[cdn-nucl-l] Bioterrorism more likely than nukes

["Franta, Jaroslav" <frantaj@aecl.ca>]

posted at
http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/bioterrorism/allfall.html
is the article below, including this interesting snippet:

"A nuclear bomb in the hands of a deranged person has long been the stuff of
nightmares, but the materials needed to make such a device are hard to
obtain and exceedingly tricky to assemble. Biological weapons are not nearly
so difficult to manufacture."


Bioterrorism Special Report:  All fall down
by Robert Taylor
One hundred kilograms of anthrax spores could wipe out an entire city in one
go. It's only a matter of time before bioterrorists strike.  
Since the end of the Cold War, the Western world has been experiencing an
unaccustomed respite from the fears of large scale violence. No longer do
two superpowers appear ready to bury civilisation under a barrage of nuclear
missiles. Strategic bombers, once perpetually on patrol, are parked in their
hangars. The threat of Armageddon has faded. We ought to be safer. Safer,
perhaps, but not safe. Military analysts warn that we should now be on our
guard against a new type of savagery that kills civilians but spares their
homes and offices, strikes without warning, and against which there may be
no defence. What is more, although this threat requires no radically new
technology, the laboratories of academia and the biotech industry indirectly
contribute to its development. The threat is bioterrorism.  A few hundred
kilograms of a properly 'weaponised' bacterial preparation, carefully dried
and milled to a precise particle size, has the potential to wipe out the
inhabitants of an entire city in a single strike. A nuclear bomb in the
hands of a deranged person has long been the stuff of nightmares, but the
materials needed to make such a device are hard to obtain and exceedingly
tricky to assemble. Biological weapons are not nearly so difficult to
manufacture.  Many experts say that it is no longer a question of whether a
major bioterrorist attack will occur, but when. 'It is really a matter of
time,' says microbiologist Raymond Zilinskas of the University of Maryland
Biotechnology Institute in College Park, who participated in the UN's hunt
for Iraq's biological weapons after the Gulf War. 'I don't understand why it
hasn't happened already.'  Two factors make the threat of a bioterrorist
attack greater than ever before, says Kyle Olson, a chemical and biological
weapons analyst at TASC, a firm of defence consultants in Arlington,
Virginia. First, the unspoken taboo that previously dissuaded terrorists
from using chemical or biological weapons against civilians has now been
broken. On 20 March 1995, the nihilistic Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo
unleashed nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and hospitalising
five thousand. Aum was also developing biological weapons. Second, with the
explosive growth of basic biological research and biotechnology, what was
once regarded as esoteric knowledge about how to culture and disperse
infectious agents has spread among tens of thousands of people.
Grim reality
People must recognise that the threat of bioterrorism is not a curiosity,
but a grim reality as we enter the next century,' says Olson. Most
importantly, argue Olson, Zilinskas and others, public health authorities
and emergency services must start planning now to cope with the aftermath of
a variety of biological attacks.  Biological weapons have been with us for
half a century or more, but military commanders consider them too
unpredictable and slow-acting, preferring the touch-of-a-button reliability
of explosives. What is more, the international condemnation that the use of
biological weapons would provoke gives any rational military strategist
pause. Biological weapons are also an unlikely choice for most politically
inspired terrorist organisations. 'Traditionally, political terror groups
are trying to get a seat at the table and to establish the legitimacy of
their cause,' says Brad Roberts, a biological weapons expert at the
Institute for Defense Analyses, a think-tank in Alexandria, Virginia. That
goal would not be met by resorting to bioterrorism.  Nonetheless, terrorist
experts fear that the probability of a surprise biological attack on an
unprotected city is higher today than ever before. Many point to a new brand
of terrorism-epitomised by Aum Shinrikyo-that lacks the restraints imposed
by a political agenda. 'There are new actors appearing, individuals and
small organisations that don't seem to care about establishing legitimacy,
but just want to strike a blow in anger and kill as many people as
possible,' says Roberts. 'For them, the calculation of the right level of
violence seems to have no upper bound.'  In addition, the number of trained
biologists is soaring. Life science PhDs awarded in the US increased by 30
per cent between 1975 and 1991 to more than 5700 a year. By 1994 England
alone had 5700 biology graduate students. American industry now employs
around 60 000 life scientists. There are over 1300 biotechnology companies
in the US and about 580 in Europe; 25 years ago there were none. Moreover,
many less developed countries, including Iraq, have their own biotechnology
industries.  The threat does not come from the fictional mad scientist
engineering a deadly new germ, says Zilinskas, although the technology to
create a Satan bug may soon be within our grasp (see 'What if . . .').
