, but that doesn't tell us anything. Was the USG behind the anthrax mailings? Not likely.
There are limits to the abilities of specific government agencies to do evil, mostly a function of the incompetence of large bureaucracies. For the USG (or some conspiracy within it) to be behind things like the anthrax attack or 9/11 would require a level of competence and secrecy which quite frankly they're not capable of. The Emperor Has No Head.
Now the Mossad IS capable of such a conspiracy, but they're not nearly stupid enough to try such a stunt. Though the benefits were large -- increased funding, and diplomatic support for Israel -- the risks would have been totally unacceptable. If solid evidence got out that the Israelis were behind 9/11, a second holocaust would surely result.
See, I can say nice things about the Israeli government too!