A Higher form of Killing

ELEVEN Full Circle

IN THE END, as the twentieth century drew to a close, it was not a new generation of weapons which the world had to worry about; it was the old.

In the spring of 1984, a familiar and terrible type of fatality began to reappear in the casualty lists of the latest Middle East war. A United Nations report described one typical victim, an Iranian soldier: ‘Sourab Norooz, age 24, exposed in [March 1984] at Majnoon… crepitation [a grating, crackling sound] due to gas in the chest wall, probably resulting from gas gangrene… The patient died that night.’¹ The symptomatology might have come straight from an autopsy report written by a surgeon of the Royal Army Medical Corps on the Western Front in 1917. Sourab Norooz’s death was one of the first pieces of evidence from the Iran-Iraq war proving that Saddam Hussein was using mustard gas.

For twenty years, Iraq, under Saddam’s leadership, has held up a Caliban’s mirror to the west. Almost every major chemical and biological weapon devised by the British, Germans and Americans since the First World War has been tested, manufactured and, in many cases, used, by a power which, in the 1970s, was regarded as no particular military threat to anyone. Every warning about the ease with which CBW weapons could proliferate has been proved true by Saddam. Not only was the original technology he exploited Western; so were the ingredients he used. Through a network of front companies acting on behalf of the Iraqi State Enterprise for the Production of Pesticides (SEPP), the Iraqis bought all the plant, equipment and chemicals they needed on the world market. An American company provided the blueprints for Iraq’s first poison gas plant in 1978. By 1979, the factory – near Akashat, in the northwest of the country – had a production capacity of 2,000 tons a year. The protective suits used by its employees came from Britain. German and French companies were in the forefront of supplying the sophisticated equipment needed for three other factories: Salman Pak, Al Fallujah and Samarra. One relatively small Dutch company, Melchamie, exported literally thousands of tons of precursor chemicals to SEPP.² Sometimes the firms involved knew what was going on and turned a blind eye; often they were ignorant. As Richard Butler, subsequently the head of the UN Special Commission on Disarmanent (UNSCOM), explained, ‘the same fermenter used to make anthrax could be rinsed out and used to make beer, and the same equipment used to make the nerve agents sarin and tabun could be used to make aspirin tablets.’³ By the time Western intelligence woke up to what was happening, in early 1984, it was already too late. Samarra alone, which covered a site of some 25 square kilometres, had become the largest chemical weapons facility in the world.

Iraq’s use of chemical warfare (CW) was initially defensive and followed a classic tactical pattern. Facing superior numbers of Iranian infantry, advancing in waves, the Iraqi airforce dropped airburst bombs, each containing 64 litres of mustard gas, to contaminate the maximum area of ground. Two separate Iranian offensives, in August and in November 1983, were dealt with by the use of mustard, killing or wounding more than 3,000 of the attacking troops. A further 2,500 were contaminated the following spring.

Mustard gas, however, was merely the beginning. On 17 March 1984, at Basra, Saddam achieved the dubious distinction, avoided even by Adolf Hitler, of becoming the first national leader in history to authorize the use of nerve gas on the battlefield. The agent used was, appropriately, the original Nazi discovery: tabun (GA). Major General Maher Abdul Rashid, commander of the Iraqi Third Corps near Basra, was unabashed about its employment: ‘If you gave me a pesticide to throw at these worms of insects [the Iranians] to make them breathe and become exterminated, I’d use it.’⁴ The Iraqis also made extensive use of sarin (GB) and, in May 1985, began a successful programme to develop the heavy contaminant, VX. With its CW factories now beginning full-scale production, Iraq went on the offensive. The results were devastating. According to the US State Department, ‘20,000 Iranian soldiers were killed in Iraqi chemical attacks from 1983–1988’.⁵ In addition, an untold number of civilians – certainly hundreds, probably thousands – were gassed in an attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in March 1988, during which the Iraqi airforce dropped 100-litre canister bombs containing a ‘cocktail’ of agents – mustard, sarin, tabun, VX – ‘clearly intended to complicate the task of treating the Halabja victims,’ according to one Western doctor who studied the atrocity.⁶

