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Bio-Terrorism is a real threat - in the future
 
The natural unease, sometimes bordering on panic that has greeted the first wide scale, but crude use of a biological agent as a terrorist weapon is understandable.A genuine acceptance of the possible long term threat which leads to an improvement in the health services bio-hazard capability, the provision of more and better equipped CBW incident response teams and a general heightening of the publics awareness and knowledge of how best to react in a bio-emergency are to be greatly welcomed.  However, over the last few weeks we have been rather deluged by ill-founded speculation from new found 'experts' or the baseless confidence in present levels of preparation of politicians and administrators struggling to come to terms with the post-September 11th world.
 
Anthrax, the new bogey word, has been presented as a lethal killer threatening Western cities with instant annihilation. A crop-dusting aircraft, suitably modified to spray 100 kgs of Anthrax spores would indeed contain enough lethal does, if inhaled, to kill perhaps 3 million people - in theory anyway. The chances of 3 or 4 million people all standing outside on a windless day breathing in the requisite doses of spores is rather unlikely of course, however that does not mean to suggest that we should not take the threat seriously.  A determined terrorist organization that had managed to develop a usable aerosol dispenser or an explosive device to scatter shrapnel or tiny ball bearings coated with spores in a liquid suspension, at say a major football match, could indeed infect many thousands and with a reasonably high death rate.  This is still not the annihilation feared by the general public, but it is terror on a grand scale with the consequent dire results for the life of the nation.
 
Anthrax can be an acutely infectious and deadly disease, particularly if inhaled when the tiniest doses can produce a choking cough, difficulty in breathing, a high fever and toxaemia leading to death within 24 hours. Its potential to have an 80-100% mortality rate, if left untreated, has long made it attractive as a weapon to the USA, UK, Russia, Japan and China and while these states have reportedly destroyed their stocks, a host of smaller countries see the possession of chemical or biological weapons as providing something of a counter-balance to the nuclear armed states.
 
Chemical & Biological warfare
 
A major advantage to states like North Korea, Iraq or Iran of creating CBW programs is the ease of hiding the facilities required to develop and produce these agents. Anthrax, once the technique for cultivating the spores has been mastered, can be mass-produced. Britain's Porton Down facilities used metal containers, similar to milk churns to prepare the anthrax then using a refined vacuum suction system to transfer the spores off the cultures into 'flasks'. After which it was a relatively simple matter to create a weaponized version.
 
The Japanese probably killed some 250,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians in world war two with a combination of plague and the massive use of the 'Uji' and 'Ha' Anthrax bombs and perhaps as many as 10,000 Allied and Chinese prisoners had died previously during chemical and biological warfare experiments in POW camps.  The Soviet Russians produced many variations on the theme, including the use of the antibiotic-resistant strain known as Bacillus Thuringiensis and by 1987 had weaponized Anthrax in both powdered and liquid form that was at least three times more powerful than in its normal form. The former deputy director of the Soviet and later Russian Biological Weapons programme admitted in 1999, following his defection to the USA, that a 'Genetically Modified' Anthrax weapon had been perfected that was many times more deadly and resistant to antibiotics.
 
However, Anthrax is only one of a wide range of chemical and biological weapons that have been developed over the last century and sooner or later, terrorists like Osama Bin-Laden or those even more extreme groups who wish to replace him will gain access to these weapons and the technology to use them as an effective weapon of mass terror. The moral barriers to the use of such weapons disappeared without trace on the morning of September 11th and while it may still be some time before terrorists can make widescale and regular use of such vile weapons or gain possession of small nuclear weapons, it is imperative that Western Governments make the best possible use of this limited breathing space.
 
Like it or not, democracy is living on borrowed time, for without a shadow of doubt, the changes that will be required to cope with the Bio-terrorist, the Cyber-terrorist or worst still the Nuclear-terrorist of the 21st century may well lead to a major infringement or curtailment of the very liberties and way of life we seek to protect.
 
 
Richard M. Bennett
 
 
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