The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

PERSPECTIVE

A Tribune Special
The threat of biological weapons
India unprepared for an attack with this kind of ‘atom bombs’, says Pushpa M. Bhargava

If you were James Bond and were ordered to kill half the population of a city of two million, without notice and without the resources of a major power at your command, what would you do? Do another Hiroshima? No. You will take just a gram or two of a toxin called botulin and put it in the water supply system of the city.

The LD50 (amount required for killing 50 per cent of a group) of botulin is 0.6 nanograms per kg weight of a person (1 nanogram is 1 billionth of a gram). And there will be no damage to property! Further, as botulin is a protein and all proteins decay sooner or later, the water contaminated with it will become potable in a while. Small wonder, botulin is one of the most powerful biological weapons. Such weapons have the following advantages.

They are easy and inexpensive to manufacture, weaponise and deliver. They have a long shelf life and are virtually impossible to detect and, therefore, verify; one can store enough biological weapons that will kill the entire population of the world many times over, in just a few small refrigerators or freezers; this is probably what Saddam Hussein did.

One has a wide range of choice, from agents that will lead to virtually cent percent mortality, to agents that will lead to little mortality but high morbidity; or from agents that would have an immediate effect, to agents that will have a delayed effect (silent warfare!). One can develop ethnic-specific weapons. For example, those that will kill or hurt only Americans but not Indians.

Biological weapons can be either live bacteria, fungi (specially for plants) and viruses or toxins. The former category has a potential of multiplying after the organism is released and thus causing far more extensive damage over a long periods of time than the latter.

Today’s repertoire of live biological weapons includes (where not obvious, parenthesis gives the disease caused by the bacterium, virus or rickettsia): Chlamydia peittaci (Influenza psittacosis); Yellow fever virus; Dengue fever virus; Chikungunya virus; O’nyong-nyong virus; Mayaro virus; Ross River virus; Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus; Western equine encephalitis virus; Tick-borne encephalitis virus; Kyasanur Forest Disease virus; Rift Valley fever virus; Junin and other similar viruses (Argentinan haemorrhagic fever); Hantaan virus (Korean haemorrhagic fever); Lassa fever virus; Sindbis virus; Marburg virus; Congo Crimean virus (African haemorrhagic fever); Ebola virus; Variola virus (small pox); Vibrio cholarae (cholera); Salmonella typhose (typhoid); Shigella (dysentry); Francisella tularensis (tularemia); Brucella species; Clostridium tetani (tetanus); Clostridium perfringens (gangrene); Pasteurella pestis (plague); Bacillus anthracis (anthrax); Antinobacillus mallei (glanders); Rickettsia prowazakii (epidemic typhus); Rickettsia tsutsugamushi (scrub typhus); Coxiella burnetii (G-fever); Rickettsia rickettsii (Rocky Mountain spotted fever).

One needs to be infected with only 25 tularemia-causing microorganisms to run the risk of death. The toxins produced or studied as potential biological warfare agents are: Botulin (Clostridium botulinum toxin A); Enterotoxin B from Staphylococcus aureus; Saxitoxin (shellfish poison); Cobrotoxin; Crotoxin (from South American rattle snake); Myotoxin; Cardiotoxin; Bungarotoxin; Aflatoxin; Snail conotoxin; Scorpion toxins; Ricin (derived from castor beans); Substance P; Tetanus toxin; Trichothecene mycotoxins; Shiga toxin (from Shigella dysenteriae or S flexneri); Epsilon toxin from Clostridium perfringens).

And then there are fungi such as Puccinia graminis (black-stem rust of cereals) and Pyricularia oryzae (rice blast) which can destroy whole agriculture fields when sprayed over them in very small amounts. Before the collapse of their empire in 606 B C, the Assyrians used an ingenious method of poisoning their enemy. Rye, widely used at that time, is liable to attack by a poisonous fungus, Claviceps purpurea, which grows in place of the grain and forms a horny mass called ergot. Eating rye bread contaminated with ergot can cause gangrene, abortion and hallucinations.

The Assyrians used this rye-ergot to poison their enemy. The ancient Romans threw carrions into wells to poison the drinking water of their adversaries. In 1347, the Tartars catapulted the bodies of bubonic-plague victims over the city walls of Kaffa, a Black Sea port that served as a gateway to the silk-trade route — a manoeuvre that worked.

