Book details shadowy world of germ war Tuesday, 11 April 2000 19:25 (ET) Book details shadowy world of germ war By HIL ANDERSON LOS ANGELES, April 11 (UPI) - While the threat of an all-consuming nuclear exchange between superpowers has diminished in recent years, a new book reminds the world that the grisly development of biological warfare remains a bustling cottage industry among rogue states. Journalists Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg report in "Plague Wars" that the harnessing of lethal bacteria and viruses has been the goal of various major powers since World War II, and research into making the organisms deadlier, and delivering them more efficiently to a helpless foe, continues. The prospect of an unhinged dictator or a terrorist cell loosing anthrax or some other vile plague on a major city or against the woefully unprepared U.S. military conjures up nightmarish visions of mass burials in Central Park or the loss of entire divisions of troops. "I am taking the biological terrorist threat very, very seriously," Jerry Hauer, the head of New York City's Office of Emergency Services, told the authors. "I have a background in public health, and I know what the implications are." The implications are serious trouble due not only to a lack of equipment, medicines and trained emergency personnel, but also to the nature of biological weapons -- invisible to the eye and capable of swiftly drifting along on the breeze through streets, air conditioning ducts and subway tunnels. It is this apparent portability that seems to make biological warfare an attractive possibility for a terrorist bent on causing mass casualties and panic in an urban area, or a rogue nation looking for a weapon that will serve as a great equalizer in a confrontation with the United States. According to the book, the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo repeatedly tried to launch biological attacks against Tokyo and against U.S. Navy installations in Japan in the mid-1990s, but the attempts failed - undone for a variety of reasons, including faulty equipment or viruses that just didn't work -- and the cult turned to sarin nerve gas, which killed a dozen people and injured about 5,000 others in the Tokyo subway in March 1995. The prospect of facing biological and/or chemical weapons in the days leading up to the Gulf War was enough to prompt President Bush to deliver a thinly-veiled threat to Saddam Hussein that the coming battle could go nuclear quickly if the Iraqis unleashed their arsenal of such weapons against Coalition forces. The nuclear option appears to be what has been keeping the biologicals at bay, and more likely to be used in a regional conflict such as the Iran-Iraq war, or the kind of covert "dirty" war as the one that occurred in the bush during the guerrilla campaigns against Rhodesia and South Africa. While the prospects of a strategic biological attack are bone chilling, the most likely scenario is a small-scale operation during a little-known war in a remote corner of the world. Biological weapons have been under development since World War II when Japan, the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States all took the plunge into biological warfare research. The Soviet program appeared to have been the most ambitious, and Plague Wars reports on a couple of mysterious outbreaks of disease that swept through the invading German army that may or may not have been caused by germs grown in Soviet labs. The Soviet program frightened the west enough that the United States kept its program alive after the war ended, even drafting former members of Japan's ghoulish Unit 731, that had conducted bizarre and inhumane medical experiments on hapless prisoners in China, to provide U.S. scientists with their discoveries. The western programs never really matched the Soviets' in terms of output and ambition, and the collapse of the Communist government failed to terminate research that continued into the Yeltsin years. So cloaked in secrecy was the Russian biowar industry that even Yeltsin had to fumble around for the truth when coming clean about offensive biological weapons to the U.S. and the British. The Russians eventually agreed to a series of reciprocal inspections of both their facilities and those of the U.S., and Plague Wars mercifully breezes through the frequently tedious negotiations of such arms agreements. The secretive nature of biological warfare continues to the present day as United Nations arms inspectors try to ferret out the truth about Iraq's program. Plague Wars offers a fresh look at the often-tangled process by focusing on the adventures of the inspectors themselves in Iraq, the kinds of war stories one would hear over a drink in a pub rather than read about in the Sunday papers. Richard Butler, the head of the UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission on Iraq), told the authors that he saw his mission in Iraq as a vital step toward a solid, verifiable biological arms treaty. "UNSCOM is making a matrix for the future here, and we simply must not lose," Butler said. "If we do, the decent world will never be able to control biological warfare." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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