From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
Two Decades of Warnings,
And Now Duct Tape
We've long known the dangers of bio warfare.
On "orange alert" and on the eve of a war with a foe armed with chemical and biological weapons, the U.S. has discovered duct tape and plastic sheeting. Pardon me, but it's time to repeat that these pages elaborated the threat nearly two decades go.
In April and May of 1984, we published a nine-part series on the ultimate in chemical and biological warfare, the Soviet program to use genetic engineering to splice, say, cobra venom into common infectious agents. William Kucewicz, an editorial page writer, spent seven months interviewing scientists who had fled the Soviet Union, and found their accounts chillingly consistent. In special laboratories in places such as Novosibirsk, the Soviets were trying to develop unknown new biological weapons.
This program was headed, the refugee scientists agreed, by Yuri A. Ovchinnikov, a vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. At the first mention of his name, one emigre blurted out "I wish someone would tell the world what that bastard is doing." The series started in the heart of Moscow itself, when a dissident microbiologist expressed precisely the same sentiment to me, and I suspect other Western journalists.
The refugee scientists said they did not believe the experiments had yet succeeded, but the ambition of the program certainly displayed a lively interest in biological weaponry of the kind that concerns the U.S. today. And of course, this activity was a flagrant violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972.
All of this was amply confirmed with the 1992 defection of Kanatjan Alibekov, now known in the West as Ken Alibek, deputy chief of the Soviet program. He reported that the program called Biopreparat had some 25,000 people working on germ warfare. By 1999, he and Stephen Handelman published a book, "Biohazard," detailing the threat in public. By the way, in an article in The Wall Street Journal in October 2000 (and again in an October 2001 article), they also reported that many of the prominent officials in the Soviet program remain in similar positions today (though Mr. Ovchinnikov died in 1988.)
Warnings came even earlier, in particular with the 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. We suspected at the time, and now know, that a germ warfare plant had accidentally released a plume of anthrax spores. At least 105 people died of rare inhalation anthrax.
As early as 1975, H'Mong tribesmen reported being attacked by "yellow rain," a spray that caused hemorrhaging and other bizarre symptoms. The Carter administration raised the issue in several forums, including the 35th session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in 1979. In 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig reported that trichothecene mycotoxins, a potent natural poison that grows on moldy grain, had been identified in samples from the attack sites and victims in Southeast Asia.
Our 1984 series also included reports of Afghan freedom fighters found dead frozen in place or suffering hour-long periods of incapacitation. These reports sound a lot like fentanyl, the gas that Soviet special forces pumped into a Moscow theater last October to overcome Chechen hostage-holders. More than 100 hostages also died from the drug, and perhaps other agents in the gas.
In 1978 Bulgarian secret police assassinated dissident Georgi Markov in London with a weapon, disguised as an umbrella, that shot a pellet of ricin, a deadly poison derived from castor beans. More recently, in 1995, 12 people were killed and thousands injured by the nerve gas sarin, released in the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.
Even more to the point, in 1988 Kurds from the village of Halabjah reported they were attacked with poison gas from Iraqi planes over three days. The CIA has documented nine earlier Iraqi gas attacks during the Iraq-Iran War. And in 1995, Iraq, faced with overwhelming evidence and the defection of one of its high officials, admitted to United Nations inspectors that it had produced thousands of liters of biological agents including anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin.
So there were warnings aplenty: The first mysterious reports from 1975, the accident at Sverdlovsk in 1979, concern by both the Carter and Reagan administrations. Actual terrorist deaths from toxins and nerve agents in Western capitals. A consuming interest in chemical and biological weapons not only by the Soviets but by Saddam Hussein.
Back in 1984, we quoted bioweapons expert Joseph Douglass that "the public and civilian government officials are almost totally unprepared to respond effectively to even a crude attack by naive terrorists." He suggested new "fast reaction teams" and a complete review of preparedness.
So now, 19 years later, we're told to stock up on duct tape. The military has digested the lesson, to be sure, and has developed equipment and doctrine to fight in a chemical or biological environment. But in terms of public awareness and terrorist threats, we have spent the last two decades in a state of denial.
Let me say, as a voice who tried to sound the alarm, that one of the big obstacles to understanding has been the mystique of arms control. In particular, the 1972 convention, though admittedly unverifiable and in the event blatantly violated, was assumed somehow to protect us from biological threats. Worse, the "scientific community," in particular Matthew Meselson of Harvard, took it upon themselves to "defend" the treaty by excusing away evidence of Soviet violations.
Still, in the end arms control was only a contributing factor. The main source of denial is that shoving aside a huge threat is simply comfortable; it is too ghastly to recognize. Similarly, despite terrorist attacks on American embassies and ships and even an earlier attack on the World Trade Center, the country denied away terrorism until September 11. So it might be apt to wonder where denial still grips today. For example, I suspect we'll eventually find, on Saddam's complicity in the anthrax mailings and other terrorism we've already suffered.
Mr. Bartley is editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
