Has the massive expansion of biodefence research in the US since the anthrax letters of 2001 made America a safer place, or more dangerous?The chief suspect in the 2001 anthrax case is thought to be Bruce Ivins*, a biodefence researcher who committed suicide shortly before charges were brought against him last year. It is a bit of a murky affair and lots of alternative theories of varying plausibility abound though.
That's the burning question among specialists in infectious disease, after a flurry of concerns about safety at labs handling potential bioweapons agents.
However it seems likely that the anthrax was sent by someone who only had access to weaponised anthrax in order to prepare a response in case anyone use weaponised anthrax. In other words if it weren't for the efforts to prepare for an anthrax attack there would have been no anthrax attack.
So wouldn't the safest method of avoiding future attacks with biological weapons be to stop making them? As it is it seems to be somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy, to prepare for biological warfare by getting leading scientists to develop more effective forms of biological warfare.
Most terrorist groups can't develop weapons themselves because they have neither the resources nor the expertise to carry out complex research and development. Countries can make them, and in some cases probably are doing so, but by and large those most likely to use them would be more likely to harm themselves than to harm the countries with the highest standards of public health and the best medical researchers on the planet.
* He appears to have been the scientific equivalent of those firemen/arsonists, releasing the anthrax in order to push the US government to increase research on anthrax.
7 comments:
"So wouldn't the safest method of avoiding future attacks with biological weapons be to stop making them? "
Well, let's see. How has totally disarming our population worked to stop gun cri...
Oh. Right.
Yeah but the difference is that criminals can get guns from other sources, whereas there are only a handful of governments that have access to sophisticated biological weapons.
Aren't some of them pretty easy to grow in a lab? Probably Leg-Iron would know.
Plus, ricin is made from kidney beans, isn't it? So, a shopping trip to ASDA, and you're sorted!
Yes, terrorists can produce a few existing poisons like Ricin, but they aren't going to innovate and produce innovative weaponised versions of them.
If scientists in a lab created a new more effective version of ricin that did not otherwise exist that would create a threat that would not have arisen otherwise.
If they can construct viruses on computers, why not in nature?
Ross, ultimately you are right.
On the wider issue, if Western government build WMDs then it only encourages the shitty countries like Russia or Iran or North Korea to want to build some as well.
The good news is that building proper WMDs is ridiculously expensive and those shitty countries can't afford it and/or if they did it their people would be so starved that they are more and not less likely to engage in revolution, regime change.
But up to now the regimes in those shitty countries look just as firmly in place as they did twenty or thirty years ago.
"On the wider issue, if Western government build WMDs then it only encourages the shitty countries like Russia or Iran or North Korea to want to build some as well."
I don't agree with that, they'll try to build whatever they can.
In the case of biological weapons I don't see the people most likely to use them as being capable of making anything that developed countries wouldn't be able to cope with.
With nuclear weapons anything they build is too dangerous.
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