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Earlier in December, Interpol hosted a bioterrorism tabletop exercise at its headquarters in Lyon, France, that was code named “Black Death.” The scenario for the exercise involved militants unleashing a biological agent at a large sporting event, using air horns to disperse the agent into the unwitting crowd. According to the opening statement given by Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble, “Using disease, terrorists can substantially multiply the devastation and societal disruption that they cause, and they can do it without sophisticated infrastructure or state support. For this very reason, we would be mistaken to treat a worst-case scenario as a remote possibility. Instead, we must deal with this as an eventuality for which we need to be prepared.”
In this season of large college bowl games and the National Football League playoffs in the United States, and large nonsporting events such as the New Year’s Eve celebration in New York’s Times Square — not to mention the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing — a discussion of bioterrorism and the threat it poses might be of interest.
First, it must be recognized that during the past several decades of the modern terrorist era, biological weapons have been used very infrequently — and there are some very good reasons for this. Contrary to their portrayal in movies and television shows, biological agents are difficult to manufacture and deploy effectively in the real world. In spite of the fear such substances engender, even in cases in which they have been somewhat effective they have proven to be less effective and more costly than more conventional attacks using firearms and explosives.
In fact, nobody even noticed what was perhaps the largest malevolent deployment of biological agents in history, in which thousands of gallons of liquid anthrax and botulinum toxin were released during several attacks in a major metropolitan area over a three-year period. This use of biological agents was perpetrated by the Japanese apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo. An examination of the group’s chemical and biological weapons (CBW) program provides some important insight into biological weapons, their costs — and their limitations.
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