Biological Warfare and Bioterrorism

Biological weapons, bioterrorism and the fear of intentional disease have a long history and are not new thoughts. We knew how to spread disease long before we understood the science behind

Among the older military techniques that can be considered biowarfare is the use of corpses of humans or animals to contaminate wells and other sources of drinking water. While the principal objective was thought to be the denial of clean water to the enemy, a secondary effect was to spread disease among people and animals that consumed the contaminated water.

The earliest recorded account of armies using infectious disease as a weapon is the 1346 siege of the heavily fortified Crimean city of Kaffa, an important trading hub on the Black Sea between Europe and the Far East controlled by the Maritime Republic of Genoa.

The Mongol forces besieging Kaffa suffered a severe natural outbreak of bubonic plague that was killing ‘thousands upon thousands every day’. A contemporary Arabic source estimates 85,000 plague fatalities among the Mongol forces in the Kaffa region during this epidemic.

But the Mongols turned this to their advantage and catapulted the plague-infected corpses of their dead comrades over the city walls to spread the disease to the European traders taking refuge in Kaffa.

The Mongols were skilled siege warriors, and their artillery at Kaffa was likely numerous and sophisticated. The numbers of cadavers hurled into the city could well have been in the thousands. The Mongols’ tactic finally broke the three-year stalemate; the Genoese were crippled by the plague and fled Kaffa by sea back to Europe.

A second well-documented account comes from North America and the wars against the Native Americans. Of the many new diseases that the Europeans brought with them to the New World in the 1700s and 1800s, smallpox was the most feared.

Among Europeans, smallpox epidemics typically had a case fatality rate of 20–40 percent; but among Native Americans, who had not previously been exposed to smallpox and who had not built up immunity towards the disease, fatality rates of 90 percent or higher were common.

In the late 1700s, at Fort Pitt on the Ohio River – in present day Pittsburgh – conditions were extremely crowded. Traders and settlers had been driven in by the hostilities, and smallpox had just broken out. Journal entries, ledgers and other documents from the time indicate that the ranking British officers at the fort met with a delegation from the native Delaware tribe, and handed over smallpox-contaminated sheets and linens from the fort’s hospital under the false pretence of a gift.

A smallpox epidemic is reported to have broken out in the Delaware tribe at this time. Of course, the extent to which the spreading epidemic can be attributed to the blankets is impossible to determine, but the incident is indicative of what appears to be a history of sporadic British and American efforts to infect North American tribes with smallpox.

For most of human history, attempts to transmit infections were rare and clumsy; they probably seldom worked out – and, when they did, they were in all likelihood redundant with natural routes of transmission. Lack of knowledge about infectious diseases and how they’re transmitted prevented rational design of methods of biological attack. This changed in the 20th century.

The revolution in microbiology transformed ignorance about infection into sophisticated understanding. Over the period 1880 to 1900, the microbial basis of infectious disease was proven, the pathogens causing virtually every common bacterial disease of importance were identified and studied, and their mechanisms of transmission worked out. Coupled with new organisational links between the military and sciences, this paved the way for manipulating infection and the systematic design and improvement of biological weapons.

Advances in science were applied to unconventional weapons at an industrial scale for the first time in World War I, and the horrors of gas warfare led to several arms limitation treaties. A key treaty was the League of Nations’ 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of chemical weapons in international armed conflicts.

A prohibition on the use of ‘bacteriological methods of warfare’ was added to the treaty late in the negotiations, almost as an afterthought, because unlike chemistry, there were no indications at the time that biology was being militarised. Yet, shortly after the treaty was signed, the Japanese did exactly that.

They developed a bioweapons programme on a significant scale that included the most atrocious human subject experiments on thousands of Chinese prisoners of war and attacks on civilians with biological agents – actions unique in military history. Most major World War II combatants conducted research on biological weapons, but none of these programmes were on the scale of the Japanese programme.

The post-war nuclear age set a high standard for the next 20 years of biological weapons development; they made it imperative for bioweaponeers to show how pathogens could devastate populations at the same enormous scale as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Post-war American efforts to show that biological warfare could rival nuclear warfare were extensive, and involved laboratory and human subject research into potential pathogens, the industrial production and stockpiling of agents, the manufacture of bombs and spray generators, fitting of airplanes and ships for dispersal, the indoctrination of troops, and large-scale field trials.

Yet, despite the intensive development and testing, and simulations of disease attacks on civilians that grew larger and more elaborate until they verged on reality, biological weapons were neither assimilated into the thinking and planning of the regular military, nor used by the United States or its partners – the United Kingdom and Canada, and, later, Australia.

In a political move that caught the bioweaponeers off guard, the newly elected President Richard Nixon unilaterally renounced biological weapons in 1969, paving the way for the multilateral Biological Weapons Convention, introduced three years later.