In 1942, the Soviets infected the German occupation troops with the Tularemia-causing agent, which eventually led to more that 100,000 cases of the disease on both sides. Between 1936 and 1945, the Japanese Military Unit-731 experimented with biological weapons on the Chinese at PingFan in Manchuria, killing 3,559 prisoners of war with agents like anthrax, cholera, plague and dysentery. The Japanese also released plague on the Chinese civilian population of Chekiang province on several occasions by dropping from aeroplanes fleas fed on infected rats. In fact, China was plagued by diseases from Japan’s biological weapons (typhus, bubonic plague, cholera and anthrax) between 1940 and 1950.

In 1978, Soviet intelligence agents used ricin to murder Georgi Markov, a defector from Bulgaria. In 1979, an accidental release of anthrax from the Soviet bioweapons facility in Sverdlovsk killed some 100 people and much livestock. In 1984, Salmonella was released by the cult followers of Bhagwan Rajneesh in salad bars in four restaurants in The Dalles in Oregon, US, which made 750 people ill; the objective was apparently, to keep voters from the polls to influence a local election! And between 1990 and 1995, the Japanese cult, Aum Shinrikyo, made several unsuccessful attempts to use biological weapons including botulin.

In 1763, the Whites in the US used blankets and handkerchiefs infected with small pox virus against the Red Indians; this led to the death of 6 million original American Indians.

In 1955, US scientists sprayed Q-fever bacteria over Utah in a slurry on human test subjects; not only were they infected but also soldiers on the road blocks! The US used the pig plague-causing organism in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs conflict. And the Anthrax attack in the US just after 9/11 was almost a contained act of biological warfare.

Advances in modern biology have opened up avenues for making designer biological weapons which would, say, exploit genetic or ethnic differences. For example, in the US, those who are above 50 have a depleted immune response. They would thus be far more susceptible to small doses of certain toxic antigens (living organisms or chemicals) which would have no effect on the adult Indian population. Proper release of these antigens in the environment could cause at least temporary disability amongst the Americans over 50, while not affecting Indians. Indeed, when it comes to developing and using biological weapons it is essentially a battle of wits — something in which, perhaps, the deprived section of the world has an advantage, as they have been in any case living by their wits!

The Soviets have developed genetically modified Legionella bacteria that have been shown to induce auto-immunity to myelin (an important component of brain) in mice; when infected with this bacteria the mice die a horrible death.

In 2002, a group of Australian gene engineers accidentally created a mouse virus that kills every one of its victims by wrecking their immune response — something like what HIV does. There would be, as of today, no defence against such a human virus.

The question whether SARS was being developed by China as a biological warfare agent and happened to leak out of the laboratory, has never been satisfactorily answered.

In spite of their being signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention, at least the UK, the US, Russia, Canada, Germany, South Africa, Japan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea have had extensive biological weapons development and testing programmes — in some cases for at least 80 years.

When, during the Iraq-Kuwait conflict from January 16 to February 20, 1991, Saddam Hussein said that he had the final weapon, several of us had predicted that he had biological weapons such as botulin or anthrax spores which could be put on a Scud war head, even though Iraq had initially denied that it had a biological warfare programme.

On May 31, 1991, the distinguished American scientist, Mathew Meselson, and this writer were invited to address the ambassadors in Geneva, at Chateau de Bossey on Lake Geneva, under the auspices of a residential conference on biological weapons. During a lecture that evening, this writer mentioned about Saddam Hussein having biological weapons. Immediately after the meeting, the organisers introduced me to two German gentlemen who had set up the biological weapons factories in Iraq! These were the factories unearthed later by the CIA.

Subsequently, Iraq declared it had 157 aerial bombs and 25 warheads with botulin, anthrax spores and aflatoxin, the first two of which are the most fatal biological weapons known. An area of 18 sq km. which had been fenced and which Iraq maintained, was for making single cell protein, essentially housed facilities for making biological weapons. In 1995, it was discovered that Iraq had imported 40 tonnes of bacterial growth media in the 1980s which could only be for making biological weapons.

According to the US Defence Department, there are large stocks of Anthrax in Syria, Iran, Libya, China, South and North Korea, Taiwan and Israel. Strangely, it excludes itself and the UK where perhaps the stocks are the largest. In 1944, the US provided funds to produce 275,000 botulin bombs and one million anthrax bombs.

