Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, William Broad. Simon and Schuster, $27, pp 382. ISBN 0 684 87158 0. Rating: ★★★★
In 1984 the Baghwan Shree cult used Salmonella typhimurium to infect salads in 10 restaurants in the small Oregon town of The Dalles. About a thousand people became ill; 751 were confirmed to have salmonella, making it the largest outbreak in Oregon's history.
Two women leaders of the cult who fled to Germany were extradited back to the United States in 1986, tried, and convicted of attempted murder by causing the salmonella outbreak. Both were released after serving four years in a federal prison, but fled again to Europe before state charges could be brought against them.
The Baghwan Shree's attack kicks off this well researched and comprehensive book on biowarfare. The book is the result of a three year investigation by Judith Miller, a contributor to the New York Times since 1977, Stephen Engelberg, a reporter on national security for over a decade and now investigations editor for the New York Times, and William Broad, a science writer for the New York Times since 1983. As they say, the book points to “germs as the weapon of the 21st century.”
Germs continues with a history of the US germ development programme at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and the work of Nobel prize winner Joshua Lederberg, the founder of microbial genetics and gene transplantation, which led to the “weaponising” of existing strains of bacteria. Engineered resistance to antibiotics created “superbugs.”
Both the United States and the former Soviet Union now entered a deadly new biowarfare competition. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972, signed by the United States, Soviet Union, and more than 100 other nations, did not stop the Soviet Union from cheating on a massive scale. The accident at a military compound in Sverdlovsk in 1979, when a cloud of anthrax was released causing from 68 to 105 deaths, gave the show away. Final proof was confirmed when one Soviet scientist, Vladimir Pasechnik, defected to Britain in 1989, and another, Ken Alibek, to the United States in 1992.
Chapters on Saddam Hussein's biowarfare programme, the Aum Shinrikyo cult's unsuccessful dozen or more attempts to attack using anthrax and botulinum toxin from 1990 to 1995, and the enormous Soviet biowarfare establishment Biopreparat make compelling reading.
President Bill Clinton was greatly impressed by The Cobra Event, a novel by Richard Preston. It is the story of a mad scientist's determination to thin the world's population by infecting New York City with a designer pathogen. At a closed meeting of officials from the United States, Canada, Britain, and Japan, convened by the Clinton Administration in 1995, retired microbiologist William Patrick, with years of experience at Fort Detrick, described how easily a terrorist could make a lethal culture of Francisella tularensis in a garage, and disperse it. He ended, “My conclusion today is not if terrorists will use a biological weapon but when and where.”
The authors of Germs write that American intelligence officials briefly considered the possibility that the West Nile virus, reported in various parts of the United States in the past couple of years, had been unleashed against America as part of a biological attack.
After finishing the book, one wonders whether this is science fiction or whether it is for real. The authors answer that question: “We conclude that the threat of germ weapons is real and rising, driven by scientific discoveries and political upheavals around the world.”
In light of the recent anthrax attacks in Florida, New York, and Washington, I must agree. I would add only that this book is definitely not bedtime reading.