Don't be too scared by panicky Chicken Littles worrying about bio-weapons... this is one of the more informed articles I've seen.
Of all the hypothetical nightmare scenarios involving future waves of terrorism on U.S. soil, the threat of a biological attack is perhaps the most frightening. If successful, it would be hard to detect at first, then still harder to contain. Even after the initial attack, more people, and more cities, would continue to become infected. As one paper on the subject puts it: "When used effectively in this way, biological weapons have an area coverage which makes them equivalent to nuclear weapons as weapons of mass destruction."
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But while the threat seems all too possible, the way in which diseases such as anthrax, plague, or small pox can be turned into weapons is largely misunderstood, and the likelihood of their successful deployment by terrorists is much smaller than recent press accounts would have you believe. To get a better handle on the true parameters of the threat, I tracked down Dave Franz, who heads up the chemical and biological defense division of the Southern Research Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and who inspected Iraqi weapons facilities during the early 1990s.
According to Franz, pulling off a successful biological attack, while certainly conceivable, would be exceedingly difficult because there are so many possible points of failure: production, delivery, effectiveness, weather.
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Remember, biological agents are living germs that are cultivated in solutions. Drying them without killing them is a very tough thing to do, although it has been done by both American and Russian military scientists in massively funded bioweapons programs that ceased operations in the 1960s and 1990s, respectively. Iraq also had a bioweapons program, which produced mostly liquid agents. Perhaps some further solace can be found in the relative failure of that program. "I've been in their facilities, and I've seen data from their field trials," says Franz, "and it was not impressive at all." Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult also failed to develop effective biological weapons, despite being scientifically savvy and having access to millions of dollars.
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Beyond production, there are also hurdles involved with trying to actually infect a population. Contaminating a city's water supply, for instance, would require amounts of biological agents orders of magnitude greater than an equally deadly atmospheric release -- quantities that would be hard to produce and easily detected. Even if someone could get a few tons of an agent into a reservoir or a lesser amount into a water main, the attack would likely be thwarted by regular water treatment plants or the ubiquitous presence of chlorine in the water system, which would kill most of the germs in question. Of course, germs also could be packed into some sort of bomb or missile, but the explosion would destroy most of the bacteria or virus. In a best-case scenario, Franz reports, no more than 3 percent would remain active.
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In 1993, when Aum Shinrikyo members tried to spray anthrax from the top of an eight-story building in Tokyo using a steam-generating device, the attempt resulted in nothing more than gelatinous glops collecting on the sidewalk below.
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Thus, the most viable alternative is the aerosol powder route. A terrorist organization would have to first figure out a way to manufacture or obtain such a substance (with very slim chances of success). Then, "even after you disseminate something in perfect particle size," Franz explains, "it still has its greatest hurdle to cross." Namely, the weather, with all of its vagaries. Besides the aforementioned sunlight problem, there are thermal drafts that could lift the particles high into the atmosphere or gusts of wind that could otherwise disperse them. Given such a gauntlet, a smart terrorist would choose the sturdiest germ he could find: anthrax. Although anthrax is quite lethal, it's not contagious, unlike the pathogens for smallpox and plague. Yet those more contagious pathogens are less likely to survive the trek to a victim's lungs. And instead of a gas mask with a charcoal filter -- as you would need with a chemical agent -- just four or five folds of a handkerchief held over your mouth and nose may provide enough protection to defend against infection from such pathogens.
It's natural to fear a biological attack right now, given all that's happened in the past few weeks. But understanding the difficulties and the low chance of such an attack's success should help us all breathe a little bit easier.
business2.com
BTW, Zoltan, you moron, ICBM's are not really the delivery mechanism du jour for bioweapons. And if they were, a high-level airburst would be a really f***ing stupid way to stop the spread of lethal biological agents. Of course, on a trans-Arctic launch maybe only Canada would be wiped out.
Meanwhile, I think a terrorist who wandered onto an island stuffed with anthrax and tried digging some up would be a pretty self-limiting threat, don't you think? Maybe he'd survive to get some live (leaky, rusty) barrels full of spores back to his base... well, maybe. I'm sure his colleagues would be delighted, too. LOL, those Taliban caves are particularly well-equipped for sterile biological work.
The Telegraph, BTW, is a right-wing rag which barely deserves the title of 'quality' press. It's owned by Conrad Black, an unpleasant RW near-Zionist tax avoider. HIs good points are being Canadian and not being Murdoch. |
