#4
Moscow Times
October 18, 2001
Perfect Anthrax Application
By Pavel Felgenhauer

The Soviet Union actively developed biological weapons in violation of the 1972 international convention banning them, and anthrax was one of the favorites. Only in April 1992, after the demise of the Soviet Union, did President Boris Yeltsin sign a decree banning work on biological weapons and officially acknowledging that the treaty had been violated by Russia.

In unfavorable conditions, anthrax can form a spore -- a thick-walled capsule inside the body of the bacteria -- that contains the DNA and other essential parts of the living bug. Such spores can withstand frost, heat and drought for decades, sometimes even centuries. When the spore finds favorable habitation, it hatches to produce a living pathogenic bug.

Many different species of bacteria found in the soil can also form spores, but anthrax is the only one known to be able to infect humans -- through small skin cuts or through inhalation -- and develop into a potentially deadly disease. This makes anthrax an ideal bioweapon: It can be mass-produced and stockpiled in peacetime. In fact, anthrax can be loaded into military delivery systems years before actual use.

However, anthrax's main shortcoming in a military application is that any potential enemy will probably be prepared for it. During the Cold War, Russia and the United States prepared millions of doses of anthrax vaccine to treat all combatants in time of war.

Russia possesses some rare natural strains of anthrax, and the Russian military boasts of having the world's best complex anthrax vaccine -- a compound that supposedly protects against all existing anthrax bugs, including those that the West does not possess. In the fall of 1990, the United States asked to buy this vaccine for its troops in anticipation of a possible Iraqi bacteriological attack during the Gulf War. The Soviet authorities, however, turned down the request, mainly for security reasons according to Defense Ministry sources.

Anthrax may cause serious outbreaks in cattle, but is not easily (if ever) transferred from human to human. Antibiotics can effectively treat anthrax if diagnosed in time, and in most cases, it takes millions of spores to cause sickness, since the human immune system can effectively cope with smaller-scale infections. The effectiveness of anthrax and other bioweapons depends on the weather conditions at the time of release and on other factors.

Other infectious bugs that may be used as bioweapons have to be kept alive till delivery and are not as easy to stockpile as anthrax. Under the the Soviet Medical and Microbiological Industry Ministry, a network of industrial plants and research centers was built between 1970 and 1980 to produce commercial single-cell protein from yeast. Military sources say that in wartime, the same facilities could mass-produce lethal germs.

The Russian military was also very much interested in investigating the possibilities of creating lab-designed lethal bugs with the help of genetic engineering techniques. Special expeditions were also sent to Africa and Asia to collect rare local contagious bacteria and viruses. The task was not only to find new vicious bugs for military use, but also to prepare antitoxins to defend against the United States, which was also active in the same field.

Still, the biological military effort was not part of the mainstream Soviet military buildup. Soviet generals had in 1986 up to 50,000 nuclear warheads and 40,000 tons of chemical weapons -- much better payloads for their missiles than anthrax. Bioweapons could kill hundreds of thousands or no one at all, depending on the weather and other factors that are hard to predict. Four star General Mikhail Kolesnikov, Chief of Russia's General Staff from 1992 until 1996, told me that during Soviet times, "biological warfare was never an intrinsic part of the Soviet military doctrine, and we did not include biological weapons in our plans."

Today, however, the perfect application has at last been found for anthrax and other such bugs: The inaccuracy and unpredictability of bioweapons makes them the perfect terrorist weapon that may kill few, but is guaranteed to terrify all.

The main consequence is that international pharmaceutical companies will drastically increase sales and profits. Market regulators should look into recent pharmacy stock transactions. Who was the guy that was placing huge buying orders from Kandahar, when the markets went into free fall last month?

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.

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