From Amazon
While the U.S. maintained an active "bugs and gas" program in the '50s and early '60s, bio-weapons were effectively pulled off this country's agenda in 1972 when countries around the world, led by the United States, forswore development of such weapons at the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The issue reemerged in the early '90s thanks to Saddam Hussein and revelations of the clandestine and massive buildup of bio-weapons in remote corners of the Soviet Union. The book's description of the Soviet program is horrific. At its peak the program employed thousands of scientists, developing bioengineered pathogens as well as producing hundreds of tons of plague, anthrax, and smallpox annually. The authors conclude that while a biological attack against the United States is not necessarily inevitable, the danger of bio-weapons is too real to be ignored. Well-researched and documented, this book will not disappoint readers looking for a reliable and sober resource on the topic. --Harry C. Edwards --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
William Safire The New York Times The most important book of the year.
David Perlman San Francisco Chronicle Engrossing, well-documented, and highly readable....Both a revelation and a history; [the] authors are both skilled reporters and tellers of vivid stories.
Book Description
Featuring an inside look at how germ warfare has been waged throughout history and what form its future might take (and in whose hands), Germs reads like a gripping detective story told by fascinating key figures: American and Soviet medical specialists who once made germ weapons but now fight their spread, FBI agents who track Islamic radicals, the Iraqis who built Saddam Hussein's secret arsenal, spies who travel the world collecting lethal microbes, and scientists who see ominous developments on the horizon. With clear scientific explanations and harrowing insights, Germs is a masterfully written -- and timely -- work of investigative journalism.
About the Author
William J. Broad has practiced yoga since 1970. A bestselling author and senior writer at The New York Times, he has won every major award in print and television during more than thirty years as a science journalist. With New York Times colleagues, he has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as an Emmy Award and a DuPont. He is the author or coauthor of seven books, including Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, a #1 New York Times bestseller.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Decades before the Rajneeshees started their experimentation, the United States and the Soviet Union were already veterans at turning germs into weapons, having produced arsenals to cripple and kill millions of people. There had been challenges. On the American side, a main problem solver was Bill Patrick. For two decades, he had done biological research at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. Army's sprawling base for the design of germ weapons. He had been awarded five patents and risen to become chief of what was known as the Product Development Division. In 1969, when President Nixon suddenly ended the program, he had stayed on at Detrick doing defensive work.
So when the Federal Bureau of Investigation needed a top expert to study the attack of the Rajneeshees and examine the cult's compound, it turned to Patrick. Flown out from Detrick to Oregon in late 1985, he sensed that the cult was to blame for the outbreak. For one thing, he found a germ incubator -- an unusual piece of equipment for a health clinic. Patrick knew salmonella well. Scientists at Detrick had investigated the bug as a weapon, with at least one worker falling ill.
As the evidence grew, Patrick could see that the people in The Dalles had been victims of crude bioterrorism. The Rajneesh crowd had chosen one of the mildest pathogens and had ignored the airborne delivery of biological agents -- the traditional and most effective way of mobilizing microbes for war. Growing germs was easy; the process was like brewing beer. It was the subtleties of biological engineering -- drying germs, encapsulating them in special coatings, making them hardy and stable enough for wide dissemination by aerosol sprayers, learning how to extend their shelf life -- that turned pathogens into deadly weapons.
Beginning in the 1950s, Patrick and his men had devised little biological time bombs that would float invisibly in the air for hours, like dust, or sail far on the wind. The small size of the particles meant that once they encountered a person, they could penetrate deep into the lungs. The natural defenses of the human respiratory tract, ranging from hairs in the nose to cilia along the windpipe, easily block large particles. But small ones zip right by. Inside the lung, multiplying in moist tissues, a single invader could produce millions of offspring. Patrick and his coworkers had also learned how to concentrate the tiny bomblets, ensuring wide destruction. In time, they had managed to increase the potency of anthrax -- a usually fatal disease of coughing, high fevers, hard breathing, chest pain, heavy perspiration, and a bluish discoloration of the skin caused by lack of oxygen -- so that a single gallon held up to eight billion lethal doses, enough to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet. A bigger challenge was distributing the poison, most of which would dissipate in the wind. American scientists had spent decades investigating how to make lethal dissemination as efficient as possible.
Such progress had a price, of course. Painstakingly, the germ-development program at Fort Detrick had tested prospective germ weapons on nearly a thousand American soldiers, in sealed chambers and the wilds of the Utah desert. Reaching beyond the military, it had exposed prisoners at the Ohio State Penitentiary, where volunteers were carefully monitored. Clandestinely, it also sprayed American cities with mild germs to investigate the likely impact of deadly pathogens.
