Armageddon Science (17 page)

Considering just how well established is the concept of nerve agents as deadly weapons—most people have heard of them without being quite sure what they are—they have seen surprisingly little use in warfare. The Germans manufactured large quantities of the G series agents during the Second World War, going as far as producing artillery shells containing them, but never deployed them in battle. Although Britain developed the more potent V series agents in the 1950s, the British promptly, unilaterally gave up chemical weapons, including nerve gases, a move followed by many other countries. One of the G series nerve agents, GA or tabun, was used in a limited quantities by Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, but the best-publicized use was the terrorist attack in 1995 using agent GB or sarin, on the Tokyo subway system.

During the morning rush hour of March 20, 1995, five members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo entered the Tokyo underground railway system, each carrying plastic bags containing a little less than a pint of liquid sarin. These bags were placed on the floor of the subway train and pierced using the bizarre mechanism of sharpened umbrella points, then left to spread the agent through the train and the tunnel as the motion of the train carried traces of sarin in the air through the carriage.

This was not a particularly efficient way of spreading the nerve agent—unlike a V series agent, sarin has to be breathed before it has an effect, and it doesn’t evaporate particularly quickly at room temperature. Attacks on five separate subway lines killed twelve people and resulted in more than five thousand people going to the hospital, of whom around fifty were severely affected, and around one in five were more than trivially ill.

This Tokyo attack followed another terrorist incident carried out by members of Aum Shinrikyo the year before in the city of Matsumoto, where eight died. These incidents demonstrate a number of aspects of the use of chemical weapons. They show that a terrorist group with sufficient resources is perfectly capable of producing chemical weapons—but also that, despite the huge disruption and distress caused, nerve agents may have a relatively small impact when spread by improvised means.

Aum Shinrikyo’s activities, incidentally, highlight that we should not rule out the ability of terrorists to access weapons of mass destruction because of the expense involved. Aum had a huge amount of cash in its coffers—some estimates have placed their assets at around $2 billion. Despite the apparently casual means of delivery, the nerve gas attacks on the subway were not undertaken on the cheap. The cult had set up a laboratory in Australia to develop the nerve agents and test them (mostly on sheep). According to some reports, the excess baggage costs alone of shipping laboratory equipment into Australia amounted to $300,000. The group also attempted (with less success) to buy old Soviet nuclear weapons.

The relative lack of impact to date doesn’t make the deployment of chemical weapons by terrorists impossible, nor does it mean that chemical agents don’t have the potential to be used in a deadly attack. Perhaps the biggest risk would be if some sort of aerosol system could be used to introduce a nerve agent into the air-conditioning system of a large office building.

There was awareness of the potential for terrorist use of chemical agents well before terrorism was recognized as a significant issue on the U.S. mainland. In 1989, then secretary of state George Shultz said, “Terrorists’ access to chemical weapons is a growing threat to the international community. There are no insurmountable technical obstacles that would prevent terrorist groups from using chemical weapons.”

Even so, all the evidence is that chemical agents will rarely be the weapon of choice for many terrorists or rogue states. However scary or dangerous chemical weapons are, they have less emotional impact than biological weapons. A chemical weapon may be indiscriminate once it is released, but at least it can be deployed solely on a battlefield. A biological weapon has the potential to spread without control—and in the long term will inevitably do more harm in the civilian population than the military. This makes biological agents particularly attractive to the terrorist.

What’s more, we have a very sane, natural fear of being infected by serious biological agents. If there is such a thing as folk memory, plague will always lurk there as a dark reminder of our shared past. “Ring a ring o’ roses” goes the old children’s rhyme, speaking of the rash that accompanied plague. “Atishoo, atishoo! We all fall down.” Dead. (There is some doubt about the link of the rhyme to the plague, but the sentiment works.)

It’s well to remember when we contemplate even the horrendous casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that in the four years from 1346 to 1350, the Black Death—which in all probability was bubonic plague—killed one-third of Europe’s population. One in every three persons dead. Look around a busy office or at a bustling street, and imagine that happening now. Every third person dying. That would amount to around 90 million deaths in the United States alone. Biological hazards leave deep mental scars.