Instead, the widespread use of the basic tools of industrial biology has put
the power to create 'traditional' biological weapons in the hands of tens of
thousands of people. 'Advanced biological technologies have spread all over
the world,' says Zilinskas. 'There are many more people who are technically
trained, and the methods for culturing large quantities of bacteria are well
worked out and commonly employed.'  Olson agrees: 'A person who is smart,
determined, trained in basic microbiological techniques, and willing to take
a few short-cuts on safety and go at a few technical problems in mildly
unconventional ways, could conceivably do some horrible things.'  Horrible
indeed. Bioterrorism is distinguished not only by its mode of killing, but
also by the potential scale of destruction-thousands of times as many people
as could be killed by a typical car bomb. That awesome potential has caught
the attention of the US government. A 1993 report on weapons of mass
destruction by the US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) lists the
diseases that could be employed as biological weapons. They include plague;
tularemia, a plague-like disease; and botulism, caused by a toxin from the
common food-poisoning bacterium Clostridium botulinum. But the most chilling
reading in the report is the story of anthrax, the original biological
warfare agent.
Low-tech weapons 
Anthrax, a disease of cattle and sheep caused by Bacillus anthracis, can
also kill humans. The external form of the disease, which sometimes strikes
people who handle infected fleeces, causes unpleasant sores. The pneumonic
form is far more serious, killing more than 90 per cent of its victims if
left untreated. The key to triggering the second form of the disease is to
create and disperse spore-containing particles of exactly the right
size-between 1 and 5 micrometres-to ensure that they are retained in the
lungs. As few as 8000 spores per person reliably causes a lethal infection.
The spores cross the epithelial lining of the lungs and travel to the lymph
nodes, where they germinate, multiply, and then spread to the other tissues,
releasing toxins as they go. The first symptoms include vomiting, fever, a
choking cough and laboured breathing. Antibiotics can cure patients in the
earlier stages of the disease. Without antibiotics, death from haemorrhage,
respiratory failure or toxic shock follows within a few days.  The OTA
report emphasised that, for the most part, transforming B. anthracis into a
weapon is a low-tech procedure. It also noted that on a clear, calm night, a
light plane flying over Washington DC (similar to the one that crashed into
the White House in 1994), carrying 100 kilograms of anthrax spores and
equipped with a crop sprayer, could deliver a fatal dose to up to three
million people.  Zilinskas emphasises that making an anthrax weapon capable
of murder on this scale is not a trivial undertaking. But while it may be
much more difficult than building a fertiliser bomb, the problems are far
from insurmountable. The tricky part, he says, is not culturing the agent,
but processing the crude slurry into a form suitable for dispersal. 'You
have to dry it somehow, adjust the particle size, load it into a canister,
and spray it. If you wanted to be sure your preparation would work, you
would also need to test your isolate for virulence, measure the particle
size and perhaps field test your sprayer with a non-pathogenic bacterium.
All the while you have to protect yourself and avoid detection.'  A project
of this complexity would require months of systematic effort, the practical
engineering skills of a clever back-yard inventor, and luck. These barriers,
however, are not impossibly high. Basic microbiology skills-techniques an
undergraduate studying the subject would be taught-should be sufficient to
isolate B. anthracis from cattle pasture in areas where the disease is
endemic, such as small areas of the US, and larger tracts of land in Russia
and South Africa. Using this as the starter culture, a terrorist with a
100-litre culture vessel-about the size of a home fish tank-could in a few
days brew up several kilograms of crude slurry containing billions of
spores. Drying the slurry would be tricky, though not impossible.