In 2003, the US Government gave $1.5 billion as an additional grant to an institution (NIAID at the National Institutes of Health) to work on selected agents of biological warfare: to develop an enzyme to lyse anthrax bacilli; and to further work on a vaccine that seems to have been developed by a NIAID scientist against Ebola (the vaccine was being tried on monkeys in 2003). In the past seven years, the US has spent more than $57 billion to shore up the American Bioterrorism Defences, stockpiling drugs against biological weapons and networking detection systems in more than 10 cities and preparedness at hospitals.

After the last world war, the US gave immunity to Lt-Gen Shiro Ishia who started work on biological warfare in Japan in 1931, for exchange of 8000 pages of Japanese data. The US had in 1950, large stocks of mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever, Malaria and Dengue; fleas infected with Plague; and ticks infected with Tularemia.

When a few years ago there was an epidemic of measles in a part of the US, they wondered it if it was an act of biological warfare. However, with the effective systems they have, they traced it to a Romanian girl who unknowingly brought the infection to the country. Unfortunately, we do not have such a system and thus cannot be sure whether the Surat plague or the various episodes of Chikungunya have not been surreptitious acts of biological warfare.

Experts have identified strains of pests which are not known to occur in India in some imported consignments of food. In fact, India is totally unprepared for a biological weapons attack in spite of it now being clear that such an attack has a far greater possibility of occurring in comparison to a nuclear attack, for biological weapons are poor man’s atom bombs.

OPED

Windows of opportunity
The armed forces’ role needs a close look
by Brijesh D. Jayal

Why has there been a systematic and progressive decline in the standing of the armed forces over the last six decades? Why are we the only democracy where civilian control of the armed forces has come to mean bureaucratic control? And why was it thought fit not to give a state funeral to a Field Marshal, who won us a war? One could go on. None of these and associated issues will mean much to the ordinary citizen, but to those in uniform it’s a matter of honour.

That there was a religious backlash within the Army after Operation Bluestar is a historical fact. What is not so well appreciated is how the services in general and the army in particular took discrete yet extraordinary steps to heal the wounded psyche within their ranks. Wounded psyche that was not of their own making in the first place. Not many may know that having learnt a deep lesson, the army set up an Institute of National Integration to preach commonality of religions, spirit of tolerance as well as rich cultural heritage thus propagating national integration.

That the army had healed its internal wounds is borne out by its performance during the Kargil conflict and the proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir. To a grateful nation this should have been tribute enough to its self- correcting capabilities. But the ongoing over-reaction to the episode of an Army Lieutenant Colonel’s alleged involvement in terror activities appears to have tainted the entire institution of the armed forces with one black brush.

The investigating agencies are indulging in selective leaks and media trials have pronounced the Lieutenant Colonel guilty long before any charge sheets have been filed. These are happenings in banana republics and not worthy of a nation aspiring great power status. This shows our governance and justice system in poor light and undermines the morale of our fighting forces.

Militaries are secular not out of any ideological consideration, but out of an innate sense of professionalism. While individuals may be deeply religious, if one is facing death in the line of duty daily, what counts is flag, country and regiment or unit of the fighting men. Those who have either donned military uniforms or respect the profession of arms will understand this ethos. The rest will find it incomprehensible.

The progressive decline of the parity of the armed forces as a consequence of successive pay commissions is well known. The Service Chiefs’ request to include a member from the services in the Sixth Pay Commission was turned down. The services did not get a fair deal and the Chiefs made a representation. While appointing a Committee of Secretaries, the government again declined a service representative. When the services voiced concern on these findings, there were veiled threats in the media about disciplining the services.

Even as this bizarre episode was unfolding the media, a distinguished former Ambassador, in an article titled “Services contempt of civil authority is not casual” ventured to suggest that the armed forces were envious of the privileges and power of their Pakistani counterparts and that such envy though natural was dangerous. The ambassador went on to say “The storm that has arisen today clearly has its roots in a general, if widespread, contempt of the forces for their civilian masters and counterparts.”

These observations smack of lack of understanding of the ethos and loyalty of our armed forces. The psychosis while aimed at the political class is not lost on the armed forces as this has ensured that for the last six decades civilian control of the armed forces, so vital for a healthy democracy, has been transformed to control by the bureaucracy. A model that no other democracy follows! The political leadership is kept so insulated from the armed forces that it does not see a valuable and priceless institution for what it is — a national asset that keeps our secular, democratic republic intact!

