Biological Weapons, Literally Older Than Methuselah
By JUDITH MILLER
Published: September 19, 1998
Maybe it started with Moses. The biblical story of Exodus mentions 10 plagues God inflicted on the Egyptians for the Pharaoh's refusal to free the Jews from slavery: blood, frogs, vermin, flies, murrain, boils, hail, locusts, darkness and the slaying of the first-born.
Modern biology, which in the last century has produced almost miraculous cures for some of man's most intractable diseases, now may be harnessed to produce an ''Eleventh Plague,'' an image that Leonard A. Cole, a political scientist, seized on in his book exploring the politics of biological and chemical warfare.
Unlike chemical and even nuclear arms, those other weapons of mass destruction, biological agents are living weapons. And although technology is making the creation of ever more deadly strains possible, the idea of using germs in warfare has a long history.
Though historians and biologists dispute some of the more famous stories linked to biological weapons in war, including some biblical accounts of plagues and pandemics, the list of historical attempts at such use is impressive. Here are a few of the more celebrated cases.
''Medical Management of Biological Casualties,'' a handbook issued in 1996 by the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., says that two of the earliest reported uses of biological weapons in war occurred in the sixth century B.C. when the Assyrians poisoned enemy wells with rye ergot (a fungus disease), and Solon used the purgative herb hellebore during the siege of Krissa.
Fomites, or objects that harbor and can transmit disease, have been used deliberately to transmit disease since antiquity, said another group of scientists from Fort Detrick, writing in an August 1997 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
They say that modern attempts to ''weaponize'' deadly biological toxins like botulin and ricin were anticipated by aboriginal South Americans with neolithic technology who used curare and amphibian-derived toxins as arrow poisons.
In 1346, during the siege of Kaffa, now Feodossia in Ukraine, the attacking Tatar army had an epidemic of plague. The scientists argue in the medical association journal that the Tatars, ''attempting to convert their misfortune into an opportunity,'' catapulted the corpses of plague victims over Kaffa's city walls, touching off a plague among the inhabitants that eventually forced them to surrender. Some infected people (and possibly plague-infected rats as well) who left Kaffa, sailing off to Constantinople, Genoa, Venice and other Mediterranean ports, may have contributed to starting the Black Death pandemic that spread through Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, killing a substantial percentage of the population.
In 1710, Russian troops may also have used what the scientists called the old ''plague-infected corpse tactic'' against Sweden.
Smallpox has long been a germ of choice among biowarriors. In the 15th century, Pizarro is reported to have presented South American natives with variola-contaminated clothing. The English apparently did the same during the French and Indian War in 1754-67. According to the medical journal article, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander of the British forces in North America, suggested that smallpox be used to reduce American Indian tribes hostile to Britain, and on June 24, 1763, Captain Ecuyer, one of Amherst's aides, gave blankets and a handkerchief from the smallpox hospital to the Indians.
''I hope it will have the desired effect,'' he noted in his journal. It apparently did, though the scientists argue that cause and effect are uncertain since smallpox epidemics had been occurring among Indians for more than 200 years after initial contacts with Europeans.
The 19th-century discoveries of modern microbiology led to technological breakthroughs in biowarfare, especially the ability to isolate and produce stocks of specific pathogens, or deadly germs. World War I provided ample opportunities to use them.
There is substantial evidence, say the scientists in the journal article, that Germany developed an ambitious biological warfare program and that German agents inoculated horses and cattle with glanders in the United States before the animals were shipped to France. The Bucharest Institute of Bacteriology and Pathology identified germ cultures that were confiscated from the German Legation in Romania in 1916 as B. anthracis and B. mallei. And German agents operating allegedly used Burkholderia mallei in Mesopotamia to inoculate 4,500 mules and in France to infect the French cavalry's horses.
The use of chemical and biological weapons in World War I caused public revulsion and helped bring about the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibited the use of germ or chemical weapons in warfare. But the protocol did not ban basic research, production or possession of such agents, and many countries that signed the accord specifically preserved the right to retaliate if they were attacked.
While Germany tried to develop biological weapons in World War II, the only known German use of them then was ''the pollution of a reservoir in northwestern Bohemia with sewage in May 1945,'' according to the Fort Detrick scientists. Japan, however, used a series of germ weapons on a vast scale, especially against prisoners in Manchuria from 1932 until the end of World War II. Thousands of prisoners died after being infected with B. anthracis, meningitidis, shigella and yersinia pestis, to name but a few. Japan also dropped germ-filled bombs, feathers and cotton wadding from its fighter planes, infecting thousands more in at least 11 Chinese cities.
Japan's program was huge, encompassing 150 buildings, 5 satellite camps and more than 3,000 scientists and technicians, according to the Fort Detrick scientists. As many as 15 million plague-infected fleas were released from aircraft during each attack.
Russia and the United States both launched large offensive biological warfare programs in the early 1940's, but Washington, unlike Moscow, unilaterally abandoned all offensive biological and toxin weapon research and production in 1969. By 1972, all stockpiles of biological agents and munitions were destroyed. In 1972, the United States became a party to a treaty outlawing the development, possession and stockpiling of germs and toxins for offensive purposes. But so did Iraq and Russia, both of which continued to produce germs to be turned into weapons until at least 1990.
Photo: In Jerusalem, the violinist Isaac Stern posed in a gas mask during a Scud missile alert in the Persian Gulf war, but he played without it. (Reuters/Bettmann)(pg. B9)