Freeze-drying-a procedure in which material is frozen and put under a vacuum
to remove water, and which is used on a small scale throughout the biotech
industry-could be one option. Grinding the slurry powder into particles of
the desired diameter would provide the greatest challenge, mainly because of
the risk of contamination. Indeed, the most likely glitch all round is that
the terrorists become the first victims, or that they infect their
neighbours and give the game away.  Moreover, Zilinskas says a few essential
details are not commonly known. 'The Iraqis, as far as we know, never
mastered the art of weaponising their bacterial agents, which included
anthrax,' he says. 'Most of what the UN investigators found were crude
preparations mounted on conventional bombs and missiles, which might not
have dispersed very well.' But he notes that less ambitious attacks also
pose a threat. For example, a crude slurry of anthrax spores left in the
tunnels of an underground railway system, where wind created by passing
trains would dry them and blow them around, could claim thousands of lives.
The Aum Shinrikyo attack on the Tokyo underground fell into this less
ambitious category-and even that was bungled. Olson, who interviewed cult
members in Japan both before and after the Tokyo incident, says that the
attack was hastily planned, the batch of sarin nerve gas the cult members
manufactured was impure, and the dispersal device was nothing more than a
bag punctured with an umbrella tip. Had the sarin been pure, and the
dispersal mechanism slightly more sophisticated, tens of thousands could
have died.  But John Sopko and his colleagues on the staff of the US Senate
Permanent Committee on Investigations, who were asked to look into the
attack by Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, found that despite the cult's
ineptitude there was plenty of reason to take notice. In a report presented
last November at one of a series of Senate hearings on terrorism, they wrote
that the cult, which had more than 40 000 members in Japan and Russia and
one billion dollars in assets, had recruited hundreds of scientists to
assist with its 'avowed purpose of plunging the United States and Japan into
a war of 'Armageddon' from which the cult would arise as the supreme power
in Japan.'  Sopko and his colleagues-not the kind of people given to
sensationalism-also noted that 'although the findings may initially sound
far-fetched and nearly science fictional, the actions of the Aum . . .
create a terrifying picture of a deadly mix of the religious zealotry of
groups such as the Branch Davidians, the anti-government agenda of the US
militia movements and the technical know-how of a Doctor Strangelove.' A
manual on sarin production included the song Sarin, The Brave with the
catchy lines 'Prepare Sarin! Prepare Sarin! Immediately poisonous gas
weapons will fill the place. Spray! Spray! Sarin the Brave, Sarin.' 
Ebola expedition
The cult also had a large biological weapons programme, the precise extent
of which remains unexplored to this day. 'There is an Aum lab-now
sealed-that was devoted to biological agents, which has not yet been fully
investigated,' says Olson. 'As early as 1990 they were trying to aerosolise
botulinus toxin. We think they had anthrax as well. In 1991, (cult leader
Shoko) Asahara led an expedition to Zaire to obtain samples of the Ebola
virus. We have to assume they had progressed since then, but how far they
got we don't know.'  The Japanese cult is now out of action. 'My concern is
(that) new groups will look at Aum Shinrikyo's activities and ask: 'How
could I do this a little better?' ' says Roberts. Compared with Sarin gas,
he says, 'biological agents might look a lot easier to work with-in terms of
access to material, and the level of expertise needed-and more effective'.
Only time will tell whether the Aum Shinrikyo attack will inspire or deter.
