Dreading the near Future
The growing threat of chemical and biological warfare
Ten years ago the Kurdish village of Halabja was attacked with mustard gas and a nerve agent by Iraqi government troops because the village supported Kurdish autonomy. Five thousand men, women, and children died immediately.
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| Halabja after the attack |
The Halabja assault is one reason the United States has been so adamant about forcing inspections on Iraq but it is not the most important one. Halabja is history and it is the future that concerns the U.S., and the future may well hold horrors.
The problem is two-fold actually. First, the general problem of weapons-of-mass-destruction has forced the crisis I call Postmodern War. At its heart is the existence and proliferation of mass destruction weapon technologies that cannot really be used militarily.
Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons all offer mass destruction but historically the only really effective armaments in this class have been nuclear, and they were very hard to make. And even with nuclear material for sale to the highest bidder in the states of the old Soviet Empire it is still not easy to put together a nuclear "gadget" or "device" as it is called in the trade.
Even with improved scientific and technological understandings in chemistry, chemical weapons remain limited by weather and chance, although as Habiya shows they can be terribly effective. Still, on a good day, the danger of nuclear and chemical weapons seems manageable. The same cannot be said of biological weapons. The biological revolution in genetic engineering that has produced cloning and other wonders is the second part of the weapons-of-mass-destruction crisis. While the danger of nuclear or chemical weapons is actually increasing dramatically, the threat of biological weapons is going off the charts.
Nuclear weapons
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Atomic bombs were the first effective weapons-of-mass-destruction and they changed war profoundly. The belief in the efficacy of total war, which is the defining characteristic of modern war, suddenly became not just nonsensical, but very dangerous for the survival of humanity. The confusion of post-modern war led to the bloody Cold War of many limited conflicts but the fundamental contradiction that nuclear weapons reveal about war has not gone away, it has deepened.
Nuclear weapons are just a symptom of how technoscience has transformed war. It has been a controllable system, up until now, because making nuclear weapons is a fantastically difficult and complex enterprise. There must be mining and refining of rare material, the production of delicate machined parts of explosives and radioactive metals, and then the incredibly careful assembly and calibration of the gadget. Because of this, only nation states have the resources to make an effective nuclear weapon. Until such a state uses one, or until a non-state terrorist buys or steals one, the most likely use of a nuclear weapon would be a dirty bomb without much explosive potential. It's nasty effects could just as easily be accomplished by detonating a conventional (high explosive or even fertilizer) bomb at an nuclear plant. Still, unless international politics changes fundamentally, eventually nuclear weapons will be used.
The most likely scenario is a "limited" nuclear war in the Mideast, perhaps starting with a terrorist strike at Tel Avi followed by an Israeli response of one-to-five eyes for an eye, taking out Tripoli, Teheran, Baghdad, Damascus and maybe Cairo. Another possibility is a conflict between India and Pakistan, where antagonistic fundamentalists (Hindu and Moslem) have come to power in both states. There are other danger zones as well, but horrible as nuclear war seems, for now at least it is not the most likely nightmare we face.
Chemical weapons
Nor are chemical weapons, but their use is somewhat more likely. Chemical weapons have not been that successful, which accounts in large part for the many strong treaties prohibiting their production and use.
When they were first perfected in World War I they seemed to offer a chance for breaking the stalemate of the Western Front. But instead, thanks to the fickle winds and the inadequacy of protective gear, poison gas turned out to be a very uncontrollable weapon, often blowing back on the troops that deployed it and disrupting the planned attack. Even though over a million gas casualties were produced, 91,000 of them fatalities, the use of chlorine, phosgene, and chloroethyl sulfide (mustard gas, the "king" of the gases) didn't change the course of the war at all.
Claims like those by the nobel prize winning German chemist who led their development efforts, that using poison gas was "a higher form of killing," were hardly accurate. While many great powers and small have continued to prepare for chemical warfare it has only been used effectively against civilian populations such as the Chinese targets of the Japanese Army Unit 791 or Halabjavillage.
Biological weapons
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| Halabja after the attack |
There is a long history to biological weapons. Some accounts have it that the use of plague infected bodies in the siege of Kaffa (catapulted over the walls) led to the Black Death pandemic that changed European history. Hundreds of years later smallpox infected blankets were given to Indians in North America. But biological contamination in war was really not that common, except in the case of poisoning water. However, in the 1930s and 40s, advances in biology inevitably led to military attempts to perfect it as a weapon. The Japanese, the Germans, and the Allies all had biowar research, but only the Axis powers experimented on humans and only the Japanese used biological agents, spraying bubonic plague and deploying bacterial bombs against the Chinese.
