Fighting Bioterrorism | Introduction
Most twentieth-century Americans found bioterrorism—the deliberate release of disease-causing microorganisms with the aim of causing devastating epidemics—unthinkable, perhaps even more so than nuclear war. Along with chemical warfare, biological warfare was forbidden by the 1925 Geneva Convention. More “civilized” nations regarded countries known to have tested biological weapons, such as Japan during World War II, with horror. To be sure, during the 1950s and 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union developed bioweapons programs— purely, they said, for defense in case the other side used such terrible weapons first. In 1969, however, President Richard Nixon formally ended the U.S. bioweapons program, and in 1972, the United Nations established the international Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, in which all signatory nations pledged never to develop, produce, or stockpile such weapons. Both the United States and Russia signed it.
Confidence that no one would ever dare to use bioweapons began to be shaken during the late 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet government in 1991, Ken Alibek (Kanatjan Alibekov), former deputy director of the Soviet bioweapons program, revealed that the program had continued long after 1972. Rumors circulated that some of the Soviet Union’s bioweapons stock had fallen into the hands of smaller nations, such as Iraq and North Korea. The Clinton administration carried out simulation exercises for smallpox and plague attacks on civilian populations in 1999 and 2000, and Congress budgeted more than $1.5 billion specifically for bioterrorism preparedness in fiscal year 2000, more than double the amount allotted in the previous year.
The idea that disgruntled individuals or small groups as well as rogue governments might employ bioterror weapons also began to circulate around the start of the new century. Some writers called bioweapons “the poor man’s atomic bomb” because they were easier and cheaper to produce than nuclear weapons. Experts pointed out that these smaller groups might not be deterred by factors that might limit the activities of national governments, such as fear of massive retaliation.
The most popular proposed bioterror microbe was the bacterium that causes anthrax, a disease usually confined to hoofed animals such as cattle and sheep but able to infect humans, often with fatal results. Anthrax bacteria were appealing because under harsh conditions they encase themselves in protective cocoons, forming spores that are almost impossible to destroy by methods that normally kill bacteria. Dried and ground into powder, such spores would be fairly easy for terrorists to distribute, and they would revert to their disease-causing form once they entered a human or animal body. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, letters or parcels supposedly containing anthrax spores appeared so often that an article in the July 1999 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called sending them a “hot new hobby.” There were more than 150 anthrax incidents between March 1998 and July 1999 alone.
Every one of them, however, was a hoax. No one, it seemed, had actually been both willing and able to mail the deadly bacteria—and many experts doubted that anyone ever would. Some stressed that preparing and effectively distributing microorganisms as bioweapons required more technical skill and equipment than small groups were likely to possess. Others pointed out that there had been only one documented bioterror attack on American soil: In 1984, followers of cult guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh added salmonella bacteria to restaurant salad bars to sicken citizens in The Dalles, Oregon, so they would not vote in an election that the group wanted to influence. The attack made 751 people mildly ill but caused no deaths.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, therefore, articles containing dire warnings about bioterrorism were matched by an almost equal number expressing powerful skepticism. For instance, W. Seth Carus, senior research professor and bioterrorism specialist at National Defense University, stated in a 1999 New Republic article that “the threat [of bioterrorism] is less compelling and not as imminent as often claimed.” Similarly, Barbara Rosenberg, chair of the Federation of American Scientists Working Group on Biological Weapons, was quoted in June 2001 as claiming that “even those in high places in the military judge bioterror to be a low probability here in the U.S.” Jonathan B. Tucker and Amy Sands, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in July 1999, attributed fear of bioterrorism to government exaggeration reinforced by “an obsessive fascination with catastrophic terrorism” in Hollywood films and popular novels.
Perhaps even more tellingly, most of the media, along with the bulk of the American public, ignored the bioterrorism issue entirely during this period. InfoTrac, a wide-reaching periodical database, cites only seventy articles on the subject between the database’s earliest records in 1980 and the end of August 2001. John R. Hamre, head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., himself was concerned about bioterrorism but admitted in April 2001 that it was “not something that average Americans worry much about.”
Then came the terrorist airplane attacks on New York’s World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—and three weeks later, Bob Stevens, photo editor for a supermarket tabloid in Boca Raton, Florida, entered JFK Medical Center in the nearby city of Atlantis suffering from chills and fever. Emergency room doctors thought he might have meningitis, a brain infection, but Larry Bush, the hospital’s chief of staff and an experienced specialist in infectious diseases, looked at a sample of Stevens’s spinal fluid under a microscope and made a far more startling diagnosis: anthrax. A Florida laboratory confirmed the diagnosis on October 4, and Stevens died a day later. Careful checks of his background and activities showed that there was no way he could have caught the disease naturally. Hours after Stevens’s death, a man who had worked in the same building— the supervisor of the mail room—was admitted to a Miami hospital with what proved to be another case of anthrax. The unthinkable had become not only thinkable but real.
As the anthrax attacks continued and expanded over the next two months, bioterrorism became the year’s third-hottest story, dwarfed only by the World Trade Center disaster and the war in Afghanistan. InfoTrac lists 545 articles about bioterrorism published during October and November alone. After the attacks had spread to major media offices in New York and closed down the office buildings of the U.S. Senate in Washington and had been shown to be spread by something that entered everyone’s home—the mail—even respected NBC news anchorman Tom Brokaw signed off one night by saying, “In Cipro [the antibiotic being used to prevent and treat anthrax] we trust.” Then and later, many opinions were expressed about what was being done or should be done to combat actual and potential bioterror attacks—but skepticism about the likelihood of such attacks was no longer among them.
The fall 2001 anthrax outbreak was a far cry from the apocalyptic scenarios envisioned in movies and government simulations. A mere twenty-one people caught the disease, and only five died. Nonetheless, this handful of individuals changed Americans’ worldview forever because they were far from the only casualties of the still untraced attacks. Also severely stricken were an already-shaky economy, the U.S. postal system, and, perhaps most telling of all, the public’s confidence that “it can’t happen here.” Ruth Levy Guyer and Jonathan D. Moreno wrote in Social Education in March 2002, “The anthrax events have done great physical damage to a small number of individuals. . . . The events have done great psychological damage to many more. Bioweapons were once the stuff of science fiction . . . today they are the realities of contemporary life.”
