Bioweapons: a potential threat of mass destruction

ECONOMIC CONFIDENCE matters, but not as much as confidence that the government can protect its citizens from plots that had once been the stuff of novels, science fiction and Hollywood movies! American intelligence agencies ongoing investigations have revealed that bioweapons have emerged as a global threat like the barbaric attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. There is need to try and prevent bioweapons proliferation.

The biotechnology holds the promise of a great future but like any other technological breakthrough, it is a double-edged sword. Biotechnology could be panacea for eliminating hunger and disease from the globe but the same biotechnology tools can be used in a deadly manner against the mankind. Modern technologies that add efficiency, power and wonder to our lives inevitably deliver the same benefits to evildoers. According to Bill Joy, the chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, "the tragedy of September 11 was nothing like what might be possible with biological weaponry.'' In his forthcoming book titled Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, Joy has predicted that the coming age of biotech will undoubtedly make programmable bacteria and viruses more accessible — to doctors, business and bio-terrorists. "The things which we are worrisome about haven't happened yet." And having in mind all these, Harvard biologists, Matthew Meselson and Leading, have suggested a convention making any individual involved in the production of biological weapons liable as an international criminal, prosecutable anywhere, as is already the case for pirates and airplane hijackers. This proposal would permit countries to research and plan defensive work against biological warfare agents.

Urgency to stop possible terrorist attacks in future with bioweapons has added importance to the proposed fifth Biological Weapons Convention Conference in November at Geneva. At the conference 140 countries, which have ratified the convention, will discuss a 210-page draft protocol document and declaration affirming the treaty that would account for threats that have emerged with the revelation of terrorist intent to explore the possibility to use biological weapons.

Easy availability

America is worried more about biological arms than about nuclear or chemical ones. Unlike either of the other two, biological weapons combine maximum destruction and easy availability. Nuclear arms have great killing capacity but are hard to get; chemical weapons are easy to get but lack such killing capacity; biological agents have both qualities. A 1993 study by the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. concluded that a single airplane delivering 100 kilograms of anthrax spores — a dormant phase of a bacillus that multiplies rapidly in the body, producing toxins and rapid haemorrhaging — by aerosol on a clear, calm night over the Washington D.C. area could kill between one million and three million people, 300 times as many fatalities as if the plane had delivered sarin gas in inanities ten times larger.

According to the journal Science, the following are the major potential weapons of mass destruction in bioweapon category.

Old standbys:

Anthrax — A staple of bioweapons arsenals for decades, the bacterium bacillus anthracis might be engineered to resist antibiotics.

Plague — In an infamous episode in World War II, the Japanese Army unleashed fleas infected with the Yersinia pestic bacterium on Chinese forces in Manchuria. The attack backfired, inflicting heavy tolls on both sides.

Q fever — This disease is transmitted by the highly infectious and heat-resistant Coxiella burnetii rickettsiae. Not usually fatal, Q fever could be used primarily as an incapacitant.

Tularemia — One of the most infectious bacteria, Francisella tularensis would kill one out of five people in a hypothetical scenario in which 50 kilograms of the weaponised agent were released 2 km upwind from a city.

Small pox — Eradicated from the wild in 1980, variola major is known to exist in only two restricted laboratories in Russia and the United States. Experts don't dismiss the unlikely scenario of theft or diversion of these stocks.

New possibilities:

Aflatoxin — U.S. intelligence reports in 1998 suggested that Iraq was attempting to weaponise aflatoxin, a protein produced by a mould that grows on peanuts and other crops. Afllatoxin is highly toxic for human beings.

Ebola-influenza hybrid — a flu strain equipped with the haemorrhagic proteins of Ebola, presumably stills a fantasy, would be a fearsome weapon.

Tools of assassination

Old standbys:

Botulinum toxin — the most poisonous substance known, a single gram of this crystalline toxin from the bacterium clostridium botulinum, evenly dispersed and inhaled, would kill more than one million people.

Ricin — In 1978, Soviet agents used ricin, a lethal toxin extracted from the castor bean, to murder Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in London.

New possibilities:

RNAi — Double-standard "interference" RNA might be tailored to latch onto specific messenger RNA sequences, thus virtually silencing any gene.

Saxitoxin — Eating shellfish contaminated by this alkaloid neurotoxin, produced by dinoflagellates, can lead to paralysis and death.

Substance P — An aerosolised version of this neurotransmitter could be far more toxic than the potent chemical weapons sarin and VX.

Great innovators

Biological weapons are relatively easy to make. Innovations in biotechnology have obviated many of the old problems in handling and preserving biological agents, and many have been freely available for scientific research. Nuclear weapons are not likely to be the choice for non-state terrorist groups. But now unthinkable is possible. Terrorists are really proving to be great innovators. They require huge investments and targetable infrastructure, and are subject to credible threats by the United States. An aggrieved group that decides to kill huge numbers of innocent people will find the mission easier to accomplish with anthrax than with a nuclear explosion.

