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Edited by Christian Lowe | Contact

Bioweapons Spread: Scare?

On Tuesday, I linked to a Technology Review article, "The Knowledge," about the accelerating spread of bioweapons gear and know-how. The story has touched off a big debate in the community that tracks biological threats. So I thought I'd give SUNY Purchase environmental science professor (and long time bioweapons researcher) Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation's scientists working group -- a chance to respond.

smallpox_yellow.jpg

1. [The story's lead example, Russian bioweapons researcher Serguei] Popov, is a convenient tool for raising a number of ideas that have been around for awhile, and not just in Russia. The BWC [Biological Weapons Convention] does not prohibit research, and the US has been doing some of the same sorts of things for at least 20 years.

2. Terrorists would have to be crazy to spend time and other resources on long-term BW agent development, risking detection without any certainty of success. They don’t need MORE virulent agents. They don’t need to synthesize agents. Anthrax can be isolated from cowfields all over the place. Unless and until real defenses against the standard agents are universal, the latter will do the job. ( And an even better job is done by explosives. ) The agent is just the first, easiest, step. Weaponization and delivery are harder. Testing is required if they don’t want to fizzle. Testing is much more likely than genetic engineering to be detected.

3. If terrorists actually wanted novel BW agents, the way to get them is to buy/steal/infiltrate a biodefense lab, as [Rutgers researcher Richard] Ebright says.

4. The most notable information in the article is the description by Popov of how he was co-opted into working on BW, drawn in without at first knowing it until his career, his income and his future depended on it. To say nothing of patriotism. There are similar stories from S. Africa. Would a scientists’ “code of conduct” have mattered?

5. Interesting that the article brings up “pacification of a subject population” and other modification of behavior with “non-lethal” weapons. This is a very popular research topic in a lot of countries these days, especially since the Moscow theater hostage event -- the Manchurian Candidate concept, essentially. [Harvard University molecular biology professor Matthew] Meselson has been fighting this for years. Tell the public, please, that this kind of research is likely to be turned against themselves, ultimately, rather than terrorists.

As for terrorists developing such things — I don’t see why they would even want them. But if they did, they would know where to get them. Let’s stop focusing our fears on hypothetical terrorists, when governments are actually preparing the tools!

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The prof is no doubt correct, and in his position we would expect a coal-face expert to have the last word on the technical side of CWB terrorism.

However, I am uncomfortable with blind assumptions olong the lines of "what a sensible terrorist might do". A plague on the enemy would have great resonance, and our enemy is able to make the leap from a doctor of children to a bomber of children in the case of Zarquawi.

I think the ultimate threat is a weaponised nasty stolen or bought from the former Sov inventory, or a nasty prepared from loose research.

BTW, as I understand, the Russians used huge doses of an established anasthaetic at the theatre siege, not a spooky James Bond knockout gas.

Posted by: Scared at March 17, 2006 12:02 PM


"Weaponization and delivery are harder."


I started reading about this area extensively starting about four years ago, when it became crystal clear that GWB was GOING to invade Iraq no matter what happened or didn't happen in the course of the "negotiations".

The information I mined out of places like Ken Alibek's autobiography, Johnathan Tucker's book about smallpox, Jeanne Guillemin's recounting of the investigation of the Sverdlovsk accident, and other similar sources was quite alarming.

But upon further research and reflection, the quote above seems the most relevant answer to the issue raised in the Technology Review article. Unless the attacker is going to use a supercontagious agent like smallpox, which virually guarantees blowback. Weaponization, testing, mass production, and reliable competent delivery are going to be the real showstoppers.

You can't just strew an agent like anthrax around like some sort of evil pixie dust and expect much result. The letter attacks were successful as _terrorism_. As biological attacks per se ... well, I can almost hear the derisive laughter of 10,000 Russian scientists. People for whom a half-dozen or so victims doesn't register as an "attack", but as an "industrial accident". And they had bigger ones than that, too, by at least an order of magnitude. Like Sverdlovsk.

The Soviets' program succeeded because they were willing to spend multiple decades and tens of billions and the labor of tens of thousands to build a real supporting infrastructure. One that could define and solve the problems surrounding the competent testing, production, and delivery of biological weapons.

The Soviets grew _tons_ of smallpox, and _thousands_ _of_ _tons_ of anthrax every year. They could and did perform open-air testing. They could and did maintain more than a hundred facilities at fixed locations. They could and did erect multiple concentric rings of extremely effective security around the entire project.

Terrorists operating out of caves aren't going to be able to do any of these things at all easily.

