Bioterrorism: A Dirty Little Threat With Huge Potential Consequences Jul 21st 2013, 11:00
In the early 1950s the evening of September 19th was simply another pleasant balmy night for the residents of San Francisco, California. The year so far had been a tumulus one for the United States, with a Korean War that would have a final death toll of 33,629 American military casualties together with 1.5 million communists from Mao Zedong's China and the military of the Korean peninsula. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the President of the United States, in Europe the Cold War with the Soviet Union was heating up, and an uprising against the communist government of East Germany was developing.
A national polio epidemic was continuing, and Dr. Jonas Salk was developing the world's first Polio vaccine that he would eventually administer to himself and his family. On the lighter side of events, a charming young Queen Elizabeth II would be crowned Queen of England, and a humble New Zealand beekeeper named Edmund Hillary would perform the first successful ascent of Mount Everest. Texas Instruments had just invented the pocket-sized transistor radio, gasoline cost 20 cents a gallon, and the first color television sets would soon go on sale to the public for the princely sum of $1,175.
Over in Oakland, John Renfield and his wife were preparing their two young daughters for bed. The children were both excited over their father's just announced promise to take them to see Walt Disney's new movie "Peter Pan" which was showing the next day at the local afternoon matinee. Consequently, it had taken the couple some coaxing to get their two youngsters quieted down and into bed. After watching a half hour of the Jackie Gleason show the couple retired at 8:30, and were soon fast asleep.
As the Renfield family slept quietly and comfortably snug in their beds, a dark grey converted U.S. Navy minesweeper sailed a perpendicular course two miles off the coast of downtown San Francisco. The small vessel had been modified to pass one hundred and thirty gallons of a special homogenized liquid under pressure through a peculiar circular arrangement of specialized spray nozzles located at the very stern of the ship. As the liquid sprayed into the air, the minesweeper left a two-mile long trail of white vapor against the backdrop of the night. Within a few minutes, the larger droplets in the long white cloud fell back into the ocean leaving only an invisible aerosol of microscopic droplets that were gradually blown over San Francisco by the prevailing onshore breeze.
By three AM, the invisible aerosol particles finally reached the Renfield house as well as the homes of all their neighbors, and as the aerosol passed through the neighborhood, some of the droplets seeped into the homes to equilibrate with the volume of air inside them.
The sleeping Renfield family inhaled thousands of bacterial spores of a harmless test microorganism deep into their lungs. Unknown to the Renfield family, they and most of the 800,000 other residents of San Francisco at the time, had just unknowingly participated in one of the most significant military experiments of the Cold War.
The San Francisco test had its origins during World War II, when the American scientists at Camp (later Fort) Detrick and the English scientists at Porton Down began to perfect the military science of biological warfare in response to Japan's use of biological agents in China. Using a series of aerosol dissemination tests at Area B in Maryland, the American scientists had developed a liquid spray system to disseminate lethal infections such as Anthrax, Tularemia, Psittacosis, and Brucellosis to kill and incapacitate enemy soldiers on the battlefield. Concerned over the possibility that Soviet submarines might one day surface off the coast of the U.S. and employ the same techniques, a series of large-scale open-air vulnerability tests were conducted on several American cities, as well as in the New York subway system.
The test on the City of San Francisco had been performed using the non-pathogenic biological warfare agent simulant called Bacillus globegii. The microorganism caused no ill effects in humans or animals but its spores approximated those of deadly Bacillus anthrasis, the causative organism of Anthrax. By daybreak on September 20th, a handful of scientists from Fort Detrick began swarming over the San Francisco area where they were busy collecting hundreds of all-glass impinger air-samplers from the government offices and warehouses where they had been covertly installed before the test. The air samplers had faithfully monitored the dispersion and concentration of the simulated biological weapon aerosol.
When the sampling results were analyzed, the Detrick scientists were shocked to discover that the simulated biological aerosol had traveled more than 10 miles from its release point offshore. Had the disseminated agent actually been anthrax spores instead of harmless Bacillus globegii, then virtually the entire area population of San Francisco would have received an infective dose and would have died in a matter of a few days. Biological warfare had now progressed from being a battlefield weapon to a strategic weapon in the same category as the atomic bomb, capable of destroying entire cities. In fear, the United States established the original Epidemic Intelligence Service designed to detect and provide early warning of a covert biological attack.
Over the next 25 years, new dry formulations of biological warfare munitions were developed and tested out in the vast expanse of the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Small backpack generators were created to disseminate liquid biological agents for use in military special operations, and open air testing revealed the tremendous devastation that could be caused by even such simple but well-engineered devices. As biological munitions development continued, the vast acreage of Dugway proving grounds proved insufficient, and open air testing moved out to the H-bomb testing sites in the Pacific.
By the 1960's, biological warfare had become a well-understood and terrifying new science. Using advanced aerial-delivered systems, it had been demonstrated on live rhesus monkeys. The latter revealed that a single aircraft disseminating a properly formatted biological aerosol could cause infection and death of up to 30 percent of the inhabitants within a 2,400 square kilometer area. During this time, Russian intelligence had a secret informer at Fort Detrick, and the Soviet Union responded by expanding their own biological weapons program and munitions.
It soon became clear that biological weapons were a genie that must never be let out of the bottle, and in 1969; President Nixon terminated all U.S. biological weapon research and production. This was not the case for other nations. In response to the U.S. "Star Wars" program for ballistic missile defense, the Soviet Union began a massive program of offensive biological warfare, loading horrendous disease agents such as the Marburg virus and Smallpox into nose cones of some intercontinental missiles.
The Soviet program remained a complete secret to the Western intelligence agencies until three defectors from the program managed to escape from Russia. That program was eventually confirmed by Boris Yeltsin. Then, as the former Soviet Union disintegrated, over 100 Soviet biological warfare scientists found their way to Iran and other parts of the world. They brought with them their expertise in the design and manufacture of a variety of biological munitions, both simple and highly sophisticated. Some of these countries were known to be sponsors of international terrorism.
Following the anthrax letter incidents in 2001 in the United States, a flurry of books, internet articles, and mostly clueless "talking heads" on international television, openly described the necessary characteristics of a successful biological aerosol, and one former FBI agent even went so far as to actually name one of the classified additives used for dry biological agent preparation. If the terrorists of the world did not previously know the potential of biological weapons for their cause before, the U.S. media made sure that now they would.
Although federal efforts involving numerous agencies to combat the threat of bioterrorism expanded rapidly following the 2011 anthrax letter attacks, which killed five people and infected 17 others, various congressional commissions, nongovernmental organizations, industry representatives and other experts have highlighted flaws in these activities. A 2008 report published by the congressionally-mandated Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism concluded that "…unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack in the world by the end of 2013." It went on to say "The Commission further believes that terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon."
Making matters worse, unlike most other terrorist attacks, a biological attack could infect victims without their knowledge, and days could pass before victims develop deadly symptoms. To address this problem, the U.S. has been forced to implement air quality monitors throughout the country and stockpile antibiotics for emergency use.
A 2011 study conducted by the Congressional Research Service observes that: "Unfortunately, the nature of the bioterrorism threat, with its high consequences and low frequency, makes determining the bioterrorism risk difficult. Additionally, the presence of an intelligent adversary who can adapt to the presence of successful countermeasures complicates the use of standard assessment techniques."
We should never doubt that terrorist adversaries are intelligent, have sophisticated and ever-advancing capabilities to inflict devastating casualties, or fully lack the will to do so. To believe otherwise could potentially be a deadly mistake.
YOUR COMMENT
