Non-Subscriber Extract
Analysing the US anthrax attacks
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| 12 October 2001 |
By John Eldridge, Editor of Jane's Nuclear, Biological and Chemcial Defence
The sudden appearance of anthrax at the offices of the Sun tabloid in Boca Raton, Florida, at the NBC news headquarters in New York's Rockefeller Center and most recently at Microsoft facilities in Nevada is almost certainly malicious.
Jonathan Tucker, writing for the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), examining the occurrence of both chemical and biological events over the last decade, concludes that a large proportion of the events involving so-called biological warfare (ie, events involving the malicious introduction of harmful organisms into the food chain) have often been 'grudge' events.
In many cases these acts were perpetrated by people feeling enraged at perceived mistreatment by colleagues or, more often, by the bureaucracy of a large corporation. Most of these events were crude in form and therefore relatively ineffective. Before the recent tragedies, a mere declaration of such an incident by coded message to the media was sufficient to throw the general public into panic. However, since September 11, the general public has gained increased understanding of the mechanisms, the outcomes and the technical difficulties of effecting a successful biological or chemical warfare event within the domestic arena. They fully understand from data now placed in front of them in the written, television and web-based media what anthrax is, where it came from and what it can do. They know, for example, that the outbreak in Florida is suspicious. They are worried that the fourth outbreak has occurred many miles away. It is known that Iraq obtained anthrax cultures, for example -- quite legally -- from the American Type Culture Centre (ATCC) in the 1980s at a time when the West tacitly supported the regime. No questions were asked.
The point here is that anthrax is available both naturally and by manufacture in laboratories. The reason it is considered by the West to be attractive for use as a biological weapon is twofold: first, the spores are robust, surviving exposure to both ultraviolet radiation and the sterilising effect of high temperatures far better than other pathogens; secondly, anthrax causes a non-transmissible disease. This is an important factor as the consequences of releasing a highly infectious disease as a weapon against a population may be unintentionally collateral. People travel. Within the incubation period of such a disease, affected people could be anywhere in the world. This is a significant disadvantage, whereby its indiscriminate use in an attack against a densely populated, developed urban centre could easily, and very quickly, result in the disease ending up in Kabul or Kandahar.
The only recent active model available for study is that of the attacks by the Aleph (aka Aum Shinrikyo) sect in Japan. This was an extremely well funded and supported organisation which, working in secret, was unsuccessful at producing an effective biological weapon and was only moderately successful in producing a chemical weapon despite having remained undiscovered and unhindered while working under the noses of Japanese authorities for several years. Clearly, families of those injured or deceased in the Tokyo incident would find the word 'moderately' offensive but, had the quality of the sarin released in those subways been pure, the 3,000 or so injuries would more likely have been deaths.
The US outbreaks are clearly malicious and they may well continue. Conjecturally, for these attacks, there are three possible sources. First, the person who perpetrated the event had a specific grudge against the media offices in Boca Raton and, having seen the effect he produced, attempted a more general attack on the media machine. The second alternative is simply that it is a follow-on event and part of an ongoing campaign organised by Al-Qaeda. A third possibility is similar to the first, involving an individual perpetrating a vendetta style act against a media organisation but having a loose association with Al-Qaeda personnel. It may, therefore, be more than a coincidence that the Florida event occurred very close to the air training school where the perpetrators of the 11 September terrorist attacks acquired their skills. Government organisations have become suspicious, and people are wary about the possibility of more events.
Acting in the interest of personal safety, there are simple, no-cost precautions that can be taken. First, organisations can review their entry and access security procedures. In addition to visitor searches, internal shipping and mail facilities need to improve the speed and accuracy of their communications to ensure that inter-office freight and mail is expected by someone within the organisation. The second major precaution that can prevent the internal spread of pathogens is to crash-stop the building ventilation systems when a suspect object has appeared within the scope of the intake system. This precaution should not prompt building managers to stop the ventilation system at every minor incident but should prompt them to review their responses based on the particular arrangements of their facility.
There are many other detailed precautions that funding may allow, but the bottom line is that we should not change our lifestyles to so disrupt our activities that the challenger wins. The heightened understanding and vigilance of populations, from the individual in the street right up to the top levels of government, is supported by countermeasures technology that will make it increasingly difficult for an antagonist to create the type of mass event with which biological and chemical warfare materials are often credited.
Finally, of interest was an exchange between two correspondents in the UK media on Thursday morning. One was in London talking to his colleague in Boca Raton, Florida, bemoaning conflicting reports from experts about the ease with which anthrax could be successfully weaponised. One said that anthrax was far too difficult to produce in enough quantity to qualify as a weapon of mass destruction, whereas the other was arguing that it was all too easy. We have come across this type of dichotomy before. Many scientists were concerned that the very first nuclear detonation in the Almogordo Desert might set off a chain reaction to destroy all matter. With anthrax, the fact that we don't know the potential effects is happily because the substance has never been successfully deployed as a weapon of mass destruction. Hopefully, such failures will continue.