Posted
31st September 2001
GM A Military Nightmare
by Jeremy Rifkin, The Guardian, Thursday September
27, 2001
In November, 143 nations will assemble in Geneva to review the
1972 biological weapons convention, a treaty designed to "prohibit
the development, production and stockpiling of biological and
toxin weapons". Negotiators, including the US representatives
to the talks, need to address the serious loophole in the existing
treaty that allows governments to engage in defensive research
when, in fact, much of that research is potentially convertible
to offensive purposes. And the commercial concerns of US and
other biotech companies around the world to protect trade secrets
and other commercial information should not be allowed to derail
protocols designed to verify and enforce the provisions of the
biological weapons convention. It is time to get tough and do
the right thing. One would think that the welfare of human civilisation
would be more important than the parochial interests of a handful
of life science companies
The
FBI reports that several of the World Trade Centre hijackers
had made a number of visits to a facility in Florida housing
crop-duster planes. According to the proprietors, the hijackers
asked questions about the load capacity and range of the planes.
The FBI has subsequently ordered all 3,500 of the nation's privately
owned crop dusters grounded, pending further investigation.
Meanwhile, universities, including the University of Michigan,
Penn State, Clemson and Alabama, have barred aircraft from flying
over their stadiums during football games, for fear of a biowarfare
attack. Policy makers are scurrying to catch up, by allocating
funds to stockpile antibiotics and vaccines, and upgrading emergency
procedures at hospitals and clinics.
Unfortunately,
to date, the politicians, military experts and media have skirted
a far more troubling reality about bio-terrorism. The fact is,
the new genomic information being discovered and used for commercial
genetic engineering in the fields of agriculture, animal husbandry
and medicine is potentially convertible to the development of
a wide range of novel pathogens that can attack plant, animal
and human populations. Moreover, unlike nuclear bombs, the materials
and tools required to create biological warfare agents are easily
accessible and cheap, which is why this kind of weapon is often
referred to as the "poor man's nuclear bomb". A state-of-the-art
biological laboratory could be built and made operational with
as little as $10,000-worth of off-the-shelf equipment and could
be housed in a room as small as 15ft by 15ft. All you really
need is a beer fermenter, a protein-based culture, plastic clothing
and a gas mask.
Equally frightening, thousands of graduate students in laboratories
around the world are knowledgeable enough in the rudimentary
uses of recombinant DNA and cloning technology to design and
mass-produce such weapons. Ironically, while the Bush administration
is now expressing deep concern over bioterrorism, just this
summer the White House stunned the world community by rejecting
new proposals to strengthen the biological weapons convention.
The stumbling block came around verification procedures that
would allow governments to inspect US biotech company laboratories.
The companies made it clear that they would not tolerate monitoring
of their facilities for fear of theft of commercial secrets.
Biological
warfare involves the use of living organisms for military purposes.
Biological weapons can be viral, bacterial, fungal, rickettsial,
and protozoan. Biological agents can mutate, reproduce, multiply,
and spread over a large geographic terrain by wind, water, insect,
animal, and human transmission. Once released, many biological
pathogens are capable of developing viable niches and maintaining
themselves in the environment indefinitely. Conventional biological
agents include Yersinia pestis (plague), tularemia, rift valley
fever, Coxiella burnetii (Q fever), eastern equine encephalitis,
anthrax and smallpox. Biological weapons have never been widely
used because of the danger and expense involved in processing
and stockpiling large volumes of toxic materials and the difficulty
in targeting the dissemination of biological agents. Advances
in genetic engineering technologies over the past decade, however,
have made biological warfare viable for the first time. Recombinant
DNA "designer weapons" can be created in many ways. The new
technologies can be used to program genes into infectious micro-organisms
to increase their antibiotic resistance, virulence and environmental
stability. Scientists say they may be able to clone selective
toxins to eliminate specific racial or ethnic groups whose genotypic
makeup predisposes them to certain disease patterns. Genetic
engineering can also be used to destroy specific strains or
species of agricultural plants or domestic animals. The new
genetic engineering technologies provide a versatile form of
weaponry that can be used for a wide variety of military purposes,
ranging from terrorism and counterinsurgency operations to large-scale
warfare aimed at entire populations.
Most governments, including the US, claim that their biological
warfare work is only defensive in nature and point out that
the existing biological weapons treaty allows for defensive
research. Yet it is widely acknowledged that it is virtually
impossible to distinguish between defensive and offensive research
in the field. Professional military observers are not sanguine
about the prospect of keeping the genetics revolution out of
the hands of the war planners. As a tool of mass destruction,
genetic weaponry rivals nuclear weaponry, and it can be developed
at a fraction of the cost. The revelation that Iraq had stockpiled
massive amounts of germ warfare agents and was preparing to
use them during the Gulf war renewed Pentagon interest in defensive
research to counter the prospect of an escalating biological
arms race. Saddam Hussein's government had prepared what it
called the "great equaliser", an arsenal of 25 missile warheads
carrying more than 11,000lb of biological agents, including
deadly botulism poison and anthrax germs. An additional 33,000lb
of germ agents were placed in bombs to be dropped from military
aircraft. Had the germ warfare agents been deployed, the results
would have been as catastrophic as those visited on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. A study conducted by the US government in 1993
found that the release of just 200lb of anthrax spores from
a plane over Washington DC could kill as many as 3m people.
Iraq is not alone in its interest in developing a new generation
of biological weapons. In a 1995 study, the CIA reported that
17 countries were suspected of researching and stockpiling germ
warfare agents, including Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea,
Taiwan, Israel, Egypt, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Bulgaria, India,
South Korea, South Africa, China and Russia. In the 20th century,
modern science reached its apex with the splitting of the atom,
followed shortly thereafter by the discovery of the DNA double
helix. The first discovery led immediately to the development
of the atomic bomb, leaving humanity to ponder, for the first
time in history, the prospect of an end to its own future on
Earth. Now, a growing number of military observers are wondering
if the other great scientific breakthrough of our time will
soon be used in a comparable manner, posing a similar threat
to our very existence as a species. No laboratory, however contained
and secure, is failsafe. Natural disasters such as floods and
fires, and security breaches are possible. It is equally likely
that terrorists will turn to the new genetic weapons.
Jeremy
Rifkin is the author of The Biotech Century (Penguin, 1998)
and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington,
DC..
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