Isegoria

Back in 2003, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established a multibillion-dollar national syndromic surveillance system called BioSense:

Under the BioSense platform, the CDC collects biosurveillance information on Americans from 7,200 healthcare facilities across fifty states, Washington, D.C., and Guam. This includes near-real-time data from emergency departments, urgent care clinics, ambulatory care centers, and other registered facilities, all of which feeds into centralized servers at the CDC for rapid analysis.

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But the program does not include any data from any of the nation’s homeless shelters or clinics. None. This means that the entirety of America’s ~800,000-person homeless population is left out of the CDC’s national syndromic surveillance program.

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Across America, the phenomenon of mass overdose in homeless camps has gone from rare to commonplace. In July 2025, police in Baltimore responded to a “mass casualty” incident in an open-air drug market, after twenty-seven people overdosed on fentanyl mixed with what was reported to be some kind of powerful sedative. Thirteen medical units and four fire trucks were sent to triage people on-site, with dozens of officers trying to locate more potential victims.

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More than twenty years ago, the U.S. Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center wrote a handbook for police officers describing what to expect in a biological incident or attack. It acknowledges a merciless truth. Unlike U.S. military personnel, who are trained and equipped to enter contaminated battlespaces in protective gear and gas masks, local law enforcement officers and first responders will face biological threats unprotected.

Since the publication of the U.S. Army’s guide, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on what the government calls BioDefense.

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Biological attacks are invisible. Silent and odorless, they won’t be detected until people start dying and contagion levels are already out of control.

An aerosolized pathogen is the ultimate nightmare scenario. Humans must breathe air to stay alive; with an airborne pathogen incident or attack, breathing becomes the primary dispersal mechanism of death.

Law enforcement, first responders, doctors, and nurses will be exposed. The people best equipped to respond and help will become sick and die, leaving few professionals left to care for the sick and the dying.

Mass panic will likely collapse the medical system. The sudden onset of dying people will lead to a crushing wave of infected people and not infected people (“ the worried well”), overwhelming local emergency medical systems before diagnoses can be made. The noninfected will become infected while waiting for aid.

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The system is flawed to the point of breaking. A 2022 after-action report following a terrorist-attack exercise in Los Angeles found that L.A. County’s Emergency Operations Center was “unable to coordinate the dissemination of emergency public information” effectively, and that it “did not take any corrective action to establish an alternate method” after it was clear the system had failed.

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The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is “[ a] corrupt, bloated, inefficient bureaucracy,” the Los Angeles–based AIDS Healthcare Foundation insists, and it is not alone in its assessment. A 2025 audit of the agency dedicated to Los Angeles public health found that hundreds of millions of dollars of Los Angeles’s $ 875-million-a-year budget for the homeless (which has since been raised to $ 953 million for fiscal year 2025–2026) had been spent recklessly and without transparency. “It’s now been verified by two audits that [the city] cannot produce an account for the work that they are funded to do,” City Council member Monica Rodriguez told the Associated Press, “and that, to me, is an egregious breach of taxpayer trust.”

The United States does not have a vaccine for plague, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), for reasons that are complicated:

Russia’s vaccine, called Live Plague Vaccine, or LPV, is understood to have been created from an attenuated, or weakened, strain of plague. “For the past almost eight decades of usage,” writes Russian vaccine expert Valentina A. Feodorova, “millions of [Russian] people have been immunized with this LPV.”

Russia has a long history of plague epidemics. The Russian Ministry of Health lists Y. pestis bacteria as an “Extremely Dangerous to Human Populations” pathogen on its version of the CDC’s Tier 1 Select Agent list. Because of this, Russians generally embrace anti-plague-vaccine campaigns. There are “no recorded live vaccine-related deaths or serious post-vaccination complications,” Feodorova adds, which may or may not be true. “Reactions are generally mild and of short duration,” she says.

Plague epidemics tend to occur in remote regions of Siberia, in border areas with Mongolia and China. Large plague outbreaks in Russian cities are uncommon. During the Cold War, there were at least five research institutes dedicated to what Russia calls anti-plague work. As we know from Igor Domaradskij’s writings, many of these institutions performed dual-use biological weapons work.