Given that by 1988, Iraq had achieved roughly the level of technical sophistication in CW that the major powers had attained in the 1940s, it was perhaps not surprising that Saddam Hussein next embarked on a biological weapons programme of a similar vintage. Like the British in the Second World War, the Iraqis were attracted by the possibilities of anthrax and botulinum toxin. Tests began in March 1988 using rockets and bombs against live animals – sheep, monkeys and donkeys. These were successful and biological agents duly began to be manufactured on a large scale. At Salman Pak, equipment acquired from German companies was used to produce anthrax. Iraq has also admitted to producing 190 litres of concentrated ricin solution at the same facility. Botulinum toxin was produced at the al-Taji complex just north of Baghdad. An incapacitating agent called aflatoxin, which causes vomiting and internal bleeding, was manufactured at Baghdad’s Agricultural and Water Research Centre. But by far the largest BW factory was at al-Hakam in the western desert. Here, between 1989 and 1990, half a million litres of biological warfare (BW) agents were produced.

As with the Iraqi chemical weapons programme, Western intelligence was slow to realize the scale of the threat posed. It was not until two months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in October 1990, that the Pentagon was warned that the Iraqi BW stockpile consisted of ‘at least one metric ton of dried anthrax and up to 15 kgs of botulinum toxin’ (both huge underestimates, the former by a factor of eight, the latter by a factor of one thousand).⁷ On 1 December 1990, less than two months before the start of the Gulf War, Iraq began arming its biological weapons in preparation for the coming struggle. This arsenal, by Iraq’s subsequent admission, consisted of 166 aircraft bombs (50 loaded with anthrax, 100 with botulinum toxin and 16 with aflatoxin) and 25 Scud B missile warheads (10 loaded with anthrax, 13 with botulinum toxin and two with aflatoxin). On 23 December, the weapons were dispersed to five different sites and held ready for use. Around this time, the Iraqis also experimented with spray tanks capable of releasing up to 2,000 litres of anthrax over a target area.

The Allied response was immediate, and betrayed the coalition’s rising anxiety. Four days after the Iraqi deployment, the US announced that it would begin vaccinating all its troops in Saudi Arabia. The following day, Britain followed suit. On 9 January, US Secretary of State James Baker met the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, and handed him a letter warning that ‘if the conflict involves your use of chemical or biological weapons against our forces, the American people will demand vengeance. We have the means to exact it.’ Baker subsequently explained that he ‘purposely left the impression that the use of chemical or biological agents by Iraq would invite nuclear retaliation’.⁸

Just as Hitler’s failure to use chemical weapons in the Second World War is to some extent a mystery, so we still cannot be sure why Saddam Hussein decided against using his CBW arsenal in the Gulf conflict. That he had the munitions prepared is beyond dispute. Apart from the Scuds loaded with biological warheads, Iraq is known to have had another 30 Scuds chemically-armed, principally with sarin. After the war, the United Nations destroyed a total of 38,000 munitions either loaded with, or capable of being loaded with, CW agents. Had Saddam authorized the use of biologically-armed Scuds against Israel, the effects upon a densely-populated area would have been appalling. According to a Pentagon report, given ‘ideal weather conditions and an effective dispersal mechanism,’ a single Scud warhead loaded with botulinum could theoretically contaminate an area of 3,700 square kilometres.⁹ To put that figure in proportion, the ‘primary lethal area’ of a Hiroshima-sized atom bomb is 10 square kilometres. Even if the agent had not been properly dispersed – indeed, even if it had not been dispersed at all – the psychological impact would still have been immense.

The best guess must be that Saddam did, indeed, fear nuclear retaliation, either from the United States, or – more likely – from Israel. But deterrence cuts both ways. The strategic analyst, Avigdor Haselkorn, has made a compelling argument that the real reason the United States failed to pursue its advantage at the end of the Gulf War and advance on Baghdad was its fear that Saddam, if cornered, would have had nothing to lose by reaching for a weapon of last resort. He might have used CBW against Coalition forces. More likely, he would have made a chemical or biological missile strike against Israel, courting a nuclear response which, even if it destroyed him, would at least have given him the satisfaction of knowing that the whole of the Middle East was his funeral pyre.

