FEATURE ARTICLE
The Growing Threat of Biological Weapons
The terrorist threat is very real, and it's about to get worse. Scientists should concern themselves before it's too late
Steven Block
The World Wars
The First World War saw one of the first attempts to use anthrax
during warfare, directed??ineffectively??against animal populations.
Instead, WWI became infamous for its introduction of poisonous
mustard gas, which was used effectively against humans. (By odd
coincidence, WWI also overlapped with a deadly outbreak of
influenza, the Great Pandemic of 1918, which eventually killed more
people than the Great War itself.) International revulsion at the
horrors of WWI led to the signing of the Geneva Protocol of 1925,
which went into force on February 8, 1928, with 29 participating
nations, including the U.S. The treaty contained "A Protocol
for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating gas, and of
Bacteriological Methods of Warfare."
Although the Geneva Protocol didn't expressly forbid the production
and development of biological weaponry, it did ban all use during
war. Disappointingly, neither the U.S. nor Japan ratified the treaty
before the advent of World War II, when anthrax and other bioweapons
were secretly being developed by both countries??as well as by
Germany, the U.S.S.R. and Great Britain. The Japanese and British
bioweapons programs were particularly extensive, but no documented
use of agents ever occurred during combat. This may have been due to
residual respect for the 1925 treaty or, what seems more likely,
from the relative immaturity and associated imperfections of
bioweapons technology.
There were some notorious instances of biological warfare during
this period, however. The Japanese Military Unit 731 at Ping Fan,
Manchuria, experimented extensively with bioweapons, killing
thousands of prisoners of war with anthrax, cholera, plague,
dysentery and other infectious agents. They also released plague on
the Chinese civilian population of Chekiang Province on several
occasions by dropping from airplanes laboratory-grown fleas fed on
infected rats. The Soviets may have deliberately infected German
Panzer troops with tularemia during the Battle of Stalingrad in
1942, by far the costliest battle of WWII, but the ensuing outbreak
soon spread to both sides and resulted in more than 100,000 cases of
the disease.
Unlike the years following WWI, the post-WWII period heard little
public debate concerning the need to limit bioweapons??perhaps owing
to the global preoccupation with nuclear arms that began in 1945.
With the advent of the Cold War, the U.S. biowarfare program (begun
in 1942 and aided by postwar intelligence from the Japanese) went
into overdrive. Over the course of the next 25 years, the U.S. would
quietly develop, test and weaponize at least 10 different biowarfare
agents, including bacteria, viruses and microbe-derived toxins. The
U.S. not only experimented with human disease, but also targeted
economically vital agriculture with fungal weapons such as wheat
rust and rice blast. The Soviets had a program that was every bit a
match for the American one, but concentrated on a different subset
of diseases. Both countries stockpiled plenty of anthrax.
A good deal of effort on both sides went into attacking the problem
of weaponization. Biowarfare agents may be deadly, but they are also
labile and difficult to deliver to the intended target. It took
years of experimentation before the U.S. and Soviet programs
eventually succeeded in developing effective means of stabilization
and distribution??in the form of explosive bomblets or aerosol-spray
weapons that could be delivered by aircraft or ballistic missiles.
Today, the operating principles of such delivery devices are among
the most closely held national secrets. This is entirely
appropriate, given the relative ease with which most other aspects
of the bioweapons problem are tackled.
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