Science Editors Urge Nondisclosure Of Bioterror Info

Jeraph Mason writes "According to this story on ABC news, science editors want to censor their publications because terrorists may use them. It's the same argument used to prevent security disclosures from being published." There's also coverage on the BBC and at The Washington Post.

Comments

Nerve agents and terror.

[reverseengineer]

No, while the first organophosphate nerve agents were developed by the Germans in the years prior to WWII, including tabun, soman, and sarin, the most deadly (lowest LD50) nerve agent known, VX (o-ethyl methyl phosphonothiolate), was discovered by British scientists in the 1950s. The story I have heard is that the British then traded the process of VX synthesis to the Americans- for the details of building thermonuclear weapons.

All the nerve agents in this general class are rather nasty- tabun and soman were used by Iraq in their 1980-88 war against Iran, which the US cast a blind eye to (at the very least), and then they used them to kill Kurd and Shiite dissidents in Iraq itself afterward. Then in the mid-90s, the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin in several attacks, including in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, killing 12 and injuring 5000. If they had used a more sophisticated delivery system (they used sharpened umbrella tips to puncture bags of liquid sarin), it is likely the death toll would have been far larger.

A nerve agent attack on any populated area could be extraordinarily deadly, and would certainly carry the additional weight of psychological terror- the fear that the air you breathe is contaminated with an invisible killer. And VX in particular is extremely long-lived in most environments (by design) Contact with residue could lead to injuries and deaths long after the initial attack. However, the syntheses involved in making organophosphate nerve agents are nontrivial. They make relatively unlikely terrorist agents simply because there are so many easier ways to kill and terrorize people- mustard, chlorine, phosgene, as well as biological agents like anthrax, botulin toxin, or a hemorrhagic fever virus. The feds seem so concerned about smallpox, for whatever reason, when the nations that have had Ebola outbreaks (Congo, Cote D'Ivoire, and Sudan) are in so much political chaos that setting up a lab and collecting and amplifying virus appears quite possible (whereas the only known smallpox stocks in the world are being kept in cold storage in Russia and the US).

I don't believe that much of this sort of information should be kept secret. I realize I know quite a bit about bioterror for a private citizen- but I'm not planning on becoming a terrorist- quite the opposite. I didn't obtain any knowledge from breaking into a top secret lab or kidnapping a scientist or cracking into a database anyway. As with many things, knowing how to defeat a threat involves understanding the threat (compare to computer security). Terrorists already know how to kill people- the information published in scientific journals is what's going to stop them. Secret government labs are of course going to be a large part of our nation's defense, as they have been for decades. However, the free exchange of information among labs holds the promise that discoveries could be made much more quickly.