If this analysis is correct, then Saddam Hussein’s current determination to preserve his arsenal of poisons becomes much more understandable. CBW may already have saved his regime twice – first, in the 1980s, in his war against the numerically-superior Iranians; second, in the 1990s, in his war against the numerically-superior Allied coalition. Why not a third time? The unsettling truth is that much of Iraq’s CBW arsenal remains intact. ‘In Desert Storm,’ according to General Charles Horner, US air commander during the Gulf War, ‘Saddam Hussein had more chemical weapons than I could bomb… I could not have begun to take out all of his chemical storage – there are just not enough sorties in the day.’¹⁰ Not one of Iraq’s CBW missile warheads was destroyed by Allied bombing. After the war, the UN weapons inspectors’ attempts even to locate, let alone eradicate, Saddam’s stockpiles of gas and germs, were consistently frustrated, and finally ended in August 1998 when Iraq withdrew all co-operation from the UN team. Since then, it may be regarded as almost certain that Iraq has continued to develop CBW, possibly even to the extent of experimenting on prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. According to Richard Butler:

In Butler’s view, ‘it would be foolish in the extreme’ not to assume that Saddam has spent the past three and a half years ‘adding to the chemical and biological warfare weapons he concealed during the UNSCOM inspection period’.¹²

Nineteen ninety-one was an annus horribilis for Western intelligence with regard to biological weapons. They were forced to accept that they had been caught completely by surprise by the scale of the Iraqi BW effort – a programme on which Saddam is estimated to have spent $100 million. And later in that same year, just as the Western military planners were adjusting themselves to meet this unexpected threat from a new enemy, startling evidence surfaced that they had also completely misjudged the mendacity of an old one: the Soviet Union.

In December 1991, a senior physician of the former USSR, a Kazakh named Kanatjan Alibekov (a name he subsequently anglicized to Ken Alibek) was sent to the United States at the invitation of the American government. Washington was keen to convince Moscow that the US had abandoned biological warfare. For years, Alibek and his colleagues had been assured that America – like the USSR – was treating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention with contempt. But when he looked at the rusting, closed-down American facilities, Alibek realized he had been misled. He returned home, resigned his party membership, and quietly prepared to flee with his family to the United States.

The testimony of this high-level source greatly amplified that of an earlier defector, Vladimir Pasechnik, head of the Leningrad Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations, who had told his story to British intelligence in October 1989. The Russians, it transpired, had not merely ignored the Biological Weapons Convention. With remarkable cynicism, they had used it as an excuse to accelerate an immense programme of research and development which did not even make a pretence of hiding behind the cover of ‘defence’.¹³

In 1973, within a year of signing the Convention, the Soviet Union had set up Biopreparat, a front company for the Red Army. The scale of its operations was staggering. By 1991, Biopreparat controlled forty research and production facilities, some of them enormous. In the woods outside Moscow, a facility known only as Post Box V-8724, and unmarked on any map, employed 4,000 people. It was even equipped with its own forty-bed isolation hospital in case of accidents. In 1982, at Stepnogorsk, (post office box No. 2076) on the wind-blown steppes of northern Kazakhstan, the Russians had built a factory six stories high, inside which were ten enormous fermentation vats. It was estimated to be capable of turning out two tons of anthrax each day. There were five similar plants elsewhere. On the island of Vozrozhdeniye (the name translates, ironically, as Renaissance, or Rebirth Island) in the Aral Sea, the Soviets had an outdoor testing site, where lines of monkeys would be staked to the ground and then bombed with anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, Q fever, or half a dozen other diseases. (After the collapse of communism, trying to hide the evidence of its toxic archipelago, officials in Moscow ordered that hundreds of tons of anthrax be transported in special trains and buried on the island, turning its soil into the most dangerous on the planet.)

