Public Agenda Special Edition: Terrorism

Introduction

Overview

Bioterrorism

Public Opinion

Sources and Resources

Overview: The Issue at a Glance

The October 2001 outbreak of the deadly anthrax virus in the United States demonstrates why terrorists find chemical and biological weapons so appealing as a form of warfare.

They are relatively cheap. A small amount can have a devastating effect. They are difficult to trace. And they hold the potential to produce fear and disrupt society far out of proportion to the investment in labor and technical expertise.

Nearly a year later, the FBI has not yet determined who was behind the anthrax-tainted letters that killed five people and prompted thousands to take antibiotics as a precaution. But this much is clear: in each instance, all it took was a first-class postage stamp to deliver the weapon.

Historically, regulations on the sale of materials than can be transformed into chemical and biological weapons have been fairly lax. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the long-running economic problems in Russia and former East Bloc countries have made it easier for rogue countries and terrorist groups to obtain scientific expertise from Moscow's former program. Osama bin Ladin's al Qaeda terrorist network, believed to have orchestrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is known to have been interested in biological and chemical weapons.

What's more, the uneven response by American health officials to the anthrax outbreak raised serious questions about the government's ability to cope with a bioterrorism attack. Few family doctors or emergency room staff had ever seen a case of anthrax and the health system was slow to recognize the attacks for what they were. Nor was enough understood about how a bioterror attack might spread -- for example, health officials failed to realize that anthrax might be spread by the post office sorting machines that processed tainted mail. On the other hand, it's worth pointing out that the death toll from the anthrax attacks was mercifully small.

The federal government has taken numerous steps to prepare for a new attack. New laboratories have opened to test doubtful cases more quickly, training programs and drills are being developed for local physicians, and the Centers for Disease Control is more closely monitoring emergency rooms for suspicious cases.

Still, much remains unknown. The Bush administration is currently considering whether to endorse wider vaccination for smallpox, a disease eradicated in the 1970s but considered a likely bioterror weapon. Should all Americans be vaccinated? Or just health care workers? If so, how many people might be sickened by the vaccination itself, and is that an acceptable price to pay?

Chemical Trails

Chemical and biological weapons have been part of warfare since ancient times. Two thousand years ago, Scythian warriors dipped arrowheads in manure and rotting corpses to make them deadlier. In colonial America, British soldiers distributed blankets infected with smallpox to Indians.

The first large-scale use of chemical weapons took place during World War I, when Germany released chlorine gas in Ypres, France, in 1915. England and France retaliated by using chemical weapons, including mustard gas, against the Germans. But poison gas never broke the stalemate in the trenches. Gas also proved to be a fickle weapon, since sometimes a shift in the wind would blow the gas back at the attackers.

By the end of World War I, about one-quarter of all shells fired contained chemical weapons. During the war, a young German soldier named Adolf Hitler was gassed by British troops. Historians have speculated that the experience persuaded Hitler not to deploy chemical weapons during World War II - except for the poison gas used in death camps.

Public revulsion over chemical weapons was heightened by vivid reports of painful deaths during World War I. The Geneva Protocol, signed in 1925, prohibited the use of chemical weapons in warfare, but the treaty has been broken through the years. (A more recent version of the treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, has suffered similar enforcement problems.) In the 1930s, for example, Italy used chemical weapons in Ethiopia. Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran during their bloody eight-year war in the 1980s. In 1988, Iraqi authorities killed 5,000 of their own citizens when Saddam Hussein ordered mustard gas used to subdue a Kurdish uprising.

Prior to World War II, chemical weapons generally were limited to common industrial chemicals or their derivatives, such as phosgene and hydrogen cyanide. After the war, research focused on more sophisticated chemicals developed specifically as weapons, including nerve agents such as Sarin. (Find out more about common chemical agents).

Deadly Biology

Increasingly, though, military officials in the U.S. and elsewhere grew skeptical of chemical weapons because they were difficult to use and could easily backfire. More attention began to be focused on biological weapons, particularly during World War II, when Japan used plague and other bacteria against China.

More recently, scientific breakthroughs, particularly in the field of genetic engineering, have allowed researchers to take a virus and make a deadlier version of it. They can even splice together different viruses to create an altogether new "super bug."

For nearly five decades, the United States and the former Soviet Union were engaged in something of a secret arms race as they experimented with various forms of biological weapons, sometimes with deadly results.

The U.S. began investigating the feasibility of biological weapons in 1941. In 1943, it opened a major biological weapons research and development facility in Frederick, Md., at a site now know as Fort Detrick. Initial research focused on anthrax and botulism toxin.

In 1969, President Nixon announced that the U.S. was renouncing germ warfare. Three years later, the United States joined the Soviet Union and more than 100 other nations in signing a treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, that banned germ warfare.

Yet, even after the treaty was signed, the U.S. and Soviets continued to expand their research into biological weapons. While the treaty outlawed offensive weapons, it allowed research into defensive measures, such as vaccines and detectors.

That loophole allowed governments to make the argument: You can't really figure out how to defend against a particular weapon unless you have it and know how it works.

In the summer of 2001, President Bush opposed an updated version of the Biological Weapons Convention that would have allowed spot inspections of bio-manufacturing plants in all countries that signed the treaty. Bush expressed skepticism toward international agreements, and administration officials said the new treaty language needed more work. Also, U.S. biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies expressed a fear that the inspections would be used to steal their trade secrets.

Soviet Secrets

While U.S. officials had long believed that Moscow had an ambitious biological weapons program, the scope and progress of the effort did not become apparent until after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

When U.S. officials were invited to Russia and other former Soviet states to help dismantle bioterrorism laboratories, they were stunned by what they found: Moscow had amassed an enormous stockpile of biological weapons, and it was steps ahead of the United States in terms of its scientific prowess in producing toxins. But now security at the sites, some of which still had weapon-making equipment and supplies, was either lax or nonexistent.