But the Japanese tragedy has sparked concern that greater efforts are needed
to prevent and prepare for a bioterrorist attack. On the intelligence front,
the Aum experience is not encouraging. The Japanese authorities were aware
of some of the cult's activities, and were poised to move against them. But
though the US was known to be one of the cult's avowed targets, John
O'Neill, chief of the Counterterrorism and Middle East Section of the FBI,
admitted to the Senate that the cult's activities 'weren't on our radar
screen'.  Apart from acting on intelligence, another defence would be to
restrict access to the tools of bioterrorism, including starter cultures. In
March 1995, Larry Harris, a microbiologist and a member of the Aryan Nations
white supremacist group, used a forged letterhead and his professional
credentials to order samples of Yersinia pestis, the organism that causes
bubonic plague, from the American Type Culture Collection, a clearing house
for microbiological samples in Rockville, Maryland. The ATCC dutifully
mailed the samples, but in the nick of time staff became suspicious that
Harris did not have the expertise to handle plague and the vials were
recovered unopened. Harris is being prosecuted for mail fraud-owning plague,
it transpires, is not illegal in the US. In Britain any company that wants
to keep lethal pathogens must prove to the government's Health and Safety
Executive that it has adequate containment facilities. But, according to
spokesman Mark Wheeler, the HSE has no jurisdiction over private citizens.
Lindsey French of the Department of Health confirms that people may keep
lethal pathogens at home. But she says that threats to do harm with those
pathogens, transporting or storing them improperly, or obtaining them by
fraud or theft, are illegal. Not that would-be terrorists need obtain their
pathogens through official channels. If you know where to look, many can be
isolated from the wild.  But perhaps the most neglected area of planning is
the medical response to an attack. 'The scenario changes with the agent
used,'' says Philip Russell, former commander of the US Army Medical
Research and Development Command in Fort Detrick, Maryland. He is now
president of the Sabin Foundation, an organisation based in New Canaan,
Connecticut, which promotes vaccine use against natural diseases. 'Plague is
different from smallpox, which is different from anthrax. We need a group of
folks to go through different scenarios and think about what could be done
other than counting the bodies.' For example, he says, plans are needed to
ensure that large amounts of antibiotics, and properly trained and equipped
people, can be rushed to the scene.  In the US, these responsibilities fall
to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Office of Emergency
Preparedness of the Department of Health and Human Services, both in
Washington DC. At the moment, although these agencies have adequate plans to
cope with floods, earthquakes, and the occasional car bomb, OEP head Frank
Young told a Senate hearing on 1 November 1995, 'there is no coordinated
public health infrastructure to deal with the medical consequences of
terrorism'. This is not to say there are no plans at all. Last June,
President Clinton told government agencies-including the military - to
improve their planning for a massive terrorist strike. But at the most
recent Senate terrorism hearing, on 27 March, several key witnesses, among
them P. Lamont Ewell, president of the International Association of Fire
Chiefs, questioned whether the new plans were adequate and whether they had
been sufficiently well rehearsed to cope with a real attack. In Britain, the
Home Office takes ultimate responsibility for preventing bioterrorism and
for preparing to deal with its aftermath. It is characteristically
enigmatic. Robert Smith of the Home Office has 'contingency plans drawn up,
and they are ready to be used'. But he refused to give any details to New
Scientist because 'that would defeat the object of the exercise'.  In the
wake of a major bioterrorist attack, undoubtedly the contingency plans would
be rapidly and publicly overhauled. Meanwhile, consider this. The
mid-morning radio news reports an odd outbreak of a respiratory disease on
the fringes of London. It rapidly becomes the top news story, first locally,
then nationally, as more cases show up during the afternoon. Hundreds of
people turn up at hospitals across the city gasping for breath. Doctors
begin to suspect, and quickly confirm, that the bizarre disease is anthrax.
An extended evening bulletin gives it saturation coverage. Experts from the
Department of Health try to figure out where the spores came from and in
which direction they are spreading. It all takes time -- time they don't
have. Rumours are rife that supplies of antibiotics have run out. The
authorities caution against panic. You know that you and your family have
been exposed. . .  Graphic: Anthrax attack on Washington DC (38K JPG file)
>From New Scientist, 11 May 1996, Volume 150, Issue 2029 	
© Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 1999