BioWarfare and Cyber Warfare a new Kind Of War: Biowarfare And Info warfare
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3.2Aum Shinrikyo – Japanese CultJohn Sopko and his colleagues on the staff of the U.S. Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations found that despite the Japanese cult’s ineptitude there was plenty of reason to take notice. In a report presented in 1996 at one of a series of Senate hearings on terrorism, they wrote that the cult, which had more than 40,000 members in Japan and Russia and one billion dollars in assets (higher than the $300 million mentioned above), had recruited hundreds of scientists to assist with its avowed purpose of plunging the United States and Japan into a war of Armageddon from which the cult would arise as the supreme power in Japan.5 The cult also had a large biological weapons program, the precise extent of which remains unexplored to this day. There is an Aum laboratory - now sealed - that was devoted to biological agents, which has not yet been fully investigated. As early as 1990 they were trying to aerosolize botulinus toxin. It is believed they had anthrax as well. In 1991, Asahara led an expedition to Zaire to obtain samples of the Ebola virus. It can only be assumed that they had progressed since then, but how far they got no one knows. The Japanese cult is now pretty much out of action. The concern is that new groups will look at Aum Shinrikyo’s activities, try to copycat and outdo them. Compared with Sarin gas, biological agents might look a lot easier to work with in terms of access to the material, the level of expertise needed, and rather importantly, the higher effectiveness as fatal weapons.
3.3Anthrax As BioweaponAnthrax, a disease of cattle and sheep caused by Bacillus anthracis, can also kill humans. B. anthracis is a rod-shaped microbe that grows in soil, where it can be ingested by sheep, cows, horses, and goats. That is why anthrax is labeled as a veterinary disease, and why those most likely to contract it work with animals or animal products such as wool. If growing conditions deteriorate, the bacteria form microscopic spores, which can remain dormant but still lethal for decades. In the worst known anthrax outbreak, at least 66 people died when spores were released from a bioweapon plant in Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1979. The cutaneous or external form of the disease, which sometimes strikes people who handle infected fleeces, causes unpleasant sores. Animal studies indicate that cutaneous anthrax can be caused by as few as 10 spores. The pneumonic form is far more serious, killing more than 90 per cent of its victims if left untreated. The key to triggering the second form of the disease is to create and disperse spores containing particles of exactly the right size, between 1 and 5 microns, to ensure that they are retained in the lungs. Evidence to date indicates that inhalation anthrax almost never spreads from person to person because infection seems to require thousands of spores. But as few as 8,000 spores per person reliably causes a lethal infection. The spores cross the epithelial lining of the lungs and travel to the lymph nodes, where they germinate, multiply, and then spread to the other tissues, releasing toxins as they go. The first symptoms include vomiting, fever, a choking cough and labored breathing. Antibiotics can cure patients in the earlier stages of the disease. Without antibiotics, death from haemorrhage, respiratory failure or toxic shock follows within a few days. A U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) report emphasizes that, for the most part, transforming B. anthracis into a weapon is a low-tech procedure. It also notes that on a clear, calm night, a light plane - similar to the one that crashed into the White House in 1994 - flying over Washington, DC, carrying 100 kilograms of anthrax spores and equipped with a crop sprayer, could deliver a fatal dose to up to three million people.6 Making an anthrax weapon capable of murder on this scale is not a trivial undertaking. But while it may be much more difficult than building a fertilizer bomb, the problems are far from insurmountable. The tricky part is not culturing the agent. Indeed, growing B. anthracis is hardly more difficult than growing sourdough starter. But processing the crude colony into a form suitable for dispersal is another matter. Turning bacteria into spores, the only form hardy and stable enough to be spread, requires the tricky step of shocking the bacteria with heat or chemicals without killing them. A project of this complexity would require months of systematic effort, the practical engineering skills of a clever backyard inventor, and luck. These barriers, however, are not impossibly high. Basic microbiology skills - techniques an undergraduate studying the subject would be taught - should be sufficient to isolate B. anthracis from cattle pasture in areas where the disease is endemic, such as small areas of the U.S., and larger tracts of land in Russia and South Africa. Using this as the starter culture, a terrorist with a 100-liter culture vessel - about the size of a home fish tank - could in a few days brew up several kilograms of crude slurry containing billions of spores. Spores tend to clump. Yet the ideal size of particles must be between one and five microns to enter the lungs and trigger inhalation anthrax. It is not easy to get a sprayer to dispense such a fine mist. The particles have to be dried somehow. Drying the slurry would be tricky, though not impossible. Freeze-drying - a procedure in which material is frozen and put under a vacuum to remove water, and which is used on a small scale throughout the biotechnology industry - could be one option. The slurry then would have to be adjusted to the right size. Grinding the slurry powder into particles of the desired diameter would provide the greatest challenge, mainly because of the risk of contamination. Indeed, the most likely glitch all round is that the terrorists would become the first victims, or that they infect their neighbors and give the game away. A case in point is the best known (or worst known depending on which perspective you take) anthrax outbreak from a bioweapon plant in Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1979. At least 66 people died from the incident. To be used as a weapon, the particles would also have to be loaded into a canister for spraying over targets. To be sure the preparation would work, the isolate should be tested for virulence, the particle size measured and perhaps the sprayer field tested with a non-pathogenic bacterium. All the while the whole operation has to stay clandestine and avoid detection. The current U.S. postal anthrax cases have not changed one crucial reality: turning pathogens into weapons of mass destruction is still a very difficult task. As far as intelligence agencies can tell, the group that has put the most effort into bioterror was Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult. They too, went through several futile attempts. In April 1990, members drove an automobile outfitted to disseminate botulinum toxin around Japan’s Parliament building. In June, 1993, they tried to disrupt the Royal wedding of Japan’s crown prince by spreading botulinum toxin in a similar way. They also tried, for four successive days the same month to spread anthrax from a rooftop in Tokyo. All they had was nine failures in nine attempts. For Aum Shinrikyo who has a war chest of about $300 million, half a dozen laboratories and experienced biologists to fail so miserably can only attest to the difficulty in deploying biological weapons to cause mass casualties. But the U.S. postal anthrax cases have shown for the first time in history, some person or group seems to have found an effective way to spread highly toxic anthrax spores efficiently enough to kill and sicken people. And a poorly equipped and poorly informed public health system is now struggling to figure out the basics – how spores do their damage, how many it takes, how they are transmitted? |