The United States used to have a plague vaccine, but not anymore. During the Vietnam War, soldiers were given the EV76 Y. pestis vaccine, but some of them got sick and it was discontinued.

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In 1999, the FDA renewed plague vaccine efforts but discontinued use after EV76 caused severe reactions in nonhuman primates. Some of the apes being used as medical test subjects contracted fatal plague and died.

“There’s another great vaccine that’s been in development at USAMRIID for a while,” Dr. Heine tells us; he worked on this program for the army, fifteen years ago. “But this vaccine is lost in bureaucracy and is nowhere near being ready for human trials—that I’m aware of,” he says, a fact that remains largely unknown outside defense medicine circles.

In Virginia, an NRO intelligence officer uploads the images of the Russian truck convoy into the classified JWICS and SIPRNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) for the intelligence community to see, and analyze.

Biological war can begin with an accident, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War):

A large-scale attack with a biological weapon can set off a pandemic, but so can a lab leak.

“The risk of a pandemic from a lab escape is not hypothetical,” Andy Weber tells us. He’s one of a small number of U.S. officials to have ever visited the Vector Institute, which he did in the 1990s. Weber has firsthand knowledge of the germs stored inside the freezers at Vector, many of which have been weaponized to kill population sets in the most diabolical of ways.

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“We have eyes on all critical facilities,” retired colonel Julian Chesnutt, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, tells us, “near continuous coverage of all ‘facilities of interest’ across the globe.”

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Airborne killers like plague, smallpox, and genetically modified flu will have a high transmission rate, high fear factor, and potential global impact. Fluid-contact killers like Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fever will have a lower rate of spread, but similarly high lethality and panic components. Environmentally persistent spores like anthrax will mean limited, person-to-person spread, but long-term contamination and psychological issues.

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“If you can deal with a lab leak in the first twelve to twenty-four hours, the outcome can be drastically different,” Dr. Robert Kadlec tells us. Kadlec, a retired air force physician, is a long-serving presidential advisor on bioterrorism. During the Covid pandemic, he was a primary driver of Operation Warp Speed, the government-led effort that developed, manufactured, and distributed 977 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine across the United States.

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If a deadly pathogen has been accidently released, sharing information—or even asking for help—makes containment far more likely. Containment of an infected population through quarantine, contact tracing, and other measures allows public health officials to stop a pandemic in its tracks. “Koltsovo is not Beijing,” Dr. Cameron says of this [fictional] scenario, meaning quarantining Koltsovo’s 20,000 residents would be possible, whereas quarantining a city like Beijing, with a population of 22 million, would never work. But Dr. Cameron’s comments also allude to a much greater existential threat. One that hangs like a sword of Damocles over all of us. Many of today’s BSL-4 labs have been built in or near cities with millions of people.

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Because all biological weapons programs are illegal, all biological weapons programs are clandestine, or disguised as vaccine or other kinds of research.

After the anthrax scare in 2001, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), gain-of-function research quickly became normalized within government-funded science:

Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded this kind of experimental research with gusto, not just in labs across America, but also in BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs overseas, including in places like Wuhan, China.

“The benefits of such [gain-of-function] experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks,” argued Dr. Anthony Fauci in a 2012 paper. Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time. During the Covid pandemic, he served as chief medical advisor to Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Critics of gain-of-function cried foul, citing the Australian mousepox experiment of 2001 and the H5N1 ferret flu experiments conducted in the Netherlands and the United States in 2011–2012 as examples of all that could go wrong. In the mousepox experiment, a relatively simple genetic tweak inadvertently turned a mild virus into a weapon that killed previously vaccinated host mice, proving the nightmare reality that gain-of-function can easily erase existing immunity. In the H5N1 ferret flu experiments, scientists took one of the deadliest influenza viruses ever observed in humans and taught it to spread through the air, demonstrating how a pandemic-causing airborne pathogen can be easily engineered in a lab.

