Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. (Political booknotes: plague upon us).

GERMS:
Biological Weapons and
America's Secret War
by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg,
and William Broad
Simon & Schuster, $27.00

YEARS BEFORE ANTHRAX-BY-MAIL terrorism horrified America, Bill Clinton had a harrowing germ-war scare of his own. At the elite Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head in 1997, a molecular biologist urged Clinton to read The Cobra Event, a thriller involving a mad scientist who unleashes a specially engineered virus in New York, causing victims to claw out their eyes and gobble their tongues. The plot may sound like the product of a high-school creative-writing class, but it badly spooked the president. Clinton began pushing the book on friends and fellow government officials, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and had Pentagon officials brief him on its plausibility. The response he got was not reassuring. From then on, in the words of one national security official, Clinton became "obsessed" with the threat of biological weapons. He grew haunted by the thought of a crop duster spraying disease over the Mall in Washington, and, in the last years of his presidency, he demanded a strong new government emphasis on preparing for such an attack.

In the wake of September 11 and the anthrax letters of the following weeks, Clinton's phobia, once snickered at by some, has gained a much wider resonance. The news that presumed associates of Osama bin Laden had an interest in crop dusters has spurred some Americans to stock up on pills and gas masks. But there remains a dispute about just how easy it would be to infect thousands, or even millions, of Americans with a single strike; plenty of credentialed scientists have dismissed biological weapons as too difficult for terrorists to acquire and use effectively.

The authors of Germs--three New York Times reporters who have long covered the subject: Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad--are not so reassuring. After years of studying bioweapons, they conclude that, while the danger is sometimes needlessly exaggerated by policy-makers trying to alert the public (or swell their budgets), it is "real and rising." Although this has been a clear threat to American policy-makers for several years now, the other key conclusion of Germs is that a maddening combination of bureaucratic inertia, political infighting, intelligence failures, and sheer denial has left us vulnerable to both the death and public mayhem that would accompany a successful large-scale attack. America remains "woefully unprepared" for a major act of bioterrorism, the authors conclude, "a calamity that would be unlike any this country has experienced."

By way of explaining how we reached this state of vulnerability, Germs treats us to a gripping history of bioweapons in the former Soviet Union, Iraq, and the United States. In many ways, it is the American program--the least sinister and threatening--that is most fascinating and most disturbing. For instance, during the Korean War, the federal government persuaded Seventh-Day Adventists, pacifists who refused to bear arms, to submit to secret tests of germ weapons like Q fever in the Utah desert (the participants were given antibiotics shortly after exposure; none are reported to have died). Larger tests, with more benign germs, were even conducted on American cities. In 1965, mock smallpox germs were sprayed from men's briefcases in Washington, D.C. Years earlier, "mild germs" were released in San Francisco and New York so scientists could study their dispersal and effects on the population.

America renounced its offensive germ weapons program in 1969. But by the 1990s, the Soviet and Iraqi programs had achieved a scope and sophistication that astonished Westerners later granted access to them. Before the Gulf War, for instance, Iraq had stockpiled enough germs to wipe out, in theory, the earth's entire population. The Soviet germ-weapons program, meanwhile, was mind-bogglingly apocalyptic, employing tens of thousands of workers and producing strange and exotic weapons out of substances like cobra venom. In their awful zeal, the Soviets even weaponized "Variant U," a virus cultivated from the blood of a germ-warfare scientist named Ustinov who died horribly after an accidental laboratory infection. It's true that Russia is no longer an enemy, and that Iraq's stockpile was destroyed by arms inspectors after the Gulf War. But that's hardly a reason to relax. Many Russian scientists are either desperately poor, and thus potentially susceptible to offers by well-funded terrorists, or are unaccounted for altogether. This is particularly disturbing when you consider that germ-warfare scientists tell Miller, Engelberg, and Broad that "they could teach a terrorist group how to make devastating germ weapons from a few handfuls of backyard dirt and some easily available lab equipment." In part to publicly underscore this point, the U.S. government recently set out to build a germ-weapons plant entirely out of legal commercial materials; it was easily done. As for Iraq, United Nations weapons inspectors left the country nearly three years ago; no one is sure what Saddam Hussein or his scientists have been up to since.

As Bill Clinton and others grasped these troubling facts, America finally began to take preparedness seriously. But the results so far, according to Germs, have been a familiar story of government folly, turf wars, and disorganization. Despite concerns about impoverished Russian germ scientists, programs to keep them employed have been stingily funded. The nation's public health system remains "a disaster," with few doctors trained to spot a germ attack and most hospitals ill-equipped to respond to a surge of patients. Stockpiles of vaccines, meanwhile, are pathetically sparse, thanks in part to years of incompetence at the nation's only anthrax vaccine lab. An Army request for new teams to "sniff" the air around battlefields for germs was sneered at by other branches, who saw it as an excuse to buy more helicopters.

And once money did begin to flow under Clinton, it often appears to have been wasted. (See "Weapons of Mass Confusion," May 2001.) Over three years, $143 million was funneled into a program to create crack National Guard response teams, for example, but nine of the 10 units had no communications link to their headquarters, and only half had even been trained. "Biological defense turned into an entitlement program for federal agencies, private contractors, and government consultants," the authors write.

Exasperating words, given that anthrax has now knocked at America's door. But there's some reassuring news here, too--although the authors give it less emphasis. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which gassed the Tokyo subway in 1995, failed a dozen times to spray germs in populated areas. And the greatest fear of U.S. scientists--the production of ruthlessly efficient "superviruses" for which there are no vaccines or cures--appears to be years away and well out of terrorists' reach. What's more, the recent terrorist attacks attacks have already accelerated crucial bio war-response efforts, from public education to the faster stock-piling of vaccines. Still, should terrorists acquire germ weapons, there will never be a perfect defense against suicidal individuals happy to act as "smallpox carriers or Marburg martyrs," who wander through airports or downtown areas. We can only hope for the best and prepare, as quickly as we can, for the worst. It may be nearer than we ever imagined.

MICHAEL CROWLEY is an associate editor of The New Republic.