The Hydrogen Economy by Jeremy Rifkin

Author:Jeremy Rifkin
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Bioterrorism

The vulnerability of human populations clustered close together in high-occupancy social environments came home two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon when a deadly strain of anthrax began showing up in letters sent to news-rooms of national media and shortly thereafter to congressional offices in the nation’s capital. The weapon-grade anthrax—in the form of a white powder—was sent through the U.S. mail to its victims. Eighteen Americans were exposed to the anthrax spores, and five subsequently died from inhaling the deadly pathogen. Terrorist notes were found with letters praising Allah and condemning the U.S. government for its policies.

Just days earlier, the FBI had reported that several of the hijackers responsible for the September 11th attacks had made a number of visits in the preceding weeks to a facility in Florida that houses crop-dusting planes. According to the proprietors, the hijackers asked questions about load capacity, range, and operability of the specialized planes. The FBI subsequently ordered all 3,500 of the nation’s privately owned crop dusters grounded pending further investigation. Meanwhile, universities, including the University of Michigan, Penn State, Clemson, and Alabama, barred aircraft from flying over their stadiums during football games, for fear of biowarfare attacks.20 In Washington, policymakers scurried to catch up to mounting public anxiety by allocating funds to stockpile antibiotics and vaccines and upgrading emergency procedures at the nation’s hospitals and clinics.

To date, federal authorities are unsure of whether the spread of anthrax in the mail is connected with the al Qaeda terrorist network. What they do know is that Osama bin Laden’s network of terrorists has actively pursued information on biological agents, including how to procure them, produce them in large volume, upgrade their lethal properties using state-of-the-art biotech databases, and find ways to distribute them over wide geographic areas.

The anthrax terrorist assault highlights how unprepared America and the world are for such attacks, and especially how vulnerable concentrated urban populations are to this deadly form of warfare. Even as the fear of anthrax gripped an already frightened nation, politicians, military experts, and the media skirted a far more disturbing reality that lies at the very heart of the new fears about bioterrorism. The new genomic information being discovered and used for commercial genetic engineering in the fields of agriculture, animal husbandry, and medicine is potentially convertible to the development of a wide range of novel pathogens that can attack plant, animal, and human populations.

Moreover, unlike nuclear bombs, the materials and tools required to create biological warfare agents are easily accessible and cheap, which is why this kind of weapon is often referred to as “the poor man’s nuclear bomb.” A state-of-the-art biological laboratory could be built and made operational with as little as $10,000 worth of off-the-shelf equipment and could be housed in a room as small as 15 square feet. All you really need is a beer fermenter, a protein-based culture, plastic clothing, and a gas mask. Equally frightening, thousands of molecular biologists and graduate-school students in laboratories

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