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In 2014, the Obama administration imposed a temporary federal pause on certain gain-of-function studies.

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Gain-of-function was reclassified under a new term known as “Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight,” or P3CO, shifting the debate from prohibition to risk management.

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And then came the Covid pandemic, thrusting gain-of-function experiments into the global spotlight. As facts emerged, millions of people began to question whether Covid’s SARS-CoV-2 virus arose naturally, from bats, or had been genetically engineered in Wuhan’s secretive BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs.

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Governments around the world continue to fund this kind of high-risk research today, almost always with the same central argument in play. That worst-case-scenario pathogen experiments conducted inside a BSL-3 or BSL-4 lab are essential to preventing a worst-case-scenario incident or attack from happening in the real world.

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A 2025 global survey identified 110 BSL-4 labs in thirty-four countries and 3,515 BSL-3 labs across 149 countries, possibly more.

As if what had happened on 9/11 wasn’t terrorizing enough, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), just days later, a biological weapons attack unfurled across the East Coast and in the state of Florida:

Envelopes laced with weaponized anthrax bacteria were sent through the U.S. mail to two U.S. senators and the offices of several national news organizations, including ABC, CBS, and NBC. When one of these anthrax-filled letters, addressed to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, was opened inside the mailroom of the Hart Senate Office Building (part of the U.S. Capitol complex), the country suddenly realized it was under biological attack.

The Capitol was shut down. Thousands of congressional staff were tested. Major U.S. postal facilities closed. Twenty-two people in four states contracted anthrax disease. Five died. Horrific, yes, but a mass-casualty attack it was not. Unlike the 9/11 attacks, which were quickly attributed to Al Qaeda, responsibility for the anthrax letters, still contentiously debated, has never formally been solved.

Inside the federal government, the anthrax attacks weren’t just a wake-up call; they became a call to arms. A biological agent could easily be used as a weapon—this kind of an attack was cheap to mount, difficult to attribute, and capable of producing massive impact.

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In 2004, Congress launched Project BioShield—a federal program designed to accelerate the research and development of vaccines and other medical countermeasures—pouring billions of dollars into biodefense.

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This influx of investments fueled innovative vaccine platforms, antiviral drugs, and state-of-the-art diagnostic tools, fundamentally reshaping the nation’s scientific landscape. Across Washington, D.C., and beyond, the power center shifted toward secretive biodefense research, much of it classified. Transparency all but disappeared.

A biodefense industrial complex emerged. And with it, a vast expansion of high- and maximum-containment Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) and Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories across the United States, and around the world.

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Before September 2001, the U.S. government operated just two BSL-4 laboratories, one military, at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and one civilian, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. After 9/11, the number of BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs surged. Over the next five years, dozens, then hundreds, then more than 1,000 of these new, high- and maximum-containment biosecurity labs were built. A congressional audit in 2007 found there were at least fifteen BSL-4 labs and 1,356 BSL-3 labs in the United States alone. Even more alarming, no one was monitoring any of it.

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“‘Gain-of-function’ is a euphemism,” insists the former presidential advisor Andy Weber. “‘Gain-of-function research’ is another way of saying ‘biological weapons engineering,’” he warns.

Dr. Thomas Ehrhard, former special assistant to the deputy secretary of defense, has even harsher words for gain-of-function, almost certainly because of the knowledge he has acquired running classified biological war games at the Pentagon.

“Gain-of-function is evil,” says Ehrhard. No nuance there.

In 1989, one of the the Russian biological weapons program’s highest-ranking scientists defected to the West, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War):

His name was Vladimir Pasechnik. The information he revealed, first to the British intelligence officer Dr. Christopher Davis, and later to counterproliferation officers at the CIA, changed everything about the biological sciences going forward.

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“In retrospect, it was one of the greatest intelligence failures of the Cold War,” says the CIA’s James Lawler, the former head of its Counterproliferation Division, Special Activities Unit.

