Biohazard

I rose to go to the bathroom and was followed by one of the plainclothes guards sitting behind us at the conference table. I could hear his footsteps echoing in the corridor. As I reached the bathroom, he followed me inside. I found it hard to understand why an official of a friendly nation couldn't be trusted to go to the bathroom on his own. I was outraged at first, but eventually 1 calmed down. We went to similar lengths, after all, to protect our facilities from outsiders.

My colleagues agreed that the unusually tight security and ubiquitous military presence suggested biowarfare activity. From then on, I paid closer attention to the facilities we were shown.

On a subsequent trip to complete our negotiations, we were taken to a small biological complex at Mukteswar, a remote village in the Himalayan Mountains close to the border with Nepal. Security there was even tighter than in New Delhi. We were asked not to enter any of the buildings on our own. One member of our delegation asked why.

"It's too dangerous," we were told. "We're studying viruses there. Besides, most of the equipment is old. There's nothing interesting to see."

Nations engaged in chemical or nuclear weapons programs almost invariably add biological weapons to their inventory. This is particularly true in cases when a country is bent on doing everything possible to protect itself against its neighbors. India faces two hostile neighbors on its borders — China and Pakistan — with whom it has fought repeatedly over the last fifty years. Its decision to conduct nuclear tests in May 1988 showed it was willing to defy international opinion for the sake of national security.

A report submitted by the U.S. Office of Technological Assessment to hearings at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in late 1995 identified seventeen countries believed to possess biological weapons — Libya, North Korea, South Korea, Iraq, Taiwan, Syria, Israel, Iran, China, Egypt, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Bulgaria, India, South Africa, and Russia. More have joined the list since.

Ordinary intelligence and surveillance techniques cannot prove the existence of a biological warfare program. Even the highest resolution satellite imagery can't distinguish between a large pharmaceutical plant and a weapons complex. The only conclusive evidence comes from firsthand information. Western suspicions about the Soviet program were only confirmed with Pasechnik's defection. South Africa's efforts to develop biological assassination agents were first revealed when the program's director testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government-appointed panel investigating the abuses of the apartheid era. It was not until Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected in 1995 that the West came to know the extent of Iraq's germ warfare program. Kamel confirmed that Iraq had begun its program a decade earlier at the Muthamia State Establishment, eighty miles northwest of Baghdad, where researchers were cultivating anthrax, botulinum toxin, ricin, and aflatoxin, a poison that can be found in corn, pistachio nuts, and other crops. By the time the United Nations inspectors identified and destroyed Iraq's principal germ warfare facility at Al Hakun in 1996, Iraq had amassed hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid anthrax and many other pathogens. Iraq is still suspected of harboring germ weapons and continues to resist all attempts to probe further.

Some Western analysts maintain that evidence of biological warfare research is not proof that viable weapons are being produced. They argue that countries with "low-tech" scientific establishments often can't make weapons or delivery systems matching their ambitions. But even the most primitive biological weapons lab can produce enough of an agent to cripple a major city.

On March 20, 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult sprayed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. Twelve people were killed and over fifty-five hundred were injured. Subsequent testimony at the cult leaders' trial revealed that Aum Shinrikyo had tried nine times between 1990 and 1995 to spread botulinum toxin and anthrax in the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama. Seiichi Endo, a onetime graduate student in genetic engineering who headed the cult's "Ministry of Health and Welfare," testified that their delivery methods — spraying the agents from a rooftop or from the back of a van — had proven faulty, and their strains were not sufficiently virulent. But it is not difficult to find better strains.

Viruses and bacteria can be obtained from more than fifteen hundred microbe banks around the world. The international scientific community depends on this network for medical research and for the exchange of information vital to the fight against disease. There are few restrictions on the cross-border trade in pathogens.