The price of progress also included a number of accidents in which the experimenters, including Patrick, were inadvertently turned into human guinea pigs. Women were largely banned from the work after two gave birth to children with severe birth defects. Both babies died. In all, the scientists made enough mistakes to become victims of their own pathogens 456 times. All but three survived. Two men fell to anthrax. One was consumed by Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, an exotic ailment that eats away at the body's internal organs and causes profuse bleeding from the nose, mouth, anus, and other mucous membranes. Patrick himself came down with Q fever. This relatively mild disease was meant to cripple foes with chills, coughing, headaches, hallucinations, and fevers of up to 104 degrees.
Patrick had no regrets. After decades of living with burdensome secrecy rules, he spoke freely in his early seventies about the experiments, his own illness, and the deaths. It had all been done in the line of duty, driven by fear of the Communists, he said. What Moscow's germ program was in fact doing turned out to be far worse than anything Patrick and his colleagues ever imagined.
In speaking out, Patrick wanted to rebut critics who argued that germ weapons were impractical and too dangerous to use. He was eager to show not only the seriousness of the foreign menace but also how far the black art had come in American hands. In addition, he wanted to warn that the Rajneeshees' attack was but a foretaste of things to come. Terrorism was on the rise, and increasingly its targets were American. Late in life, he worked hard with many federal agencies to encourage better defenses, worried about the threat not only to Americans but also his own family.
Nothing in his past had suggested that Bill Patrick would become a germ warrior. Like a surprising number of his peers who developed weapons for biological warfare, he had begun his career eager to save lives and aid the revolution that was turning medicine from an art into a science. To all appearances, he was just a regular guy.
William Capers Patrick III was born July 24, 1926, the only child of a southern couple whose families were of Scotch-Irish descent. His middle name was taken from a relation who was a Methodist bishop. His hometown of Furman, South Carolina, was a tiny speck of civilization that lay in the Low Country near the Savannah River. While provincial, with a population of about one hundred people, the town and the surrounding area were a boy's dream.
Patrick was serving in the army during the Second World War when he first encountered penicillin, which was just coming into wide use as a way to battle microbes in the human body. Fascinated by the development, he went back to school ready to cure diseases and aid the new field of antibiotic medicine.
He received a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of South Carolina in 1948 and, a year later, a master's degree in microbiology from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Upon graduation in 1949, he began working for a company in Indiana that made the new wonder drugs of antibiotic medicine. A research microbiologist, he helped pioneer ways to mass-produce penicillin and bacitracin, another antibiotic. His work centered on learning how best to grow microbes and extract their antibiotics, which are natural compounds that germs use to fight one another in microscopic wars. Most fundamentally, he helped find ways to keep the bacterial colonies alive and reproducing, a process that required the constant renewal of food supplies and the removal of metabolic wastes.
In his antibiotic work, Patrick was aiding one of the greatest and most inconspicuous of human revolutions. People in antiquity had lived an average of twenty or thirty years. By Patrick's day, the figure had risen to more than sixty years. By the century's end, in industrial nations, it stood at roughly eighty years. The lengthening of the human life span was due largely to the decline of infectious disease. One by one, history's great killers and cripplers -- plague, cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox, typhus, leprosy, diphtheria, polio, influenza, dysentery, pneumonia, whooping cough, and a dozen other scourges -- had been vanquished or tamed.
One day, Patrick got a call from a former teacher in Tennessee who had gone to work for the military on secret projects. His work, the mentor confided, centered on how highly pathogenic organisms might be deployed to help deter and win wars. He could give no details; such talk was forbidden. But the research was fascinating. He urged the biologist to sign up, appealing to his love of country and his sense of scientific adventure.
The young scientist was eager for challenges and flattered by the attentions of a former teacher. In 1951 after a background check that took more than half a year, Patrick won a top-secret clearance and permission to work at what was then called Camp Detrick, the heart of the federal government's research on germ warfare.
Germs and warfare are old allies. More than two millennia ago, Scythian archers dipped arrowheads in manure and rotting corpses to increase the deadliness of their weapons. Tatars in the fourteenth century hurled dead bodies foul with plague over the walls of enemy cities. British soldiers during the French and Indian War gave unfriendly tribes blankets sown with smallpox. The Germans in World War I spread glanders, a disease of horses, among the mounts of rival cavalries. The Japanese in World War II dropped fleas infected with plague on Chinese cities, killing hundreds and perhaps thousands of people.
Despite occasional grim successes, germ weapons have never played decisive roles in warfare or terrorism. Unintended infection is another matter. European conquests around the globe were often made possible because the indigenous peoples lacked immunity to the invaders' endemic diseases, including smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, and plague. But intentional warfare with germ weapons has been relatively rare, especially in modern times, and has been widely condemned as unethical and inhumane. Even so, in the early twentieth century, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom were among the many countries that investigated how to wage biological war.
All understood that the weapons they were developing were fundamentally different from bombs and bullets, grenades and missiles. These munitions were alive. They could multiply exponentially and, if highly contagious, spread like wildfire. Strangest of all, given war's din, they worked silently.
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