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Before his defection to England, Vladimir Pasechnik had been working in Leningrad as the director of an organization called the Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations when he experienced a crisis of conscience. “He realized he could no longer live with himself,” doing illegal biological weapons work, says Davis. Pasechnik decided that on his next trip outside the Soviet Union, he would turn himself over to Western authorities, reveal the inner workings of the Russian program, and confess his sins.

During a somewhat rare trip to France, to sign contracts with an equipment company, Pasechnik made his move. In Paris, he located the address for the Canadian embassy in the phone book and knocked on the front door. Inside, he told a diplomat that he was a Soviet scientist who worked at a highly classified weapons laboratory and that he needed to speak with someone urgently. That he wanted to defect to the West. The Canadians didn’t believe him and made him leave. Desperate but determined, Pasechnik called the British embassy from a pay phone. The British Secret Intelligence Service took him seriously. He was picked up in a car, then secreted away to the United Kingdom. A week later, he was in an unnamed building in London, sitting across the table from Dr. Davis, the top biological weapons expert with the British Defence Intelligence Staff at the time.

Pasechnik told Dr. Davis everything he knew. Among the revelations, Davis learned Pasechnik oversaw some 3,000 scientists and weapons engineers. That he had access to an unlimited budget, which allowed him to purchase equipment in the West and to recruit the best science staff he could find. That he and his various teams had made biological superweapons, and the means to deploy them. That they’d figured out how to modify cruise missiles to fly beneath U.S. radar systems, to disperse aerosolized clouds of plague and other pathogens over large populations, in a strategic biological weapons attack. That Pasechnik had personally figured out how to stabilize plague microbes for exactly this kind of radical, widespread dissemination.

“As he talked about plague, I became incredibly alarmed,” Davis tells us. He realized the stunning ramifications of what Pasechnik was telling him. “You do not choose plague as a battlefield weapon,” says Davis. “You chose plague because you’re going to take out the other person’s country. It’s a nuclear equivalent, except it’s cleaner. It leaves all the infrastructure intact. Full stop. That’s what it is about.”

Mass extermination.

Because the Russians’ biological weapons program was a clear violation of the BWC treaty, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War), the Soviets went to great lengths to disguise it:

Igor Domaradskij was the first scientific director at Obolensk, and the first chief of the plague genetics program there. In his hand-typed writings (shared with us by Milton Leitenberg), Domaradskij reveals one such facade.

“Everything [was designed] to mislead any foreign intelligence,” Domaradskij writes, and that the Obolensk weapons facility was built to resemble an insane asylum, including actors dressed as mentally ill patients roaming the grounds. “[ F] rom space, it looked like some kind of sanatorium, with the convalescents walking about in pyjamas [sic] or playing volleyball!”

A civilian front organization was created to appear as if it produced vaccines and other medical countermeasures. The program was so highly classified that its name—Biopreparat, meaning “biological preparations” in English—was personally chosen by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, back in 1973.

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The main building at Obolensk was an eight-story structure, its exterior dominated by glass. The floors were organized by the deadly pathogen being researched: anthrax, tularemia, glanders, plague. Top secret meetings like the one in 1989 took place in a large auditorium near the center of the building, austere and without windows. “We were not allowed to bring briefcases or bags inside the room,” Alibek recalled. Any notes written down during briefings were confiscated by security guards. If a scientist wanted to see their own notes later, they had to get special permission.

The engineered plague Annie Jacobsen posits (in Biological War) is designed not only to be more virulent, more transmissible, and resistant to antibiotics, but it also has a secret back door — as originally conceived by Soviet bioweapon engineers during the Cold War:

A biological weapon with “a two-strike capacity,” like a booby trap, the legendary biological warfare expert Milton Leitenberg tells us. Now in his nineties, Leitenberg learned about the Soviets’ Cold War biological weapons program directly from one of its original cofounders, a plague expert named Igor Domaradskij. “I interviewed him at my house over a period of a few days in June of 1999,” says Leitenberg, and Domaradskij shared with him his original hand-typed writings about how the Soviet program came to be—a copy of which Leitenberg shared with us, to help us understand the scientist’s mindset and the program’s foundations.

