You've Got Germs

...All it took in the autumn of 2001 to deploy a simple anthrax attack was a batch of envelopes and stamps...

...More convenient than nuclear bombs, however, germs are cheap, tough to detect while in production, and hard to trace...

...Germs recalls such signal moments as Harvard's Matthew Meselson testifying to senators in 1989, while the Soviet program was forging ahead, and Saddam was producing buckets of botulinum toxin and anthrax, that "no nation possesses a stockpile of biological or toxin weapons...

...Nor do they necessarily need fancy delivery systems...

...Ejecting Saddam Hussein from power will be a big help—if we ever get around to it...

...But before you dedicate every hour of every sleepless night to those mushroom clouds, save some fretting time for the "true weapons of the twenty-first century," which is how New York Times reporter Judith Miller, speaking at a conference in Israel in December, neatly described what might yet prove the deadliest weapons of all: germs...

...And as the shocks fade from that dreadful autumn, Germs could stand a lot more advertising, at least until its gist has been far better absorbed: that we remain desperately unprepared for the kind of biological attacks that are becoming ever more likely, and potentially more deadly...

...Since the shocks of 2001, there has been some motion toward better addressing such threats...

...Like nuclear bombs, the worst germs are capable of killing on a huge scale...

...The perpetrator has not yet been caught...

...Germs treats at length a series of points ticked off briskly by Ms...

...And though it's been more than a year since, there's every reason to expect much worse to come...

...Germs goes on to lay out a lot of highly relevant and horrifying material on the germ projects of Saddam Hussein, and the discovery after the 1991 Gulf War that "Iraq had built and concealed a germ arsenal that was far larger and more lethal than anyone had understood"—something that this time around we had better understand...

...What comes through, above all, is the near-chronic tendency of U.S...

...We remain short on vaccines, short on defensive research, short on planning, and beset by our own lawsuit-prone legal system, which hampers preparations for our own defense...

...Kicking the Taliban out of power in Afghanistan and getting al-Qaeda on the run probably bought us some time...

...Miller in her Israeli lecture, explaining exactly why biological agents might yet become the poor man's atom bomb, the terrorist weapons of choice—especially as science makes them ever more malleable...

...The administration has ordered up a new generation of smallpox vaccine and taken such first steps as vaccinating an initial round of crucial personnel, including President Bush, against this excruciating and usually fatal-disease...

...The anthrax murders, write the authors of Germs, earned themselves a special place in the history of assaults on America as "the first intentional deaths from lethal germs...

...But it was a modern milestone, as this bookrecounts: "It was the first large-scale use of germs by terrorists on American soil, the union of a modern phenomenon and an age-old means of destruction...

...From there, Germs goes on to trace the development of modern biological weapons, including President Nixon's decision to scrap the U.S...

...Miller went on to warn about biological weapons with an argument so thorough, horrifying, and urgent that the editor of this magazine, Bob Tyrrell, who was in the audience, asked me that same evening to review Miller's book on the subject, coauthored with two Times colleagues, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad...

...policy-makers and "experts" over the years to doubt that our enemies would be willing to dabble much in the kind of lethal germ programs that they have turned out, time and again, to be pursuing on a grotesque and enormous scale...

...We are still a nation behaving by and large as if the most urgent medical issue of the day were who pays for prescription drugs for seniors, not the genuine threat some messianic murderer, wielding a bunch of bugs, might yet try to wipe not only seniors, but juniors, right off the map...

...Most directly, we have found the will to recognize and at least start getting rid of our worst enemies...

...All the better, then, that Germs is now out in paperback from Touchstone Books, with an afterword that includes both September 11 and the mysterious anthrax letters that followed...

...Germs opens with the tale of a food poisoning outbreak engineered in 1984 by some members of the Rajneeshee cult, then operating in Oregon, who laced laboratory-bred salmonella into food served at local restaurants...

...Or September 11, for that matter...

...Above all, we remain short on a comprehensive strategy for putting to work this country's vast resources of initiative and know-how in order to fully gird for the threats ahead...

...In the hands of the wicked—and they do seem to be out and about in force right now—these new technologies hold the promise to take the most hideous diseases known to man, makethem not only worse, but vaccine-resistant, and turn them into cheap and highly mobile weapons...

...This translates into danger all the more dire given the recent scientific leaps in such areas as recombinant DNA...

...In the right hands such science can confer lifesaving benefits...

...On the defensive front, we're slightly more ready than in the summer of 2001...

...Or, even when staring at the evidence, our leaders and experts have too often ducked the issue as simply "too hard" to tackle...

...But all that still leaves America far from truly prepared...

...With a remarkably prescient stroke of timing, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War was first published on September 11, 2001...

...No one died, and the story made little news at the time...

...As this latest edition of Germs concludes: "We remain woefully unprepared for a calamity that could make the anthrax mailings seem tame...

...Given the odds that North Korea might already be peddling plutonium in the Pyongyang duty-free shop, or Saddam Hussein might even now be tucking the bomb into a bag bound for Boston, I'd say go ahead and get nervous...

...Most Americans now know that biological attacks are not the stuff of sheer science fiction...

...lit...

...program in 1969, while the Soviet Union clandestinely continued its own program—secretly churning out germ weapons, souping up plague, tularemia, and anthrax, trying to meld Marburg with smallpox—on an industrial scale, the full extent of which remains unknown to this day...

...Washington has budgeted more funds for biodefense and has begun facing the fact that smallpox, though eradicated in nature, remains not only stored in the United States and Russia, but quite likely stockpiled in such rogue states as Iraq and North Korea...