Alibek was able to explain, too, what had really happened in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk, which had now reverted to its imperial name, Yekaterinburg. The outbreak of anthrax there in April 1979 (see here) – attributed by the official Soviet news agency TASS to contaminated meat – had been just as suspicious as the most hawkish Westerners had suggested. Inside a top-secret biological warfare plant in the city, anthrax had been manufactured round the clock. On the evening of 2 April, an engineer had removed a filter from one of the exhaust pipes in which the anthrax spores were separated from the fermenting liquid. He left a note for his supervisor: ‘Filter clogged, so I’ve removed it. Replacement necessary.’ The supervisor failed to enter the note in the plant’s log book. When the night shift switched on the evaporators at the start of work, a cloud of spores blew over the city. By the time the authorities realized what had happened, dozens of local people downwind of the plant had succumbed. Between 65 and 105 people died: a much lower figure than some foreign reports had suggested, due probably to the weather conditions that night, and to the fact that most people were inside their houses when the accident occurred. (The corpses were covered in the disinfectant chloramine, placed in special zinc coffins, and buried in unusually deep graves in a separate section of the local cemetery.) Alibek confirmed that the Soviet authorities had tried to hush up the affair by cracking down on unofficial food sellers. They even went as far as sending out patrols to round up stray dogs, which were killed on the grounds that they had ‘eaten contaminated meat’. In 1992. President Yeltsin was obliged formally to acknowledge the real origin of the outbreak.

All told, some 60,000 people were employed in the Soviet biological warfare programme. But it was not just the industrial scale of the effort which impressed and appalled those who began to hear about it. It was its ambition. The defecting microbiologist, Vladimir Pasechnik, had told the British in 1989 that his Leningrad institute had been aggressively researching the possible use of the microbe which causes the Black Death. After hearing his testimony they became convinced that the Soviet weapons scientists had developed a genetically-engineered strain of plague resistant to antibiotics: such a weapon had the capacity to destroy the entire human race. Weapons were being developed which would kill crops or livestock through diseases like swine fever. Other scientists were employed on projects to control human moods, heart rhythms and sleep patterns.

Even the greatest achievement of the World Health Organization, the worldwide eradication of smallpox, had been corrupted by the Russians. This terrible disease has killed more people over the ages than any other, with at least 300 million victims in the twentieth century alone. Death is preceded by dreadful suffering. The skin grows pustules which fill with fluid. Layers of skin then begin to separate, as the fluid forces them apart. Pustules line the nose, mouth and throat making breathing and swallowing difficult or impossible, while externally the patient may appear virtually pebble-dashed. In fatal cases, death comes within ten to sixteen days.

In 1966, the WHO set out to eradicate smallpox. In a little over ten years, it had done so. Twenty years after that, by the mid-1990s, the entire American stockpile of smallpox vaccine had been reduced to four cardboard boxes in a warehouse in Pennsylvania. What the Americans did not know was that even as the disease was supposedly being eliminated, a KGB officer – attached to a Soviet team sent to India as part of the world community’s attempt to fight smallpox – had returned home with a phial containing a virulent and stable strain of the disease. Russian military scientists quickly realized its awesome potential as a possible weapon. Smallpox is highly infectious: when one patient was admitted to hospital suffering from the disease in Germany in 1970, seventeen people went down with smallpox on the floors above, and the German government had to vaccinate 100,000 people to control the outbreak. If the disease could prove so virulent against a population which, as a whole, had a resistance to it, how much more potent might it be once vaccination had been discontinued (as it was, once smallpox was supposedly eradicated)? By 1990, according to the defector Alibek, the Russians had built an underground factory capable of producing between 80 and 100 tons of the virus in a year. They were even, he alleged, genetically manipulating the disease, combining smallpox with the brain virus Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and the Ebola virus.

The revelations were troubling not merely for what they revealed about Soviet ruthlessness. They also seemed to stand military orthodoxy on its head. On tactical grounds, the Americans had long ago recognized that they could never use biological weapons against the Russians. Any theatre in which they happened to be fighting, pre-eminently in Europe, would involve allies, and there was a huge risk that any outbreak of disease would also infect friendly forces. Theoretically, the Russians faced the same problem. But the critical strategic conclusion reached by the Kremlin was that missile technology might change the rules completely. If a means could be devised to deliver biological agents into the heart of the continental United States, the problem disappeared: America was far enough away for Russia to be safe from contamination. The latest generation of intercontinental missile systems offered just such a system.