Igor Domaradskij was one of two Russian scientists who, starting in 1974, laid down the architecture for this highly classified and illegal biological weapons program. “I drafted a scheme for what were known as the ‘Five principal sectors,’ ” Domaradskij writes, meaning the five major directions in which Russian efforts to genetically modify germs would expand. One of these programs is particularly important to this scenario, a bioengineering effort to transfer the DNA from one germ into another. “The plan,” says Domaradskij, “became known as ‘Bonfire.’ ”

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But it is real: a genetically modified, two-stage killer that, developed further, became known as a chimera bioweapon, according to Sergei Popov, another one of the Soviet biological weapons engineers involved. “Imagine a new weapon which is difficult to diagnose initially, and then which is impossible to treat with conventional antibiotics,” Popov told PBS Nova producer Kirk Wolfinger in 2001. “A double agent [weapon], like plague and encephalomyelitis virus, [that] could be combined in one.”

This is only possible with recombinant DNA:

One day in 1971, inside a laboratory at Stanford University in California, an American biochemist named Paul Berg conducted an experiment that would forever change the biological sciences. He successfully spliced DNA from a monkey virus into the DNA of a second virus, known as lambda phage.

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No one outside the small Stanford lab knew anything about the experiment until the following summer. That’s when one of Berg’s graduate students, a young biochemist named Janet Metz, attended a workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and told her teacher, a virologist named Robert Pollack, that Berg had succeeded in splicing together DNA from two different viral species.

Pollack was stunned. “Pollack told [Janet] he thought that [my experiment] was the most dangerous and outrageous experiment that anybody could possibly do,” Berg later recalled. He remembered Pollack asking him, “had I realized how dangerous an experiment this would be?”

Berg’s experiment involved inserting a monkey-virus gene, called Simian Virus 40 (SV40)—known to cause cancerous tumors in laboratory animals—into a bacterial virus (lambda phage), with the plan of eventually introducing it into Escherichia coli (E. coli), a common bacterium that lives in the intestines of humans. Pollack’s outrage, Berg learned, stemmed from the opinion “that the bacteria carrying SV40 DNA might escape, and cause cancer in [everyone it] infected.”

“My first reaction,” said Berg, “was that this was absurd. I didn’t see any risk to it.”

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Guidelines for lab safety protocols were set up, according to degree of risk. The biocontainment facilities where recombinant DNA work would take place needed airflow hoods, airlocks, and security systems to ensure that deadly pathogens would not escape. But the research should continue, the scientists ultimately agreed.

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Almost immediately after signing the Biological Weapons Convention treaty, the Russians began pursuing exotic biological weapons using techniques made possible by recombinant DNA.

The program’s deputy chief, Ken Alibek, explains. “We were among the 140 signatories of the convention pledging ‘not to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain’ biological agents for offensive military purposes [and yet] at the same time,” he clarifies, “through our covert program, we [developed and] stockpiled hundreds of tons of anthrax and dozens of tons of plague and smallpox… for use against the United States and its Western allies.”

Sergei Popov’s interview with NOVA producer Kirk Wolfinger is still available:

My most successful research was the finding that a bacteria called Legionella could be modified in such a way that it could induce severe nervous system disease. And the symptoms of nervous disorders [similar to those of multiple sclerosis] would appear several days after the bacterial disease was completely “cured.” So there would be no bacterial agent, but symptoms—new and unusual symptoms—would appear several days later.

Plague has been responsible for several of the most fatal pandemics in human history, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), including ones in the sixth, fourteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries:

From around 1347 to 1352, the disease killed 150 million people.

Then she explains that her nightmare scenario involves a modified plague:

This particular plague weapon has been genetically engineered to initially deliver a neurochemical high.

“When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague,” says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, “we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way… to make you want to go out and socialize… this was some horrifying stuff.”