As a type of weapon, in an unsubtle form, biological materials have been in use for a long time. It has been a common practice since ancient times to use rotting corpses (animal and human) to make wells unusable for the enemy, and there are examples of biological weapons being applied more directly in medieval times.

Take the fate of Feodosia, a town in Crimea in the southern Ukraine. In the fourteenth century this was an Italian outpost, providing a trading center for dealing between the Italian city of Genoa and the exotic East. In 1346, the town’s walls were surrounded by a Tatar army, determined to remove what were seen as invaders from their territory. Their timing was poor—the campaign coincided with the start of the great outbreak of the Black Death. Soon, the besieging army was weakened as soldiers went down with the ravaging of the plague. But rather than accept this as a sign that they should retreat, the Tatars turned their illness to their advantage.

They began to catapult dead bodies over the town walls into Feodosia. Of itself this is a horrible, demoralizing act that would have caused fear among the inhabitants. But their intention was much darker. These were the bodies of plague victims. Before long, the Black Death had broken out inside the fortified town. The surviving Italians evacuated the trading post, heading back to their own country and leaving Feodosia to the Tatars. They had been the victim of a crude biological siege weapon.

Between the fourteenth century and the U.S. War of Independence, everything from diseased corpses to smallpox-riddled blankets were used in this way, but biological weapons have rarely been used in modern times, partly because of the difficulty of controlling their impact and partly because of a fear of retaliation. Perhaps the most dramatic, if crude, attempt to use them was during the Second World War, when Japanese planes dropped porcelain containers over northeastern China. These fragile bombs contained millions of fleas carrying the plague virus.

Another, disputed example from the Second World War demonstrates the difficulties faced by those attempting to use a bacteriological weapon on the battlefield. In 1942, a German tank attack on the Russian front was abandoned when the soldiers faced an outbreak of the disease tularemia, sometimes called rabbit fever. Although the outbreak was initially primarily among German troops, it then spread to thousands of Russians, both military and civilian. Although there is no definitive evidence that this outbreak was engineered, as is believed by the Russian biological weapons expert Ken Alibek, it demonstrates the way that a biological attack on the battlefield can easily overtake both sides of the conflict.

But the difficulty of controlling the spread of diseases from the deadly agents has not stopped work from being done on the production and delivery of biological weapons, taking them far beyond the crude infectious capability of a disease-ridden corpse or a flea bite. Nor does this lack of direction make biological weapons any less appealing to terrorist groups, who see the horror raised by the uncontrolled nature of a biological agent as a positive rather than a negative attribute.

As we have seen, the Russians may well have been making use of biological weapons by 1942, and we know that the United Kingdom and Canada began work on them in 1940, while the United States started its own program in 1943, largely because of suspicions that the Germans seemed to be adding a collection of deadly biological agents to their armory.

The unit set up in the United States to work on the weapons, given the low-profile name War Research Service to conceal its activity, had its central base at Camp Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, where the usual suspects of deadly infectious diseases from plague to typhus were worked on, with a particular focus on anthrax. Thousands of pounds of biological bombs were produced at the Detrick site but were never used during the Second World War.

After the war, some had hoped that the biological-warfare capability of the United States, referred to as a “dirty business” by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, could be wound down, but the discovery of advanced biological weapons in Japan led instead to the development of an escalating series of weapons that were just as much an attempt to keep ahead of the enemy as anything that was happening on the nuclear front. It wasn’t until 1969, under President Richard Nixon, that the biological warfare program was abandoned, due to a combination of public pressure and military doubts about the viability of biological weapons on the battlefield.