Even though biological weapons have received less attention than the other weapon systems they probably pose the greatest danger to humanity. Chemical weapons were noticed more in the past decade, especially since they were used by Iraq against Iranian troops in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war and against Kurdish civilians in 1988. Chemicals are far more widely available than nuclear weapons because the technology required to produce them is far simpler, and large numbers of countries have undertaken chemical weapons programmes. But chemical weapons are not really in the same class as other weapons of mass destruction, in the sense of ability to inflict a huge number of civilian casualties in a single strike.

The ballistic missile defence system (also known as NMD) will roughly cost about $60 billions. The American Congressional Budget Office recently estimated the required amount for limited option, which will not counter other modes like biological weapons attack. Until recently, only half a billion dollars less than two-tenths of one per cent of the defence budget and less than $2 a head for every American went to chemical and biological defence, while nearly $4 billions was spent annually on ballistic missile defence.

Thousands of scientists and technicians are busy to design and produce weapons loaded with deadly microbes, such as anthrax. In 1992 the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted that the Soviet had run this vast enterprise, called Biopreparat. It establishes the point that Soviets had clearly ignored the ban on offensive weapons in the Biological and Toxin Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which the Soviets had ratified two decades earlier.

Bioweapon experts say the entire Biological Weapon Convention could also become a lost opportunity. A quarter century after coming into force, the treaty remains the weakest of the international arms-control agreements. The problem: it has no mechanism for checking whether states/parties are obeying the ban on developing biological weapons. Other agreements on nuclear and chemical weapons have established technical systems for monitoring compliance. But the Biological Weapons Convention remains little more than an agreement based on trust.

Monitoring compliance

The difficulties of monitoring Biological Weapons Convention compliance came into focus after the Gulf War, when the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) went to work in Iraq to ensure the elimination of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. With Iraqi officials grudgingly cooperating from 1991 to 1995, the UNSCOM team found loads of circumstantial evidence — facilities with a high capacity for fermentation inconsistent with peaceful purposes as well as irreconcilable records — all pointing to a broad, clandestine programme aimed at "weaponising" bacteria, viruses, and toxins. Despite UNSCOM's sweeping mandate to investigate suspicious activity anywhere and anytime, it wasn't until a son-in-law of Hussein defected in 1995 with damning inside information that the commission was able to further pressure Iraq into acknowledging the extent of its offensive biological weapons programme.

We need to have a radar screen to identify spots and follow them up. Formally known as the Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention, the measure would include mandatory investigation of facilities suspected of contravening the treaty as well as visits to declared facilities that are not under suspicion, plus export controls on organisms and technologies that might be used to develop biological weapons.

The draft protocol of 210-page document would, among other things, allow a future protocol body to mount random transparency visits at declared facilities in precisely defined categories, including maximum containment (bio safety level 4) labs, vaccine, facilities, biodefence shops, and plant pathogen containment laboratories. If a facility were suspected of contravening the treaty, the protocol would permit challenge investigations, in which teams of up to 30 investigators would be allowed to remain on site for 84 hours for a lab visit, or 30 days to investigate an alleged field release of a bioweapon.

It is ironical that partially U.S. has been responsible to this state of affairs. It has been consistently and strongly objecting to the inclusion of verification procedure in the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty of 1972, which would have given teeth to Biological Weapons Convention. The U.S. is also sparring with its allies over the procedures for facility visits and mandatory declarations of potential dual-use organisms and technologies. Driven by the concerns of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, the Bush administration is worried about the inadvertent leakage of trade secrets — vaccines in development, for example. The administration also fears that visits to government labs could compromise national security.

In all, 140 countries have ratified the convention since it was hammered out almost 30 years ago. But the treaty contains no provision for verification, a loophole that allowed the Soviet Union to operate dozens of germ-warfare facilities in the 1970s and 80s. Attempts to develop a verification plan began in 1995. It was hoped that the latest draft, released in March 2001, would address the concerns of many participants, including the United States.

The United States is developing a range of measures to counter bioweapons and seems intent on relying on these defences rather than backing the convention. But Matthew Meselson, a molecular geneticist at Harvard University and an adviser to the U.S. Government on chemical and biological weapons issues, warns that such an approach could augment suspicions that the United States has something to hide. "There is a huge cost if we just walk away and say we'll look out for ourselves,'' he says, particularly after the trauma of September 11 attack. Since in the coming months, years and perhaps decades, America and the world must prepare for a long fight. But it requires radical thinking, and even sacrificing some commercial advantage. Enemy's goal is clear — to instil fear and confusion. To sustain this fight, Biological Weapons Convention ratification of draft protocol, which incorporates some verification and export control mechanism of potential biological weapon, will go a long way to pre-empt disaster of possible bioweapons attack by any terrorist group.

DEVENDRA MISHRA

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