Book Review : Facing the Terrifying Truth About Biological Warfare

The Killing Winds: The Menace of Biological Warfare by Jeanne McDermott (Arbor House: $18.95; 285 pages)

America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical and Biological Warfare by Joseph D. Douglass Jr. and Neil C. Livingstone (DC Heath: $19.95; 173 pages)

Loss of innocence is the dilemma of 20th-Century science, and until now, physicists have known best that knowledge is a two-edged sword. Their extraordinary discoveries about the nature of matter and the universe have been turned into weapons that could destroy the world. Now biologists are learning the same lesson.

While the world’s attention has been focused on the threat of nuclear war, the dangers of chemical and biological warfare have become grave.

All of the strategic and political problems of nuclear war apply to chemical and biological war, and chemical and biological war has some of its own. For one thing, waging a biological war would be relatively cheap and easy to accomplish, compared with the difficulty of building and delivering nuclear weapons. Joseph D. Douglass Jr. and Neil C. Livingstone call biological weapons “the poor man’s atomic bomb.”

For that reason, biological warfare would be a very good terrorist weapon. The problems of detection are nearly impossible to overcome. So it is ideal for sabotage. What’s more, there is virtually no credible defense.

Two Frightening Books

These two books, “The Killing Winds” by Jeanne McDermott and “America the Vulnerable” by Douglass and Livingstone, are frightening to read. They make clear how susceptible the world is to chemical or biological attack and how much is being done in the name of deterrence to prevent one. Genetic engineering, biology’s crowning achievement to date, can be used to make powerful weapons of mass destruction.

Not enough is being done, according to Douglass and Livingstone, veteran national security analysts and consultants, whose book is a polemical (some might say hysterical) plea for a chemical and biological arms race in the name of deterrence.

Just as the “Soviet threat” has been used to justify a nuclear arsenal without limits, Douglass and Livingstone would use it to build new and better chemical and biological weapons.

“Within the Marxist-Leninist code that governs Soviet behavior, there are no laws or morals as those terms are understood in the West,” they write. “Laws and morals are derived to support the world socialist movement, and whatever advances the movement is not only legal and moral, it is right and to be employed. This is the philosophy that needs to be clearly recognized in assessing the alarming and far-reaching implications of high-tech biological warfare.”

McDermott’s book, “America the Vulnerable,” is a much more sober account of the current status of biological warfare, and it is more terrifying by being more believable. McDermott is a science writer whose book is a well-written tour of the biological weapons establishment. It is reportorial and reasoned, and it is terrifying.

Biological warfare involves the cultivation of natural diseases as weapons and the invention of new ones. Despite treaties and renunciations, considerable work on biological warfare gets done every year. In fact, the Salk Institute of La Jolla is the Pentagon’s largest contractor for biological weapons defense.

Defense is the key word. President Richard Nixon unilaterally renounced the production, stockpiling and use of biological weapons in 1969, and the United States subsequently signed a treaty to the same effect, but work on defense against biological weapons continues apace.

The trouble is that in order to be able to defend yourself against a threat, you have to know what the threat is in the first place. So work on defensive measures necessarily involves work on offensive techniques as well.

No Defense Possible

In any event, McDermott argues that defenses against biological weapons won’t work. “The idea that vaccines offer a good defense is an illusion,” she writes. A biological attack would overwhelm this country’s ability to produce and stockpile enough vaccine to meet it. Besides, the need for the vaccine would not become apparent until weeks after the attack, when it would be too late anyway.

Most important, she says, “A vaccine defense in the age of genetic engineering is easily circumvented.” All the attacker needs to do is to alter the invading organism slightly, and the vaccine probably won’t work.

McDermott sees the danger more in the future than now. She is skeptical of charges by the government and the military that the Soviets have already used biological weapons in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan. She argues against the claims that the Soviets already have a massive genetic engineering program under way to produce new strains of disease.

Accept Assertions

Douglass and Livingstone, on the other hand, accept these assertions as fact. They dismiss out of hand the nonbelievers and their “academic demands for legal evidence and laboratory procedures.”

But starting at different premises and taking a very different route through the same material, these two books reach the same conclusion. “There is no leveling off in the biological field as there is now in the nuclear field,” Douglass and Livingstone write. “Where we stand today is only the beginning.”

McDermott says: “We are poised on the threshold of a frightening new arms race.”

Read them and weep.