In looking at what biological weapons can do, we need to be aware of the different kinds of agents. Most of us know that, for example, a bacterial infection (which will usually respond to an antibiotic) is different from a viral infection (which won’t). Similarly, there are bacterial and viral types of biological weapon, plus fungal infections (most familiar in the everyday world in the harmless athlete’s foot) and rickettsias. These last are less familiar disease producers, somewhere between a bacterium and a virus, often found on fleas and ticks, responsible for illnesses like typhus (different from typhoid, which is bacterial).

The biological agent we probably hear most about—certainly one of the most feared—is anthrax. “Anthrax” originally meant a carbuncle, or malignant boil, reflecting one of the possible symptoms of an attack of the bacterium. It is primarily a disease of livestock, and its actions have been recorded since antiquity. Anthrax can take effect by ingestion or through the skin, but the main concern about its use as a weapon is anthrax’s ability to infect through inhalation. Spores carrying the bacterium
Bacillus anthracis
are breathed in by the victim. Once the disease has taken hold there is a 90 to 95 percent chance of death.

To begin with, the victim of an anthrax attack feels as he would with a cold—a blocked nose, a cough, some aching of the joints. Once the symptoms become apparent, usually a day or so after infection, it is too late to treat the victim. Despite a brief period when the symptoms subside, the bacteria is rampaging through the body via the lymph nodes, spreading a toxin that will impact all the organs, but particularly the lungs, which fill with liquid. By then, the skin will have taken on a blue tinge and breathing will become intensely painful, leading to a fatal choking spasm.

One of the reasons anthrax is a preferred biological weapon with the military is that it doesn’t spread from person to person (although spores from corpses can cause infection); rather, its spores kill on being breathed in—this makes it more controlled than an infectious disease, and hence better for a military action.

Another benefit of anthrax to the military is that it is easy to produce, can be stored for years as a dry powder without losing its potency, is cheap, and is easy to disperse in aerosol form (or, as the 2001 anthrax attack demonstrated, as a powder in an envelope). Anthrax will also stay potent for a long time, making it an effective way to render an area contaminated and unusable. When the British army tested anthrax as a weapon on Gruinard Island off Scotland in 1942 (it was never deployed in battle), it took nearly fifty years before the island was safely decontaminated.

There are many other possibilities for a biological weapon, ranging from diseases like Ebola fever to the incredibly deadly natural toxin ricin, which is derived from the castor bean plant. Ricin is particularly scary because the lethal dose is so small—about half the size of a grain of sand—but it lacks some of the practical capabilities of the preferred biological weapons.

Other diseases that were frequently added to twentieth-century biological stockpiles were plague and smallpox, while the Russians also experimented with Legionnaires’ disease—the illness sometimes caught from infected air-conditioning systems—and AIDS. Neither of these proved practical to make in a stable form that could be used in weapons, and AIDS has such a long incubation period that it wasn’t suitable for a military attack, though its potential for striking fear was huge, hence the attempt. Some have suggested, however, that terrorists might prefer an apparently low-risk biohazard: foot-and-mouth disease.

Foot-and-mouth is primarily a disease of animals with cloven hooves. It can be caught by human beings, but the result is only a mild fever and some blistering—it is not a serious problem for humans. However, as the outbreak in the United Kingdom in 2001 demonstrated, foot-and-mouth is highly contagious, and can result in huge disruption to livestock management and the general ability to move freely around a country. Strangely, the approach typically taken to control foot-and-mouth seem to have been caused by an upper-class desire for perfect-looking animals, and is not a logical response to the infection.

In the days when the aristocracy was still in control of Britain, it was fashionable for a landowner to keep an attractive herd of cattle on his estate—they were considered a visual asset, like having a beautiful lawn or an ornamental building in the garden. Foot-and-mouth rarely kills cattle, nor does it make their meat inedible, but it does disfigure them—they don’t look as pretty afterward. So draconian measures were instituted to try to prevent a relatively harmless disease from spreading. It’s arguable that those measures, still in place today, are more damaging and disruptive than the disease itself, though admittedly it can reduce milk output and cause sterility. But there is now an effective inoculation against foot-and-mouth, so the disruption that the disease causes is arguably no longer necessary.