The New York Times OP-ED

Saturday, October 16, 1999

IS THAT AN EPIDEMIC - OR A TERRORIST ATTACK?

Bioterrorism Is the Latest of Our Worries

By Jonathan B. Tucker

SFANFORD, Calif. The news media are fascinated with bioterrorism. After a New Yorker article this week quoted unnamed Central Intelligence Agency analysts who speculated,, apparently wrongly, that the outbreak of West Nile-like fever in

New York could have been the work of Iraqi terrorists, a number of television news programs reported the story. And earlier this month, ABC's "Nightilne" aired a weeklong docu-dramma in which a hypothetical anthrax attack on the subway system of a major city inflicts more than 50,000 deaths.

This sort of worst-case scenario is extremely unlikely. In truth, most

terrorists aren't interested in staging catastrophic biological attacks,

and those who are would have significant technical hurdles to overcome.

Over the past century, not a single American has died from bioterrorism. Hundreds of hoaxes involving anthrax have been staged during the past two years, but only one successful biological attack has been reported in the United States. In 1984, members of the Rajneeshee cult contaminated an Oregon town's salad bars with salmonella bacteria, making 751 people temporarily sick.

The objective was to manipulate the outcome of a local election by keeping voters home.

There are reasons why there has been only one successful bioterrorist

attack. Most politically motivated terrorist groups have no incentive to

engage in biological warfare. Conventional weapons are easier to use that microbes, and bioterrorist attacks could alienate supporters and provoke severe government repression.

The sort of group likely to engage in bioterrorism has no political constituency and is motivated by apocalyptic prophecy, religious fanaticism, racist ideology or revenge. Yet groups of this kind are usually small and lack the money and the technological know-how to produce and deliver biological weapons.

True, a rogue state like Iraq might provide technical help, but only at

grave risk: the sponsor could lose control over the terrorists and invite

severe retaliation if its involvement became known. Or a wealthy terrorist group might try to recruit scientists formerly employed by the Soviet Union, for example, which had advanced bioweapons programs. But no evidence currently available points to such assistance.

Without technical help, small terrorist cells would have a hard time

mounting a large-scale biological attack. Germs suitable for warfare are difficult to mass-produce and even harder to disseminate effectively. Microbes might be spread, for example, as an aerosol cloud, but it is technically complex and dangerous to produce a concentrated aerosol that could infect thousands of

people. Contaminating urban water supplies is also beyond the ability of

most terrorists, mainly because a huge volume of harmful agent would be needed to overcome the effects of dilution, chlorination and filtration.

In the late 1980's in Japan, the Aum Shinrikyo cult, which had vast

financial resources, recruited scientists from leading Japanese universities to develop bioweapons. But even though the cult acquired anthrax bacteria and botulinum toxin and carried out several attacks in Japan, no injuries or deaths were reported. The cult then resorted to sarin, a chemical nerve agent. In

March 1995, the group released the poisonn on the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and injuring more than a thousand:

Given the constraints, a bioterrorist attack in the United States in which thousands of people are killed remains extremely unlikely. While planning for such an event is warranted, government authorities should pay attention to a far more probable scenario: small-scale incidents involving food or drug contamination, which could cause widespread fear and economic disruption. 0