Germs The Ultimate Weapon

GERMS THE ULTIMATE WEAPON

Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad.

Simon and Schuster.  370pp.  $29.95

This book contains the stuff of nightmares.  It covers the development of biological weapons after World War II, largely through reviews of the programs of the United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq (although other countries, such as apartheid South Africa, also get brief mentions).  The activities of two religious cults, the Rajneeshees in the US and the Aum Shinriko in Japan are also described.  The latter group is best known for the Sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, but had also tried to make weapons from anthrax and botulinum, and attempted some germ attacks (with marked lack of success).

The authors cover recent developments in recombinant technology in broad terms, but emphasise how the researchers and weapon developers tend to return to the “oldie moldies”, those long standing scourges of humanity: smallpox, anthrax, plague and botulinum.  It seems that the known performers are considered more reliable than the temperamental new stars.  Perhaps their time is yet to come!

Despite the emphasis given to developments by Governments, it seems clear to this reviewer that the principal threat is from non-government groups, be they terrorists or other fanatics of various kinds.  Governments (even those out on the edges) seem to understand that they are visible targets for what is likely to be ruthless retaliation, should they be directly implicated in a biological attack.  Hence, they are inhibited in their use of biological weapons, although the authors acknowledge the potential for them to use surrogates.

The authors give a brief description of an exercise in the US, depicting the response to a pneumonic plague attack.  While the exercise did not run its full course, there might be some lessons for Australia in it.  It seems clear, for example, that the response to a terrorist biological attack should be a combined public health and police matter, with the Armed Forces in support, not taking the leading role.

In large part this is because the Armed Forces are focussed on different, more visible, threats – even poison gas is more “visible” than germs, as the various less than successful attempts to develop detectors described in the book make clear.  The Armed Forces are also likely to give an unfamiliar threat such as germs less attention, because diverting resources to meet a new threat will almost inevitably impact on existing interest groups in the Forces.  To public health authorities, however, germs are a principal threat, and they will focus on countering them.  To the police, terrorism is a crime, and they also will focus on detecting and responding to it.

It also seems clear form the book that many developed countries are likely to be less prepared now to respond to a biological attack than they might have been in the early to middle parts of the last century, when regular epidemics of such nasties as polio and tuberculosis provided public health bodies with experience of appropriate responses and countermeasures to mass outbreaks of sickness.

There are some disappointing aspects to the book.  It becomes quite clear that the former Soviet Union and Iraq both flagrantly breached the terms of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and lied about their actions even when faced with clear evidence.  Yet the strongest criticisms in the book seem to be kept for the (admittedly not well handled) responses of the US to the biological threat, where administrative waste and bureaucratic empire building are detailed and lambasted.  That some of these problems seemed to come from almost painful attempts to avoid breaching the terms of the Convention gets little acknowledgement!

Perhaps this is to be expected.  This reviewer’s memory is the western media (the authors work for the New York Times) has generally been sceptical of US Government assessments in relation to foreign biological warfare programs, and of claims that incidents such as the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak were the result of germ warfare research, not natural causes.  The willingness of even some of the experts mentioned in the book to search for any innocent explanation, no matter how unlikely, for Sverdlovsk is an indication of one of the great failings of many in the democratic West – the belief that all cultures but their own are benign!  That it is now accepted that Sverdlovsk was the result of an accident at a germ facility, and that the former Soviet Union and Iraq did breach the treaty is perhaps an acknowledgement that the world is not an innocent place.

In the end, the book does not really get into a full discussion of the likely threats.  It would, for example, have been useful if the allusions to endeavours by countries such as Iran or Libya to obtain the services of biological warfare experts from the former Soviet Union had been followed through into an examination of the activities of those countries.  It would also have been useful to have a better discussion of the range of non-government groups that might be seeking to obtain biological weapons (however crude), and their likelihood of success.  As mentioned earlier, these groups seem to be the most probable threats, as they do not have the inhibitions that restrain even the most extreme of Governments

JOHN DONOVAN