Y. pestis is shorthand for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, and Dr. Heine is one of the world’s subject-matter experts. Starting in the late 1990s, he spent eleven years working on biological warfare countermeasures at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Maryland. USAMRIID, or “you-sam-rid” as it’s known, is the Defense Department’s flagship center for high-and maximum-containment infectious disease research and its only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. In the event of a biological attack against America, USAMRIID scientists will be at the fore.

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Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. “I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration,” he tells us. “Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare].” He pauses for effect. “It was evil.”

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“Because of the severity of the disease, the rapid onset of symptoms, sepsis, and multi-organ system failure followed by 100% mortality in untreated patients,” retired colonel Bret Purcell, the former chief of the Division of Medicine at USAMRIID, tells us, “the U.S. military recognizes Yersinia pestis [as] one of the highest bacterial threat pathogens to our military and civilian populations.”

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During Dr. Heine’s tenure at USAMRIID, he spent thousands of hours inside a laboratory studying plague. His efforts, which focused on developing therapeutics against biowarfare and bioterrorism, included work to develop a plague vaccine. It never advanced beyond animal trials. “You can’t defend against every imaginable thing,” Heine laments, citing the undeniable reality at the center of the military’s efforts to defend against biological warfare. Biological warfare is, at its core, indefensible.

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People whose lungs are infected with Yersinia pestis generally begin developing symptoms after an incubation period of between one and three days, depending on an array of factors, from the strength of their immune system, to the dosage they receive. Genetic modifications can further alter this time frame.

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Pneumonic plague is a fulminant disease, meaning it strikes fast and kills quickly.

Biological warfare is illegal, and biological weapons are illegal, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), yet biological weapons exist:

Over 100 years ago, the international community banned the use of biological weapons with the Geneva Protocol of 1925, but by World War II, various nations were developing robust biological weapons programs, including the United States, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.

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And then, in November 1969 and without much warning, President Richard Nixon renounced America’s biological weapons program. This led to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention—the BWC—an international treaty prohibiting the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons.

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The Biological Weapons Convention treaty allows for “defensive” biological weapons research, meaning scientists can conduct research involving the same pathogens that could be used for biological warfare—so long as the research warrants to be “for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” In other words, offensive biological weapons research can masquerade as “defensive” in scope.

“The treaty has no protocols for enforcement,” former assistant secretary of state Mallory Stewart tells us.

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In the second half of the Cold War, after signing the treaty, the Soviet Union secretly and illegally developed and stockpiled massive arsenals of biological weapons, including genetically engineered germs.

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A 2025 U.S. State Department compliance report assesses that Russia and North Korea each “maintains an offensive BW [biological weapons] program” in violation of the treaty, while China and Iran are engaged in biological research and activities that raise unresolved compliance issues.

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“The United States maintains that the Soviet program was absorbed, not dismantled, by the Russian Federation,” says the State Department’s special representative to the Biological Weapons Convention, Kenneth D. Ward, “and that program has continued and evolved in violation of Article I and Article II of the BWC.”

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A deadly germ—genetically modified to be human-to-human transmissible, hypervirulent, able to defeat countermeasures, and with no known cure—could be twenty-first-century humans’ last invention.

We may not realize until too late, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), that we have become the victims of a biological attack:

It is not until days or weeks after such an attack has taken place—after the first wave of deaths—that we will most likely recognize its occurrence.

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A small amount of Marburg or Ebola released in the subway system of Washington, D.C., Boston, or New York, or in an airport, shopping mall, or financial center, could produce hundreds of thousands of victims.

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It is easier to make a biological weapon than to create an effective system of biological defense. Based on our current level of knowledge, at least seventy different types of bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, and fungi can be weaponized. We can reliably treat no more than 20 to 30 percent of the diseases they cause.

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In a simulated attack staged in New York City in 1998, nearly all of the members of an emergency unit dispatched to the scene “died” because they were insufficiently protected. “They did all the right things,” a federal official who watched the exercise told The New York Times. “But the scenario utterly defeated them.” The emergency teams were hampered by their inability to identify which biological agents had been used.