South Africa was another country that had its biological weapons programme exposed by the collapse of its old regime. The release of Nelson Mandela and the end of the apartheid system shone a harsh light upon perhaps the most secret military programme of the years of white supremacist rule: Project Coast, described by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as ‘the most diabolical aspect of apartheid’.¹⁴

One of the research tasks of the project was an attempt to develop a vaccine to block human fertility. This would then be selectively administered to black South Africans, disguised as a vaccine to protect against Yellow Fever. Other Project Coast scientists researched the possible uses of such traditional biological agents as anthrax and botulinum, together with more exotic diseases: the Ebola, Marburg and Rift Valley haemorrhagic-fever viruses. It is unclear how close the scientists came to turning any of these into weapons which could be used effectively on a large scale. But evidence presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did establish that a number of agents had been drawn from stocks, presumably for use as weapons, during a single seven-month period in 1989. These included twenty-two bottles of cholera, fourteen batches of chocolate spiked with anthrax or botulinum, cigarettes laced with anthrax, beer bottles contaminated with thallium and botulinum, anthrax spores sprinkled on the gum of envelopes, and more. If intended for use, they can only have been for assassination attempts, rather than battlefield operations. Project Coast scientists are also said to have been instructed to investigate the possibility of developing a bacterial device which would affect only specific races.

There is no doubting the seriousness of the South African effort. Team members have testified that they were given carte blanche by the government to examine all types of unconventional weapons of mass destruction. Front companies had been set up to acquire scientific information from around the world. South Africans were said to have visited Saddam Hussein’s mustard gas factory. Fortunately, much of the evidence that emerged about Project Coast demonstrated that its sinister intent was allied to dramatic incompetence. Nevertheless, British and American intelligence were sufficiently alarmed about the knowledge carried in the head of the project’s leader that they achieved the astonishing feat of persuading President Mandela to keep him on the government payroll. Both London and Washington had discovered that this individual was making visits to Libya, which was believed to be trying to develop its own biological warfare programme.

The image of a footloose, amoral scientist, skilled in developing weapons of mass destruction and prepared to sell himself to the highest bidder, is usually the stuff of airport thrillers. But in this case, reality has kept pace with fiction. The collapse of the Soviet Union left hundreds of scientists involved in its biological weapons programme surplus to requirements. Some were re-employed in legitimate civilian industries. Some were paid a pension by the Americans in return for their discretion. But as the plants at which they worked rusted away, others found that curious visitors began calling. American diplomats were warned in 1997 that Iranian delegations had offered biologists new careers developing a biological warfare capability in the Islamic republic. Most seem to have declined the invitations. Others, whose salaries had not been paid for months, apparently found the lure of a steady income irresistible. The Soviet defector Ken Alibek believes that mercenary biologists could have taken smallpox to Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, India, Israel or Pakistan.

The last twenty years have not been an entirely gloomy story. In 1997, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) finally came into force – the latest and by far the most determined attempt in history to stamp out poison gas. To date, 174 nations, including the United States, Britain, Russia and China, have undertaken ‘never under any circumstances to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons’, and never to use them. The CWC has 200 inspectors charged with verifying that the rules are being observed.

Unfortunately, the CWC has not been signed by a number of those countries – Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea – which give the world community the most cause for concern. And one state which has signed – Iran – nevertheless continues to develop a chemical warfare capability.

Proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is now perhaps the most urgent problem facing Western military planners. Apart from Iraq – which stands in an appalling category of its own as far as CBW is concerned – the quartet of Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea now appear to be co-operating in what Avigdor Haselkorn calls a ‘Club MAD’ for the development of weapons of mass destruction.¹⁵ Iranian oil wealth has helped enable North Korea to develop a sophisticated long-range missile programme. Tehran has also provided Syria with financial assistance to enable it to threaten Israel by buying North Korean Scuds. Libya has expressed a desire to buy North Korean missiles with a range of 1,000 kilometres. All four countries have CBW programmes in various stages of development. North Korea is believed to have a stockpile of 300–1,000 tons of CW agents, including nerve gases, and also to be experimenting with anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague and smallpox. Syria is producing chemical weapons at three sites, employed cyanide against a rebellion by Sunni muslims in 1982 (according to Amnesty International) and is ‘pursuing the development’ of biological weapons. Iran – which made limited use of mustard and cyanide gases in its war with Iraq – has continued to develop chemical weapons, has a BW manufacturing capability, and is alleged to have stocks of anthrax and botulinum. Libya used chemical weapons against troops from Chad in 1987, has an underground CW production facility, and appears to be trying to acquire the means to manufacture biological agents.