Western officials were concerned that, amid Moscow's economic woes and the lax security at the laboratories, rogue countries or terrorist organizations might try to purchase some of the weapons or pay former Soviet scientists for their expertise in bioterrorism.

The Soviets stockpile included plague, smallpox and anthrax. At its peak, the Soviet program was capable of producing hundreds of tons of anthrax in a single year. In 1979, an accident at a military lab in Sverdlovsk, an industrial city in the Ural Mountains, caused a leak that sent a cloud of anthrax spores over a neighboring village, killing about 66 people.

Domestic Terror

Prior to the recent anthrax outbreak, the only known case of bioterrorism in the United States involved an incident in Oregon that received little coverage at the time.

In September 1984, about 750 people became ill after eating in restaurants in The Dalles, Ore., and were diagnosed as having ingested salmonella, a bacterium that causes diarrhea, vomiting and cramps. It took a year for local, state and federal authorities to unravel the mystery: The salad bars had been contaminated by followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who had developed a small town in a remote area of Oregon and were locked in a bitter battle for control of local government. The salad bar contamination was a trial run of the group's plan to make enough people sick on Election Day two months later to help ensure the cult's victory at the polls, according to police. The plan was later dropped and the cult's candidates were soundly defeated by the voters. The cult also planned to kill or sicken people on its enemies list, which included the region's U.S. attorney, several county officials and a reporter for The Oregonian newspaper. The cult's leader fled to India and two senior aides were sent to prison.

Health officials hoped the incident was an anomaly. But in 1995, an apocalyptic cult known as Aum Shinrikyo released the deadly nerve gas Sarin into Tokyo's subway system, killing 12 and injuring 5,500. Two years earlier, the cult had tried to spray anthrax germs from an aerosol device from the top of a building in Tokyo. The effort failed because of two key mistakes: The anthrax was a weakened version of the virus used in vaccines, and the attack took place in daytime, when sunlight could destroy many of the pathogens.

For decades, it was fairly easy to obtain materials in the U.S. that could be transformed into biological weapons. Congress toughened the regulations after Larry Wayne Harris, a college microbiology student and white supremacist from Ohio, was arrested in 1995 when police found vials of freeze-dried bubonic plague in his glovebox. Harris was convicted on a lesser charge of fraud because he bought the plague under a false name. Technically, it wasn't illegal to be in possession of the toxic agent.

An estimated 22,000 laboratories nationwide handle lethal germs that could be used in bioterrorism attacks. Harris bought the three vials of plague bacteria for about $300 from the American Type Culture Collection, a private germ bank located in Virginia. The same company provided biological supplies to the Rajneesh cult and also sent an assortment of germs to Iraq during the 1980s.

The Tokyo subway attack captured the world's attention, and U.S. officials grew increasingly concerned about America's vulnerability to a biological or chemical attack by terrorists.

Safeguards and Shortfalls

The worst-case scenario was laid out in an emergency preparedness drill called "Dark Winter" that was conducted in June 2001. The exercise simulated terrorist attacks using smallpox in shopping centers in three cities, which the simulation predicted would spread to 25 states and 11 countries. Smallpox normally kills about 30 percent of those infected. "It's a lucky thing for the United States that this was just a test and not a real emergency," a Senate committee was told afterward by former Senator Sam Nunn, who took part in the exercise. "Our lack of preparation is a real emergency from my perspective."

Several studies have identified a number of shortfalls in disaster preparedness efforts: The public health system does not have sufficient resources -- beds, equipment, medicine -- to deal with casualties from a biological or terrorist attack. Health workers have not been adequately trained. Disaster preparedness has been poorly coordinated between the various agencies responsible for emergency response, resulting in some programs being duplicated while other needs go unmet. The nation's ability to detect an outbreak of infectious disease has deteriorated because of a lack of funding and planning, particularly in the area of new technology to monitor the increasingly complex strains of disease that might be used in a bioterrorist attack. An October 2000 report by the Henry L. Stimson Center, which specializes in security issues, said federal preparedness efforts were generally seen as "a fractured mess."

The recent anthrax outbreak also pointed to a shortfall in another key area: the lack of an adequate stockpile of vaccines against anthrax and other diseases, particularly smallpox.

More than a half-million members of the military have been vaccinated against anthrax since the Persian Gulf War. The vaccination effort was started because of Saddam Hussein's arsenal of biological and chemical weapons. U.S. officials suspected that, by the start of the war, Iraq had produced enough germs and toxins to kill every person on earth and had developed artillery shells, bombs and missile warheads to deliver them.

But many claim the anthrax vaccine has caused serious side effects, and hundreds have either left the military or faced disciplinary action for refusing to have the shots. There also are questions over whether the vaccine is still effective because of the development of more powerful strains of the virus in recent years.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson has estimated it could take up to 5 million doses to vaccinate people who are at risk of anthrax exposure, including laboratory, postal and emergency workers. But there is only one plant that manufactures the vaccine in the U.S., and it reportedly is in financial trouble.

The Centers for Disease Control's current plan for dealing with a smallpox outbreak calls for containing the disease with mass vaccinations in the region affected. The federal government has ordered 209 million doses of the vaccine, just in case. But the Bush administration is currently weighing a recommendation from a scientific panel to vaccinate only 15,000 "first responders" - the health care and law enforcement workers who would deal with an outbreak. Other federal officials say the vaccinated first responders should expand to 500,000 people. Others argue that the vaccine should at least be made available to the general public, if not required. But the risk for complications and adverse reactions from smallpox vaccine is relatively high, causing some to question whether it's worth making some people ill to guard against an attack that may never come.