I should point out at this time that while we have what _purports_ to be an immunization against anthrax, it is neither safe nor effective. This fact has been made public on multiple occasions.

Our vaccination against smallpox is effective enough. But it is sufficiently _proven_ unsafe to have been removed from general use for more than thirty years now.

Given this, why on earth should any actor in the offensive biowar business, whether a state or a non-state actor, look very much further than pulmonary anthrax?

It is well-understood, easy to obtain samples of, very much easier to grow than any virus, and the yield is tough spores that retain their viability and lethality for decades. Not fragile virions which need artificial protection against solar UV and oxygen to remain viable for more than a small handful of hours.

I don't think that the issues raised by the Technology Review article are either baseless or trivial.

But _right_ _now_, our biggest worry shouldn't be OBL, who has yet to even make a _credible_ _threat_ of a B/W strike, let alone actually put one in. Unless we are actually going to DO SOMETHING CONCRETE about our lack of vaccines against anthrax and smallpox which are safe enough to use in peacetime, to protect populations numbering in the hundreds of millions.

I _really_ don't think that last is going to happen on GWB's watch. "Bioshield" has been roundly and soundly criticised, here and elsewhere, as a boondoggle. It needn't be and shouldn't be. But that would require a chief executive whose vision extends further than providing loot and plunder for his corporate sponsors and handlers.

Rather than OBL, our present worry should be a _known_ _and_ _proven_ bioterrorist, with a track record uncounted thousands of years and billions of corpses long. One who is cooking up a new and lethal supercontagious agent even as I write this. One whose alpha-test version is known to be present RIGHT NOW on the eastern edge of the East Atlantic Flyway, whose western terminus lies on the North American continent.

You know who this terrorist is, don't you? Easy answer.

_That_ malefactor's identity is the common knowledge of suffering mankind. Out of whose mass, cholera carries off millions each and every year. Stupid well-understood preventable treatable cholera.

Posted by: Charles Roten at March 17, 2006 04:10 AM


There are lots of literature available that would give anyone a basic knowledge on how to produce biological weapons. They are pretty common in nature. Such as poison mushrooms, ergot, mycotoxins, mycotoxicoses, fungus, parasites, nematodes, insects, fungi, etc. I have read some books on the topic and it is pretty scary how easy it is to find these things in nature, identify them, incubate them, etc. Most of them don't kill but almost all of them disfigure you in some way. Some of them seem quite painful and horrible. I don't know what kind of advanced biological weapons that are out there, but just the stuff normal people can find in a walk in the woods and under a microscope is definatly freaky.

I can see how they would be hard to spread in a WMD situation, but for things like shopping malls and movie theaters, it probably isnt hard for some determined person to accumulate enough agent to hurt some people in a closed environment like that. I always hoped they set some kind of standard in air filtration systems for public places that would negate any air dispersal of biological agents.

Considering we can't secure our borders, I'm not keeping my hopes up for the government to take any initiative in trying to stop biological terrorist attacks.

Posted by: jtw at March 16, 2006 08:30 PM


There's a certain fascination in watching people trotting out their cherished canonical responses about the possibilities of bioweapons in response to this article, ignoring what it does say in order to reiterate their well-rehearsed stances. Anything to save themselves the labor -- admittedly disturbing -- of thinking about the fact that it is 2006, and these technologies exist and are widely available.

For instance, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg concludes: "Interesting that the article brings up pacification of a subject population and other modification of behavior with non-lethal weapons ... a very popular research topic in a lot of countries these days, especially since the Moscow theater hostage event -- [Harvard University molecular biology professor Matthew] Meselson has been fighting this for years. Tell the public, please, that this kind of research is likely to be turned against themselves, ultimately, rather than terrorists....Lets stop focusing our fears on hypothetical terrorists, when governments are actually preparing the tools!"

The Technology Review article repeatedly tells its readers exactly that -- that the long-term threat remains what it always has been: advanced bioweapons programs carried out by nation-states and militaries. It quotes Matt Meselson (repeatedly) and Jens Kuhn to that effect. It says, additionally, that the US bioterror/biodefense effort as currently formulated is misconceived hype, but nevertheless efforts like Richard Ebright's -- however well-intentioned -- will not wish away the fact that the current state of biotechnology permits what it permits: garage bio-hacking and the democratization of bioweaponeering. Did Rosenberg actually read the article or just scan it for places where she could do her standard riffs about bioterrorism?

