Little Shop of Horrors --- part two of a three-part series on emerging biological threats…

Silent killers, biochemical weapons transform nature into an instrument of war. Now everyone wants the deadly brews.

IBiochemical warfare is as old as creation. It is nature's gift to the weak, the vulnerable and the cunning against threats, real or perceived. Millions of years of evolution have armed legions of plants, insects, fish, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates with the means to neutralize enemies with vile-smelling, bad-tasting, paralyzing, or lethal substances. This is survival of the fittest at its Darwinian best.

Nature, however, pales in comparison with human inventiveness. Savage concoctions brewed in the laboratory can spread disease, make the air foul and unbreathable, seed clouds with substances that turn rain into liquid death. With unparalleled perversity, scientists have bred mosquitoes that carry yellow fever, malaria and dengue. Secret labs have produced fleas infected with bubonic plague, spawned ticks bloating with tularemia and Colorado spotted fever, and sired houseflies tainted with cholera, anthrax and dysentery.

"And we've only just begun," says H. J. "Jack" McGeorge, head of a Virginia-based international security research agency. The face of war is changing in a manner unimaginable even ten years ago. The next two decades are likely to witness the global use of biochemical weapons in conflicts of all sizes." The rationale, says McGeorge, a munitions expert and a former Secret Service technical specialist, is that "the use of such weapons will not win a war but will prevent the user from losing it."

Equally frightening, McGeorge adds, is the ease with which biochemical weapons can be acquired. "There's a poison in every cauldron. These scourges are now available not only to major powers but to developing nations as well." A 1985 US Defense Department report listed 14 countries known to possess a biochemical arsenal --- about ten more than had been anticipated. The number now exceeds 40. Strong evidence exists that 15 to 20 other nations are shopping around for raw materials. Some may already be stockpiling these ready-to-deploy weapons of mass destruction.

Biomedical science is also lending a helping hand. The same technology that has led to dramatic cures is now helping produce new horrors that can be easily piggy-backed on the latest delivery systems. Genetic engineering is further refining the art of killing with the development of "designer diseases" for which there is no known cure. Even the means to alter and manipulate human behavior and thought are now at hand.

No one knows how primitive man waged biochemical war. One can safely speculate that flinging excrement --- a strategy still observed among primates --- might have satisfied our ancestors' aggressive drive, not to mention their need for self-statement. Homo sapiens has since refined the art of mudslinging but the message is the same.

During the Siege of Kaffa, in 1347, the Mongols hurled the bodies of plague victims over the walls of the Genoese defenders. Genoese ships then carried the disease back to Europe where the Black Death promptly erupted. In 18th century North America, British military leaders, among them Jeffrey Amherst, offered blankets infected with smallpox to native Americans. This act of benevolence cost thousands of Indian lives.

In 1925, seven years after the end of the Great War --- during which chemical weapons were indiscriminately used by all sides --- an international agreement known as the Geneva Protocol prohibited the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons --- but not production or stockpiling. The Protocol did not prevent the French from dropping mustard-filled bombs in Morocco, nor did the Italians shy away from deploying mustard gas in the 1935-36 war against Ethiopia. Also in the thirties, the Japanese used biological weapons to spread plague and famine against Chinese civilian populations. They also tested biological agents on tethered prisoners.

In 1939, in search of deadlier, swifter poison, the Germans also invented two nerve gases --- Tabun and Sarin --- colorless, almost odorless, capable of penetrating the skin and causing death in less than two minutes. Deterred because the Allies also possessed chemical weapons, the Germans did not use theirs against Allied forces in WWII. They used them instead to murder millions in Nazi death camps. Sarin will also be remembered in a deadly Tokyo subway gas attack.

At war's end in 1945, the Soviets seized large stocks of nerve agents, as well as a fully equipped Tabun factory, which they promptly transferred to the USSR.

During the fifties and sixties, military research produced still meaner nerve agents, including the "V" series, produced by both the US and the Soviets and dreaded because of its supertoxicity and persistence. The fifties also witnessed the development of mentally incapacitating chemicals.

Tear gases and herbicides (defoliants) were also widely used by the US in Vietnam. Arguably, these were "nonlethal" and authorized under the Geneva Protocol. Of all the chemicals used to strip the tropical forest bare, the one that is most bitterly remembered is the dioxin-laced Agent Orange which sent vegetation on a self-destructive binge. Plants literally exploded, carving a surrealistic landscape out of a now rotting, foul-smelling jungle. The debate over the effect of Agent Orange on humans, particularly its cancer-causing properties, goes on.

This is the dawning of the age of weapons unparalleled in their viciousness, tenacity and ability to penetrate even the most carefully constructed defenses.

"There are no effective safeguards against biological weapons. For one thing, you must know what you are defending against," McGeorge explains. "Modern technology, willfully and often unwittingly, is producing so large and disparate a variety of biological agents that a uniform defense becomes impossible to achieve. Vaccination has long been explored as a deterrent against viral attacks; yet how do we determine which viruses to vaccinate against? How do we develop vaccines to protect us from new viruses --- those spawned by natural mutations or and those given life in laboratories?"

As genetic engineering research continues, so grows the capability of biochemical weapons to become more fearsome, less detectable and virtually invincible. Nor have the nations now engaged in an escalating biochemical arms race fully measured the impact such weapons would have on a compromised and increasingly less resilient environment. Luckily, for now, genetic research is difficult, risky and complex. It may in fact be easier to build crude but effective nuclear devices than to manufacture and deploy biological weapons. Guided perhaps by the horror they inspire, highly sophisticated biological weapons, some scientists insist, will remain drawing-board concepts rather than battle-ready tools. On the other hand, it might also be easier to build a large arsenal of biochemical agents than to maintain a huge nuclear stockpile.

Speculations notwithstanding, virtually all developed nations are funding research in areas that can readily be adapted to the production of biochemical weapons.

"How do you know what's going on in a lab?" asks McGeorge. "Most nations have dozens of them. It is impossible to know whether a lab is working on a cure or packaging a disease." This conundrum has thwarted all attempts to reach a comprehensive ban on biochemical weapons. Such research is invariably tied to "national security" or justified as "medical science." So genetic engineering research goes on. "Designer" genes are spliced to alter harmless organisms by making them lethal, to increase the lethality of certain organisms, or to produce organisms resistant to diseases such as cholera, yellow fever and typhus.

At first, we used our teeth. Then we picked up a rock, a bough, a bone. We felt a power surging through our fists, and the carnage began. We have come a long way. And to keep the momentum, we sow new killing fields with fresh seeds of folly.

Known to have

Bulgaria
Burma
China
Egypt
Ethiopia
France
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Libya
Russia
Somalia
Syria
Taiwan
USA
Vietnam

Thought to have

Cuba
Czech Republic
Germany
Hungary
Laos
North Korea
Poland
Romania
Sudan
Serbia
Turkey

Actively seeking

Argentina
Brazil
Chile
India
Jordan
Pakistan
Peru
Saudi Arabia
South Africa
South Korea
Thailand

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