All four countries have a reputation for sponsoring terrorism, and it is this which is now most exercising governments around the world. So far, the terrorist use of CBW has been the province of cults and cranks. In September 1984, for example, in the United States, devotees of the Bagwhan Shree Rajneesh poisoned 751 people in the Oregon town of Wasco, contaminating drinking glasses and salad bowls with salmonella. Mercifully, there were no fatalities, even though the salmonella had been bought from the same company which supplied anthrax and botulinum to the University of Baghdad.

Much more serious were the activities of the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikiyo, which made two ineffectual attacks with biological agents – botulinum toxin in 1990 and anthrax in 1993 – neither of which caused any injuries, before resorting to nerve agents. In June 1994, the cult used home-made sarin on the inhabitants of an apartment block in Matsumoto, killing seven and injuring 300. In December, an opponent of the cult was murdered by skin application of VX. Then, in March 1995, came the worst incident of all. Five terrorists, each carrying plastic bags containing small amounts of sarin, boarded separate Tokyo subway trains during the rush hour, and at 8 am simultaneously punctured the bags with umbrellas. Twelve people died; more than 5,000 were injured.

Most recently – and still, at the time of writing, most mysteriously – there have been the anthrax attacks in the United States, carried out by means of contaminated letters. Five people have been killed by military-grade anthrax, reported to contain one trillion spores per gram. The letter sent to the US Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, alone contained two grams of anthrax – theoretically enough to kill 200 million people (a figure which demonstrates both how easy it is to be alarmist about biological weapons, and how astonishingly lethal they could be if the right means of dispersal could be employed). The high concentration would seem to indicate that this agent was originally procured from a national weapons programme – possibly, even, from America’s own former biological stockpile. The FBI continues, however, to believe that the letters were the work of an embittered loner.¹⁶

The most frightening aspect of all these attacks – apart from the sheer malice and contempt for human life which inspired them – is the relative ease with which they were mounted. And yet the perpetrators, essentially, were amateurs. If professionally-trained terrorists, backed by the resources of a CBW-capable state, were to mount similar attacks, the results could be devastating. ‘We don’t consider it a crime if we tried to have nuclear, biological and chemical weapons,’ declared Osama bin Laden in 1999, and there have been intelligence reports that the Al-Qaeda organization has aquired botulinum toxin from a laboratory in the Czech Republic, paying $7,500 a phial. Anthrax ‘in some form’ is also said to have been obtained from an Indonesian pharmaceutical company.¹⁷ One of the hijackers who helped carry out the suicide attacks of 11 September is known to have inquired about purchasing a crop-dusting aircraft – a perfect means of dispersing chemical and biological agents over a target population. A terrorist who was infected with smallpox, and who sought contact with as many people as possible before succumbing to the disease, would be the ultimate walking suicide bomb. In one simulated exercise, undertaken by officials in Washington in 1999, the progress of smallpox was tracked as it spread through an unvaccinated American population. Within two months, 15,000 people were dead; within a year, the figure was 80 million.¹⁸

In the autumn of 2001, delegates gathered in Geneva to try once again to wrestle with the problem of how to control biological weapons. The Biological Warfare Convention (BWC) of 1972, which had been intended to ban biological warfare, is now thirty years old. Unlike the agreements designed to control chemical weapons, the BWC contains no provisions for outside inspections to check that countries are complying. That it does not is largely the fault of the United States. As late as July 2001, long after the United Nations inspectors had uncovered the full scale of Iraqi biological warfare capacity and less than three months before the outbreak of anthrax terrorism, America was arguing that to insist upon verification arrangements would be to expose it unfairly to prying foreigners.