What escapes those critical of the armed forces in this unsavory episode of administrative highhandedness is that to military commanders at any level, safety and welfare of those they command come next only to flag and country. Had they been found wanting at this juncture, they would have been perceived as having sacrificed the interests of their men and women at the altar of their own futures.

A few months ago, UK Army Chief General Dannatt, to the embarrassment of his government, went public lamenting that his soldiers were paid less than traffic wardens. Peeved, the government overlooked him for the higher post of Chief of Defence Staff but could not deny the forces their due. In military eyes, this was a true Commander willing to pay a personal price for upholding the interests of those he led.

The recent revelations have got the media into frenzy and it is difficult to fathom whether this concern runs any deeper than for their commercial interests! What else can explain the expediency with which a suspected individual, an NDA throw-out, was proclaimed as being from IAF? Is there a subtle attempt to undermine the morale of our fighting forces?

These unfortunate questions must result in introspection. In his treatise, The Art of War, Sun Tzu advises: “Therefore, to gain a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence; to subjugate the enemy’s army without doing battle is the highest of excellence.”

In today’s information age, there are potent tools for such subjugation called information and psychological warfare. While the armed forces understand these phenomena and arm themselves to handle such types of warfare, they do so with external threats in mind. Alas, they now find themselves being targeted from within and they are unable to respond. Is it possible that there are vested interests stoking these fires? Let us not forget that some of our adversaries have declared their intentions to accord high priority to cyber warfare and other information warfare tools towards furthering their warfare capabilities and are making huge investments.

This is a defining moment as our last bastion of security stands dented, fortunately not punctured. Many eagerly wish to fish in these troubled waters. The nation cannot afford to sit idle while the institution of our armed forces continues down a slippery slope.

Such moments of crises are also windows of opportunity. Let the nation respond by setting up a Blue Ribbon Commission to look at all aspects of our armed forces and indeed their role and place within the Indian Republic. Like the Army advertisement seeking volunteers, it is the turn of the nation to ask itself ‘Do we have it in us?’n

The writer is a retired Air Marshal of the Indian Air Force

Profile
Tough in action, tender in heart
by Harihar Swarup

Mohammed ElBaradei, Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency, chosen for 2008 Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development, has played a key role to enable India to clinch the Safeguards Agreement with IAEA. It was a prerequisite for New Delhi’s entry in nuclear commerce. As DG of IAEA in Vienna, Elbaradei has been outspoken on nuclear proliferation and international security issues. He led the IAEA in carving out an independent approach, free from bias and reflective of a wider balance in tune with today’s world.

Trait of sincerity and resoluteness instantly impresses a first time caller on ElBaradei or those who have seen him in action for the first time. The rugged-looking Director General of IAEA is known to be tough in action but tender in heart. The humane side of his personality is well-known in normal situation.

All his utterances manifest that he was a friend of India and his career graph showed that he was not totally pro-US as some believe. He fully subscribed to the Manmohan Singh Government’s objective that India badly needed nuclear energy for development.

An Egyptian diplomat, ELBaradei has been serving as the Director General of the IAEA from December 1997, and is now well into his third, four-year term. Election to his third term was opposed by the US, primarily because he had stoutly questioned the US rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

ElBaradei, along with Hans Blix, led a team of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq seeking evidence that Saddam Hussein had revived his efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. The team could not find hard evidence of WMD in Baghdad and its vicinity. The US used several diplomatic channels in an attempt to remove him from his IAEA position but was unable to identify sufficient number of other countries willing to support ElBaradei’s ouster.

He has also been accused by the US of having a lenient approach in dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme. He and IAEA have also been criticised for failing to detect the “nuclear supermarket” run by the Pakistan scientist A.Q. Khan. His response to the French government’s warning that world had to be prepared for the possibility of war if Iran acquired atomic weapons was quite forthright. He said: “I would not talk about any use of force. There are rules on how to use force, and I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 70,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons”.

His sternest warning came in an interview with the BCC on a possible misadventure in Iran. “…You do not want to give additional argument to some of the ‘new crazies’ who want to say let us go and bomb Iran”. Earlier, the New York Times quoted him as saying, “We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction, yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security — and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use”.

His career’s high watermark was in October 2005 when he and IAEA were declared as joint recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. ElBaradei donated the prize money for building orphanages in his home city of Cairo. His sister-in-law works in an orphanage there. He saw himself in the same line of work as his sister-in-law — protecting the security of the human family. The IAEA’s prize money is being spent on training scientists from developing countries to use nuclear techniques in combating cancer and malnutrition.