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Most methods involve the exposure of vials or petri dishes containing laboratory-grown cultures to air samples from a suspected target area. This can be a laborious process. A field monitoring device used during the Gulf War took between thirteen and twenty-four hours to make a positive identification. For botulinum toxin, one of the staples of Iraq’s arsenal, this would already be too late.

Technology has improved since then. The Biological Integrated Detection System (BIDS) cut the time to only thirty minutes, but it can so far only determine the presence of anthrax, plague, botulinum toxin, and staphylococcus enterotoxin B.

In September 1998, he explains, Clinton and Yeltsin agreed in Moscow on a program of “accelerated negotiations” to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention:

In America, the loudest protests have come from commercial biotechnology companies, who argue that open-ended inspections of their labs and production facilities will leave them vulnerable to industrial espionage. Biotechnology is a multi-million-dollar industry. Between 1989 and 1996 the number of firms in the United States developing new-generation drugs soared from 45 to 113.

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Nothing prevents a state from concealing a weapons program under the guise of protecting commercial secrets.

Arms treaties are important. They set standards of international behavior regarding the acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction. But they are almost invariably ignored when countries believe their national security is at stake.

The American plan to stockpile and develop vaccines against known agents is the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, Alibek notes, but, as parts of that plan have been implemented, its limitations have become clear:

Mandatory immunization of troops has been official Pentagon policy since 1993. All 2.3 million American soldiers have begun to receive shots against anthrax, currently regarded as the principal threat because of its documented presence in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. But no vaccines are contemplated against other agents believed to be in that arsenal, such as aflatoxin, botulinum, and smallpox. The extra cost would be enormous (the six-year anthrax vaccine program alone will cost the military an estimated $ 130 million) and vaccines are not without side effects. Injecting soldiers against dozens of diseases would not protect them from the agents we don’t know about, or from those for which there are no known vaccines.

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Vaccines made of live but weakened microorganisms are generally more effective than those made of nonliving cellular or subcellular components. Both types are usually benign, but in rare cases they can trigger significant changes in the blood and endocrine systems. Some have been known to affect the functioning of the heart, lungs, kidneys, and other organs. It is not medically advisable to combine too many different courses of vaccination.

There are currently no known vaccines for brucellosis, glanders, and melioidosis or for many viral diseases, such as Ebola and Marburg. The plague vaccine was found to be ineffective against aerosol dissemination in animal studies. The tularemia vaccine is difficult to culture and potentially dangerous. Of the four possible strains available for viral encephalitis, the first and most potent (a live vaccine) produces adverse reactions in 20 percent of all cases and is ineffective in 20 percent. The second is of restricted effectiveness (it only works against three subtypes of the disease), and the third and fourth are poorly immunogenic and require multiple immunizations. The smallpox vaccine, only available in the United States to lab workers and military personnel, can be administered either before or after infection. It requires periodic boosters and wears out after ten years, though revaccination is required after three years in case of infection. Skin testing is recommended for Q fever and botulinum toxin.

The anthrax vaccine used in the United States has to be administered six times before it becomes effective (three times in two-week intervals and three times in six-month intervals) with annual boosters thereafter.

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American experts maintain that annual boosters are safe—the live vaccine we used in Russia was associated with some risks—but scientists generally agree that excessive vaccination can create complications in the immune system, leading in rare cases to the formation of tumors.

Repeated vaccinations has been known to trigger or aggravate allergies. Thirty minutes after I received my last vaccination against anthrax in 1987, my face became swollen, and I developed a rash and had trouble breathing. I took Dimidrol, a powerful anti-allergy medication available in Russia (though not in the United States) and felt better again in a few hours. For the next ten days I received intravenous preparations at a hospital—a form of allergy treatment we called desensibilization therapy. Several colleagues had been forbidden from anthrax work after similar reactions.

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I received my first anthrax vaccination in 1979 and began a course of annual vaccinations in 1982. I was also vaccinated against smallpox once, twice against tularemia, and four times against plague. The chronic allergies I have suffered throughout my adult life are a direct consequence of repeated exposure to live vaccines, and to other biological substances I worked with.

