The Broad Issue Of Biological Weapons

New York Times reporters Judith Miller, Stephen Engel berg

, and William Broad have written an excellent book on the broad issue of biological weapons. The book opens with a chilling report on a bioterrorism attack carried out by members of a religious cult in Oregon in 1984.

Although no one died, almost a thousand people became sick. The frantic efforts of doctors and law enforcement officials to determine the nature of the attack or even to determine if it was an attack provide a warning in miniature of the frightening challenges that face the US.

The book's early chapters focus on the history of biological-weapons research during the cold war, revealing considerable detail about an ambitious American program through the 1960s as well as the better-known Soviet efforts.

Even as the US developed a massive nuclear stockpile that should have sufficed as an ultimate deterrent, cold-war dynamics drove the pursuit of various types of germ warfare. Richard Nixon ended such efforts in 1969.

The book also details Saddam Hussein's largely successful efforts to acquire biological weaponry. It explains the great worries his programs caused American policymakers during the Gulf War, when they knew that the US lacked the necessary stockpiles of vaccines and the types of biological agent detectors that would have been essential to protect American troops.

The book bogs down a bit in its middle sections, when it provides more detail than necessary on the 1990s US debates over vaccinating soldiers against anthrax and funding various types of biological-preparedness programs. But this is a minor flaw in the narrative.

The story picks up again as the authors describe how President Clinton became interested in the subject of biological arms.

The final chapters of the book disclose the results of the journalists' best investigative re-porting, detailed in a New York Times story earlier this month as well. In these pages, the authors explain how the US government elected to build mock biological weapons in the 1990s without substantial White House oversight or a fully convincing case that its research was consistent with the 1972 treaty banning the development and stockpiling of biological arms for military purposes.

This is good reporting, even if it falls somewhat short of providing the smoking gun of a treaty violation.How serious a threat is posed by biological arms in the hands of terrorists? Looking over their research, the authors conclude, "The world's response to the growing dangers of germ weapons has fallen far short of what is needed."

The authors are right to call for more research on antidotes to biological agents and improvements in public health systems, but they raise a troubling domestic barrier to such preparedness. "Biodefense, " they warn, "has no natural political constituency in Washington. The military-industrial complex that supports weapons systems has little interest in vaccines and public health."

by: emaly

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