The US bioweapon programme was dismantled in the early 1970s, the considerable stockpiles destroyed and the facilities converted. Ironically, it was only after signing the Biological Weapons Convention – the multilateral treaty banning biological weapons – that the Soviet programme began its incredible expansion.

The expansion and redirection of the programme was proposed by a small but very influential group of scientists arguing for exploiting the new field of genetic engineering that was just beginning to emerge in the West. New pathogen properties, such as antibiotic resistance and enhanced stability, were to be engineered directly into pathogens, including agents not on classical bioweapons agent lists. These altered pathogens formed a novel arsenal of weapons that could not be predicted by Western intelligence.

The tightly controlled programme was even more secret than the USSR’s efforts in the realm of nuclear weapons. Rather than expanding the Soviet military biological institutions, the new offensive programme was established in the civilian sphere. Western intelligence services most likely knew about the military biological institutions and kept them under observation, so the better option was to ‘hide’ the new institutions in plain sight.

An entirely new, ostensibly commercial network of institutes, production plants and storage facilities was constructed. Collectively known as ‘Biopreparat’, it worked both sides of the street: it cured diseases and invented new ones.

In the years following the USSR’s collapse, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Programme decommissioned the main production plant and testing site, and transformed the majority of the known Biopreparat facilities into more open research facilities – some of which began international collaborations on peaceful microbial research, including international scientist exchanges.

The three key military institutes involved in the BW programme remain closed to outsiders, and it is not possible to ascertain whether the biological weapons programme has been terminated in its entirety. Russia’s current official position is that no offensive BW programme ever existed in the Soviet Union.

Bioterrorism is a relatively new concept that emerged during the early 1990s in the United States to describe terrorists’ use of biological weapons.

In the last years of the Cold War, a new set of threats posed by rising third-world states and terrorists supported by these states began to be projected by some US security analysts and national security commissions – particularly on the right of the political spectrum and with ties to the Pentagon – and among these threats were terrorists armed with biological weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.

As the Cold War faded, the threat of biological weapons from third-world states and terrorists hostile to the United States began to replace the Soviet threat. Although little credible evidence existed at the time that such states or terrorists would, or even could, resort to biological weapons, the newly perceived threat became the driving force behind US preparedness and biodefence programmes of considerable institutional proportions.

Different assessments of the importance, urgency and scale of the threat were present in the early political debates on bioterrorism. ‘Alarmists’, who included prominent scientific and technical advisers, tended to emphasise the vulnerability of the civilian population, and they would apply their impressive scientific and technical skills to the possibility of “apocalyptic” attacks with natural pathogens and genetically engineered hybrids.

They were less focused on the identities of bioterrorists, and in their interests in pursuing such attacks or their capacities to do so. In contrast, ‘sceptics’ tended to have backgrounds and training in the history, politics and culture of terrorism, and for them, questions of the identity, interests and details of past attackers were the primary questions to ask.

Ultimately, alarmism trumped scepticism and federal funds poured into major new US civilian biodefence programmes.

The ‘Amerithrax’ attacks, as the FBI code-named the anthrax mailings immediately following 9/11, revealed serious shortcomings in US biosecurity, and also raised fears about the growing potential for bioterrorism on American soil.

The threat of bioterrorism became one of the Bush administration’s key security concerns during its two terms in office, and it initiated a series of new regulations, policies and programmes in the early to mid-2000s to strengthen US preparedness against a bioweapon attack.

Concern about the threat of international terrorism coupled with WMD proliferation was also exported from the United States to international security forums and back to capitals around the world following 9/11 and the Amerithrax attacks. Bioterrorism became an international problem requiring a policy response, and counter-offensives materialised in international risk and security strategies.

In Europe, the European Commission launched a programme to respond to the consequences of WMD attacks, and particularly bioterrorism attacks, already within a few weeks of 9/11 and Amerithrax. The European security strategy, drawn up for the first time in 2003, focused heavily on the new threat from WMD and terrorists committed to maximum violence. In parallel, the European Union also adopted a strategy against proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The change in government in the US saw an evolution in US thinking about its response to bioterrorism. The Obama administration announced its first major policy initiative on biosecurity in 2009. While the Bush administration’s efforts had been focused on biodefence, Obama’s National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats was focused on prevention. It emphasised linking deliberate disease outbreaks from bioterrorism attacks with naturally occurring disease outbreaks, to create a more seamless and integrated link across all types of biological threats – echoing what the WHO had been pushing multilaterally for years.

The Obama administration’s strategy also worked to create more linkages between health and security, by enhancing disease surveillance and fostering cooperation between the public health, life science and security communities. The strategy emphasised the need for international cooperation and partnerships to deal with the global nature of the threat, and called for expansion of bioengagement activities into Africa and South Asia.