U.S. research started in World War II and was greatly augmented by captured Japanese research and scientists, who were pardoned to help the U.S. efforts. In the 1950s and 1960s the U.S. tested "surrogate" biological agents on subway systems and whole cities in the U.S., possibly infecting many U.S. citizens. The U.S. was also accused of using swine flu against Cuba's pigs and other biological and chemical weapons in Africa and Southeast Asia and the Soviets faced similar charges. While it is difficult to tell if any of these accusations against the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were correct, there is no doubt that both superpowers had major research efforts. Russia, China, and the U.S. along with many smaller countries (over a dozen) continue intensive biowar research today. The sad irony is that any effective countermeasures to bioattack involve developing the understandings and technologies that make the offensive use of the weapon possible.
People do not realize the progress that is being made in genetic engineering. Even those involved are often amazed at the pace of the field. Newspaper headlines are captured by such feats as putting jellyfish genes into mice to make them glow in the dark, engineering mice whose bodies are covered by ears, and developing animals with human genes making them factories for natural medicines (which is the purpose of Dolly and the other cloned animals), But behind these freakish breakthroughs is the relentless improvement of genetic engineering technologies, which now include gene splicing and dicing and linking machines, and the related increases in our understanding of genetic and other biological processes. What this means for biowar is that the development of more effective and specific biological weapons is not only possible, but it gets easier every day. Soon (if not today), a competent grad student or post doc with the right equipment (which is available at most good colleges) will be able to make a bioweapon that is the stuff of nightmares.
The ideal bioweapon would be a modified natural disease with a high infection rate spread by the air that killed or disabled almost everyone but then died out after two days. Thus, while some infection might be spread by airline travel anywhere in the world, the only massive outbreaks would be where the original infection was propagated. The attackers would have an effective vaccine to protect their leadership and other key personnel. Having some sort of targeting control over the infection, and having an effective protection (defense) from the infection, are the two key parts of an effective bioweapon that haven't existed until now.
Another way to combine effective targeting with protection is to create an "ethnic weapon" aimed at so-called "private polymorphisms" particular to specific groups. There are any number of diseases and chemical agents that impact some genotypes more than others. The problem is precise targeting, however. None of the natural agents are discriminating enough but the potential has long been clear. The possibility of ethnic weapons became public in 1970 with the publication of an article in Military Review, a leading journal. But the German and Japanese projects of World War II were clearly driven by hopes of finding ethnic differences that would make an effective weapon. Even back in the 1950s the U.S. was experimenting with targeting African-Americans with valley fever, since they are 10 times more likely to die from the disease as whites. Of course the U.S. was not alone in such research. The apartheid South African government, for example, had a large program researching and using biological and chemical weapons that even included looking for a way to change an individual's race!
Now with the biological revolution in full swing it is clear that extremely effective and horrible ethnic bioweapons can be made. Such thinking is spreading. There are theories that ascribe the AIDs epidemic to biowar research, others that explain cattle mutilations as tests for an ethnic weapon and novels like Slatewiper about Rightist Japanese discovering a way of targeting Koreans by triggering dormant parts of their DNA code.
This is all part of a growing governmental and public awareness of the danger of biowar and bioterrorism. In the Gulf War U.S. and allied troops were often inoculated against biological threats (anthrax in particular) and perhaps they were also given treatments meant to block certain nerve agents. There is growing evidence that Gulf War Syndrome, the mysterious collection of debilitating symptoms that many Gulf War veterans have experienced, is linked to these treatments in synergy perhaps with pollution from the fighting (especially burning oil wells) and local beasties (sand fleas have been mentioned).
U.S. and NATO preparations for dealing with biochem warfare attacks have escalated recently and in the U.S. an infrastructure for dealing with terroristic uses of chemical and biological agents is starting to grow, although it is still minuscule in comparison with the nuclear protection establishment which includes radiation monitoring sites at many locations and on-alert NEST (Nuclear Emergency Response Teams) units at several locations.
The latest scare in the U.S. was the arrest of several militia-affiliated activists with what was purported to be weapons-grade anthrax. It turns out to have been a false alarm but as the "successful" attacks with the nerve agent sarin in Japan by the Aum cult show, every alarm is not false.
On one level the threat comes from both terroristic postmodern states and postmodern terrorists but the real problem is the way human societies make political decisions. Before war truly became total it may have made some sense to work out many disagreements in blood. Now, when mass death is becoming progressively available to more and more smaller and crazier groups it won't work. The only way to really end the threat of weapons-of-mass-destruction is to work to make the dream of real democracy and real international cooperation a reality.
Good Internet Links:
Bioterrorism Special Report in New Scientist
Scientific American article
Federation of Atomic Scientists
Dutch collection of key links
Chris Hables Gray is Associate Professor, The Cultural Studies of Science and Technology & Associate Professor, Computer Science University of Great Falls, Great Falls, Montana
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