Germs Against Man: Bioterror: a brief history

National Review, Dec 3, 2001 by Anthony Daniels

When, in 1980, the World Health Organization announced the eradication of smallpox as a disease, the plot of a thriller came to me in an instant.

It was set a few years later, when mankind's herd immunity to smallpox had declined and much of the population had never been immunized against the disease. A highly intelligent Muslim fanatic, disguising his true beliefs, trains as a virologist, and gains entry into one of the two laboratories in the world still to hold stocks of the smallpox virus. He steals the virus with the intention of converting the world to Islam by the threat of starting an epidemic, his organization having destroyed simultaneously the small number of regional laboratories in which the world's stocks of vaccine are held, as well as the laboratories capable of producing the vaccine.

After the destruction of these stocks, the fanatic's organization demonstrates the reality of the threat in a small country (let us call it, for the sake of argument, Switzerland). He then threatens that, unless hundreds of thousands turn to Mecca at a certain time and date, he will release the virus into New York, Washington, London, and Paris.

The CIA manages to capture him, but cannot persuade him to withdraw his threat, which his minions will carry out unless he tells them not to. An agent has the idea of fixing a tiny loudspeaker in his ear while he is asleep, down which is played the voice of Allah-speaking, of course, in classical Arabic-telling him to desist. There is thus a happy ending.

I never wrote the book. And although I harbored inchoate doubts about the hubris of having declared a viral disease defeated once and for all, the plot of the thriller that entered my head was conceived more as a pleasantly frightening entertainment for bored airline passengers than as genuine prophecy. I didn't think I'd live to see the day when- as happened recently-the value of the shares in a company local to where I live doubled overnight because it received orders for millions of doses of smallpox vaccine. Biological warfare was essentially a bogey, like the witches in the fairy tales of my childhood: frightening to contemplate but known ultimately to be unreal.

This is strange, because biological warfare has been with us a long time. The ancients poisoned the wells of their enemies with the bodies of those who had died of epidemic disease as a matter of course. One account of the beginning of the Black Death in Europe-which ultimately killed up to a third of the population-is that it started with an act of biological warfare. The Tartars were besieging the Genoan trading outpost of Caffa (now Feodosia) on the Crimean coast in 1346, when plague broke out among them. Turning a catastrophic epidemic disease into a weapon, the Tartars lobbed their dead by means of catapults over the walls, and the Genoans, soon plagued by plague, took to their ships and returned to Genoa: from whence the Black Death soon engulfed the whole of Europe.

Of course, there are reasons to doubt whether, in the long run, the Tartars' attempt at biological warfare made much difference. The plague had already spread across Asia from China, and would have spread to Europe in any case: but what is not in doubt is that this is the kind of thing our ancestors did, without much of a qualm.

The British used blankets to spread smallpox among the Indians of their North American colonies, knowing that the victims were highly susceptible to a disease against which they had no natural resistance. In 1763, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander of the British Army, wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet, stationed on the Ohio frontier, that "you will do well to try to [infect] the Indians by means of blankets as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." Smallpox had been an unwitting instrument of the Spanish conquest of America, too. The epidemic raged in the Incan Empire, for example, weakening it drastically shortly before the arrival of Pizarro. The Spanish were well aware of the relationship between epidemic disease and their conquest, though as far as is known they never deliberately spread disease as an instrument of war.

Until the germ theory of disease-and the acquisition of precise knowledge of microbiological organisms-the possibilities of biological warfare were necessarily limited. Once man had eaten of the culture of the petri dish of knowledge, however, it soon became clear that the prospect before him was not only that of disease eradication but of disease dissemination. Ineffectual clauses against the deliberate spread of epidemics were added to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, but in the First World War came the first belligerent use of the new bacteriological knowledge, when the Germans tried to infect Romanian sheep, destined for export to Russia, with anthrax. The French likewise tried to infect German horses with glanders; but biological weapons played a very small part in the war compared to chemical weapons.