Rosenberg also writes: "Terrorists would have to be crazy to spend time and other resources on long-term BW agent development, risking detection without any certainty of success. They dont need MORE virulent agents. They dont need to synthesize agents. Anthrax can be isolated from cowfields all over the place."

Regarding the terrorist segment of the bioweapons threat spectrum, it all depends on how many people you're trying to kill, doesn't it? The anthrax bacterium isn't a contagious agent with human-to-human transmissibility. While anthrax could be an attractive weapon in a traditional battlefield context -- since it's rapid and effective enough to kill soldiers on the field -- traditional battlefield contexts are not where bioweapons would primarily be used, are they? You can kill far more people with a highly infectious, rapidly reproducing pathogen.

Rosenberg writes: 'Unless and until real defenses against the standard agents are universal, the latter will do the job. ( And an even better job is done by explosives. )

Explosives? It again depends on how many people you want to kill. In any case, Rosenberg is again either obfuscating or has missed the point here. While the standard agents might do the job, most of the top select agents are at this point hard to obtain because of government oversight (though, as Ebright says in the Tech Review article, they're getting easier to obtain thanks to the current US biodefense effort). In 2006, the state of biotech is such that -- as the article demonstrates -- it is in principle now easier to develop deadly pathogens than to steal or buy them.

Rosenberg also writes: "The agent is just the first, easiest, step. Weaponization and delivery are harder. Testing is required if they dont want to fizzle. Testing is much more likely than genetic engineering to be detected."

Wrong. For instance, do terrorists need development of delivery means for agents like SARS, smallpox or the recently re-created 1918 flu virus? Even for agents for which aerosolization is required, however, it's 2006 and not 1986, the heyday of the Soviet program. Does Rosenberg know how much easier the science of biological agent weaponization is today thanks to modern innovations already in wide commercial use in the areas of aerosol drug delivery, drug formation, powder production, paint coating applications, etcetera? See pages 146-151 of the National Academies of Science report on "Globalization, Biosecurity and the Future of the Life Sciences" (released Feb. 2006) for further particulars.

Rosenberg writes: "If terrorists actually wanted novel BW agents, the way to get them is to buy/steal/infiltrate a biodefense lab, as [Rutgers researcher Richard] Ebright says."

It may be pretty to think that we still retain even that measure of control (though somewhat negligently, as the Tech Review article has Ebright point out). Nevertheless, it is now possible for hypothetical bioterrorists to elude surveillance by intelligence authorities while developing a biological weapon for as little, in principle, as $10,000. The article suggests exactly how; let Rosenberg refute the article's specifics. As for testing, does Rosenberg seriously suggest that, if US intelligence agencies couldn't lower the boom on the A.Q. Khan network's proliferation of heavy-duty nuclear technologies, they're going to catch what's going on in a garage bio-lab in, say, Karachi or anywhere else on this big planet?

Rosenberg also writes: "The most notable information in the article is the description by Popov of how he was co-opted into working on BW, drawn in without at first knowing it until his career, his income and his future depended on it. To say nothing of patriotism. There are similar stories from S. Africa. Would a scientists code of conduct have mattered?"

This is an interesting question. Rosenberg should know that the manner in which Popov was co-opted resembles in most essentials the process by which US and other scientists have now been drawn into biodefense research. Popov, too, was initially told that such bioweapons research as he was being called on to do was purely for biodefense purposes. As, indeed, it might have been, because to defend against the bad bugs, one must know how the bad bugs work. James, another email correspondent, wrote in response to Rosenberg: "The critical (bioweaponeering) work here will not be done in clandestine labs; it will be done in modern research facilities funded by our own government." Again, however, it is 2006 and James has it wrong: the critical work is ALREADY being done in modern research facilities funded by our own government. It's called biodefense. Should such work be halted, when it offers the possibility of defense against bio-threats? Almost certainly not. Under these circumstances, a scientist's "code of conduct" --flimsy as that would be -- may be our best hope. God help us.


Posted by: Mark Pontin at March 16, 2006 08:28 PM


Exactly. I'm racking my brain for an example where terrorist or guerrillas developed or produced an advanced weapon instead of buying or stealing it from a "legitimate" source. All I'm coming up with is the cult that released Sarin in Tokyo's subways and managed to kill far fewer people than the kids who bombed London's Tube.

The critical work here will not be done in clandestine labs; it will be done in modern research facilities funded by our own government. Just like the anthrax attacks. That investigation is stalled, even though the implied threat if far greater than the threat of another 9/11. Once again, the priorities of our government astonish me.

Posted by: James at March 16, 2006 05:13 PM


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