The IAEA has a staff of 2,300 people, hailing from over 90 countries. They work on every continent to put nuclear and radiation techniques in the service of humankind. In Vietnam, farmers plant rice with greater nutritional value that was developed with IAEA assistance. In Latin America, nuclear technology is being used to map underground aquifers and in Ghana, a new radiotherapy machine is offering cancer treatment to patients.

In South Pacific, Japanese scientists are using nuclear techniques to study climate change. In India, eight new nuclear plants are designed to provide clean electricity to a growing nation. ElBaradei says, “these projects and a thousand others exemplify the IAEA idea: Atoms for Peace.”

On Record
No recession impact on books: Andrew Biog
by Akhila Singh

Andrew Phillips Biog

ONE of the biggest publishing houses in the world, Dorling Kindersley (DK) has been bringing out internationally acclaimed titles for adults and children since 1974. DK is owned by media group Pearson and is better known as a part of Penguin Publishing. DK is also a parent company for Brady Games, a video game publisher and travel guide publisher Rough Guides.

Its chief operating officer Andrew Phillips Biog was recently in India to celebrate DK’s decade-long association with India. Andrew joined DK in February 2003, as Managing Director for International Publishing and Licensing, based at DK head office in the United Kingdom. In this role, his responsibility included the licensing of DK books in different countries.

Andrew took charge of his present responsibilities in 2006. An Electronic Arts student, Andrew, has DK India, Digital Sales, Content Development, Creative Operations and DK Images in his work portfolio. He talks to The Sunday Tribune about the global book business and DK’s Indian experience.

Excerpts:

Q: What kind of titles does DK publish?

A: Most of our titles are non-fiction reference books. Starting from family reference books to educational guides. We publish book on health care, natural history, history, popular culture and cookery. There’s also the expansive children’s catalogue. DK has established worldwide reputation for its innovative non-fiction children’s books. Under Penguin, however, we come up with fiction titles as well.

Q: What does your work in India consist of?

A: In India, we mainly build and design books. We have also published 140 titles in the country. India is a big market where our basic work revolves around getting the price right and looking for the distributors.

Q: Even after the substantial growth in the literacy rate in India, books are still not accessible in some parts of the country. Have you worked on taking your publication to this prospective group of literate people?

A: Even in the absence of a literary culture, people use books. They would require some kind of reference books in their houses and we are publishing several reference books keeping India in mind.

Q: What do you keep in mind while publishing books for children of different countries?

A: We use innovative methods to attract children towards our books. Children’s books are illustrative and we work on making the illustrations exciting. Words and pictures are closely integrated to present information with unrivalled clarity. At times we provide CDs with the books.

We have had books on sports with covers made of plastic grass to give them the look of a sports field. In China, we had book covers made of Red silk.

Q: Do you think digital publishing would put a cut into the market of printed books?

A: I believe that there is place for both online literature and printed books. It provides the publisher an extra opportunity to reach different sections of society. We did a survey in which we found out that middle-aged women buy more books. So, we decided to launch online titles to target the male population, which is more internet savvy.

Q: Are you publishing any specific titles for the Indian readers?

A: DK makes some target books. We are coming out with Hindi titles and bilingual dictionaries. There are several business books and adapted books. We also publish some specific city-oriented titles like books about the trees and tourist spots in Delhi. These books are easily accessible because of their reduced prices here.

Q: Do you think that the global economic recession would have any impact on the publishing industry?

A: We have not noticed anything drastic as yet. We sell most of our titles in bulk during the festive season around Christmas. So, the coming few months are going to be definite indicators of the impact of recession. However, we can already see that the customers have decreased by a considerable number inside the stores and so we presume that sales would be affected.

Q: What are the few things that you keep in mind while buying a book?

A: I would personally look at the press activity around the title and also the advice of the critiques. If it is a reference book, I would see how the information is placed inside the book.

Q: What is the difference between the Rough Guides and any other guide?

A: Rough Guides are guides for tourists that are opinionated. People read and know what they should do when they are at a certain place. Generally students pick our guides and go for holiday at far off destinations. Our mobile phone guides are available on the phones as well.

Q: Is the number of books sold in a country an index of a country’s development?

A: I believe so. Books do play a vital role in a nation’s growth.