Biohazard

I made a few quick calculations on my notepad. At least four hundred kilograms of anthrax, prepared in dry form for use as an aerosol, would be required for ten warheads.

Our seed stock for anthrax production was kept inside refrigerated storerooms at three production facilities in Penza, Kurgan, and Stepnogorsk. The seed stock would have to be put through a delicate fermenting process to breed the billions of spores required. The process was complicated — and it took time. A single twenty-ton fermenter working at full capacity could produce enough spores to fill one missile in one or two days. With additives, we could probably boost the output to five hundred or six hundred kilograms a day. I finished my calculations and leaned back in my chair.

"With the fermenters we have available, it would take ten to fourteen days," I said.

The colonels looked pleased. Two weeks was not a problem. No one expected to go to war overnight.

The colonels didn't tell me which cities had been targeted for biological attack, and I didn't ask. New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago were some of the targets to come up in subsequent meetings, but they were abstract concepts to me at the time. All I cared about was ensuring that our weapons would do the job they were designed for.

We stood up to stretch. The tension in the room lifted. Three of us went out to the hallway for a smoke. I had discovered that you could learn more in such casual moments than in a month's worth of memos passed around The System. The colonels were suddenly talkative.

Pressure from the top military command was making their lives impossible, they complained. No sooner had one weapons system been organized than an order came down to refine another one.

I told them we were having the same problem — but we all read the newspapers. Mikhail Gorbachev and his team of self-described reformers were publicly heralding a new era of rapprochement with the West. We joked that the mysteries of perestroika were beyond the scope of simple military men.

I don't remember giving a moment's thought to the fact that we had just sketched out a plan to kill millions of people.

Anthrax takes one to five days to incubate in the body. Victims often won't know that an anthrax attack has taken place until after they begin to feel the first symptoms. Even then, the nature of the illness will not at first be clear. The earliest signs of trouble — a slight nasal stuffiness, twinges of pain in the joints, fatigue, and a dry, persistent cough — resemble the onset of a cold or flu. To most people, the symptoms will seem too inconsequential to warrant a visit to the doctor.

In this first Stage, pulmonary anthrax can be treated with antibiotics. But it would take a highly alert public health system to recognize the evidence of an anthrax attack. Few physicians are trained to identify the disease, and the unremarkable nature of early symptoms makes an accurate diagnosis difficult.

The first symptoms are followed several days later by the anthrax "eclipse," a period in which the initial discomfort seems to fade, concealing the approaching danger. Proliferating bacteria will have begun to engulf the lymph nodes, local headquarters of the body's disease protection system. Within a matter of hours the bacteria will have taken over the entire lymphatic system. From there, they enter the bloodstream, continuing to multiply at a furious pace. Soon they begin to release a toxin that attacks all organs but is particularly damaging to the lungs, filling them with liquid and gradually cutting off their supply of oxygen.

Within twenty-four hours of this toxin's release, a victim's skin will begin to turn a faint bluish color. At this stage, every breath becomes more painful than the last. A choking fit and convulsions follow. The end usually comes suddenly: some victims of pulmonary anthrax have been known to die in the middle of a conversation. The disease is fatal in over 90 percent of untreated cases.

A hundred kilograms of anthrax spores would, in optimal atmospheric conditions, kill up to three million people in any of the densely populated metropolitan areas of the United States. A single SS-18 could wipe out the population of a city as large as New York.

Anthrax was not the only biological weapon earmarked for the SS-18s. When we sat down again after our break, we went over the available menu of toxic choices.

Plague could be prepared on a similar schedule. The plague weapon we had created in our laboratories was more virulent than the bubonic plague, which killed one quarter of the population of Europe in the Middle Ages. Smallpox was stockpiled in underground bunkers at our military plants, and we were developing a weapon prototype based on a rare filovirus called Marburg, a cousin of Ebola.