The picture in 2002 is in some respects more worrying than it was in 1972. It is not merely the threat from the so-called ‘rogue states’ which threatens civilian populations. It is the nagging worry that biological weapons are still based on the old medical discoveries of the early twentieth century, and that science has now moved into hitherto undreamt-of areas. Molecular biologists researching new ways to treat human disease have to recognize that these advances may also open the possibility of others using the same knowledge for the diametrically opposite purpose: to make disease untreatable. The discovery in 2001 by British scientists of the entire genetic code of the plague – cause of the Black Death – was rightly hailed as being of huge benefit to mankind. But, in the wrong hands, the information is potentially devastating. There have been similar discoveries about the genetic makeup of smallpox and cholera. The draft genetic sequences are posted on the Web. They are published in scientific journals. Once the knowledge of the genetic makeup of disease-causing germs is freely available, what is to stop some malevolent researcher using the knowledge not to develop treatment but to manipulate the genes to create diseases which are impervious to existing treatments? The pages of this book, unfortunately, are filled with such characters.

The talk now is of antiobiotic-resistant germs, of ‘stealth’ viruses, genetically engineered to lie dormant in the human body until triggered by terrorists releasing an otherwise harmless chemical. Professor Stephen Hawking has described such germs as the greatest threat facing mankind. At the very least, the freely available abundance of genetic information gives researchers the possibility of creating more viral strains of traditional weapons, such as anthrax, which are also more stable. The discoveries might also make it possible to couple diseases together, so that lethal agents could be joined to apparently harmless ones. Although the Russians have never disclosed the full details, the enormous Soviet biological warfare programme was authoritatively believed to have included a department which attempted the recombination of venom-producing genes from scorpions and cobras with the DNA of harmless bacteria: the objective was that such an agent could, through surreptitious inhalation, produce paralysing toxins.

The very success of the project to map the human genome opens the theoretical possibility of weapons designed to target sectors of the population whose only offence is to share a race, gender or genetic predisposition. The mapping has shown that there are far more similarities between ethnic groups than there are differences. But differences do exist, and either individually or collectively, serve to distinguish one group from another. Manipulating even an old-fashioned agent like anthrax so that it only became active when it identified a certain group of genes could create the ‘ethnic bomb’ first spoken of decades ago. To prevent attempts to develop something like a ‘White Plague’ we can rely only upon the good nature and good judgement of the scientists who have access to this information.

As for the traditional problem with biological weapons – how to deliver them – there are signs that that, too, may be nearer a solution. The Soviet Union considered the delivery problem nearly solved, with intercontinental missiles capable of scattering independently targetable biowarheads over numerous cities. Saddam Hussein developed – but mercifully never used – his ‘great equaliser’ of biological missile warheads. The British Defence Ministry concluded at the start of the twenty-first century that well within thirty years rogue states would have missiles capable of reaching the United Kingdom carrying chemical or biological – or nuclear – warheads. In the end, the protection against biological weapons remains much what it has always been. Generals don’t like them. Their effects are generally highly unpredictable. And – at least until a new, discriminating, superbug is developed – the threat of nuclear retaliation must be supposed to be sufficiently awesome to deter most potential aggressors.

But deterrence rests upon rationality, and the lunatic may not care about the consequences of his actions. In the end, the only way to ensure disarmament is somehow to enforce it. That demands, first, a proper arms control regime, with provisions to allow international inspectors to call, unannounced, at any time. The United States’ record in obstructing attempts to create such a system – born of rivalry between government departments, commercial pressure and political arrogance – has not served it well. Enforcement also means, secondly, that those states which won’t comply must somehow be placed in quarantine, must be constantly monitored, and prevented, as far as possible, from developing these terrible weapons of mass destruction.

Stating the aim is easy enough. But how is it to be achieved? By diplomacy? By sanctions? By military force? These promise to be the dominating questions in world politics over the coming months and years, as the international community continues its long struggle to eradicate what Fritz Haber called ‘a higher form of killing’.