Vaccines provide excellent protection against specific diseases, but the characteristic that makes them so effective—that specificity—is also the source of their limitations.

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Despite American efforts and expenditures, vaccines have limited value for the protection of civilians.

Great Britain and Canada began investigating biological agents and delivery systems in 1940, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), but President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t establish a program until fifteen months after the United States entered World War II, in March 1943:

Based on what Patrick told me of the early history of their program, Americans knew nothing of the ambitious weapons-making drive we [the USSR] had launched in the 1920s.

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The Americans were not fully persuaded until their British and Canadian allies noted that the Germans were suspected of having used glanders against Romanian cavalry during World War I and seemed to be amassing a larger bacteriological arsenal. The Canadians had converted an agricultural experiment station in Suffield, Alberta, into a testing area for anthrax. In southern England, an old chemical warfare proving ground at Porton Down was adapted for the same purpose.

In America, a secret biological warfare unit called the War Research Service was created to work with its British and Canadian counterparts. George W. Merck, president of Merck & Co. Inc., a leading U.S. pharmaceutical firm, was the unit’s first director.

[…]

They settled on four principal sites: a 2,000-acre tract on Horn Island near Pascagoula, Mississippi; the Dugway chemical warfare testing facility in the Utah desert; a 6,100-acre munitions manufacturing complex at Terre Haute, Indiana; and the old National Guard installation at Frederick, Maryland.

[…]

More than seventeen hundred people worked at Camp Detrick during the war years, investigating glanders, brucellosis, cholera, dysentery, plague, and typhus.

Anthrax was the largest project. Scientists built a pilot plant capable of producing anthrax in ten-thousand-gallon tanks. They were so successful that Britain placed an order for five hundred thousand anthrax bombs from the facility in September 1944.

[…]

Fears that the Germans would use biological munitions in their unmanned “buzz bomb” raids over English cities, or to repel the D-Day force, never materialized.

[…]

Some facilities were phased out, but revelations about Japan’s Unit 731 forestalled any serious discussion about ending the American program.

[…]

Camp Detrick sent scientists to Japan to interrogate the commanders of Unit 731, who gave details of their program in return for avoiding prosecution for war crimes. Their reports convinced Washington that biological weapons could be developed in greater quantities and with far greater effectiveness than anyone had suspected. The British came to a similar conclusion and decided to upgrade their testing and research unit at Porton Down and at a test site on the Scottish island of Gruinard.

[…]

Beginning in 1951, agricultural agents were developed at Camp Detrick and other facilities to attack the Soviet wheat crop and the rice paddies of Communist China. The pathogens were stored at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, as well as at Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, which also manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons.

U.S. bioweaponeers went on to explore antipersonnel agents such as tularemia, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B. Aerosols were tested on animals at Deseret Island in the Pacific Ocean and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. They conducted experiments with simulated weapons, as we did, in urban areas.

Human tests took place in 1955 on a group of young Seventh Day Adventists who volunteered as an alternative to military service. The volunteers were exposed to Q fever, which is not lethal and can be treated with antibiotics, in a program called Project Whitecoat, or Operation CD-22.

By the late 1960s, twenty-two microorganisms were under study, and there were plans to weaponize hemorrhagic fevers such as the Machupo virus and Rift Valley fever.

[…]

Nixon, convinced by his advisers that biological warfare was impractical, signed an executive order on November 25, 1969, renouncing the use of lethal biological agents and weapons and promising to confine American biological research to “defensive measures” such as immunization and bio-safety.

We didn’t believe a word of Nixon’s announcement. Even though the massive U.S. biological munitions stockpile was ordered to be destroyed, and some twenty-two hundred researchers and technicians lost their jobs, we thought the Americans were only wrapping a thicker cloak around their activities.

Nixon turned most of Camp Detrick’s buildings over to the National Cancer Institute and assigned to the complex the task of finding a cure for cancer.