Advances in Bio-weaponry

kjh1 writes "Technology Review is running an eye-opening article on how biotechnology has advanced to the point where producing bio-weapons that were once only possible with the backing of governments with enormous resources is now possible with equipment purchased off eBay. You can now purchase a mini-lab of equipment for less than $10,000. The writer also interviewed a former Soviet bioweaponeer, Serguei Popov, who worked at the Biopreparat, the Soviet agency that secretly developed biological weapons. Popov has since moved to the US and provided a great deal of information on the types of weapons the Soviets were developing."

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Also check out Ken Alibek

[Entropy]

He was deputy chief of science opperations at one of the USSR's main bioweapons facilities, and has detailed much of this experience in "Biohazard".

Frankly, this is the stuff of horror stories.

That was the first and only...

[Cyno01]

Yes, sarin is a nerve gas. And think about it, they pumped a bunch of poisin gas into a confined space with thousands of people, and managed to kill a total of 12. And this is the largest scale terrorist chemical attack ever!

From wikipedia:

The first successful use of chemical agents by terrorists against a general civilian population was on March 20, 1995. Aum Shinrikyo, an apocalyptic group based in Japan that believed it necessary to destroy the planet, released sarin into the Tokyo subway system killing 12 and injuring over 5,000. The group had attempted biological and chemical attacks on at least 10 prior occasions, but managed to affect only cult members. The group did manage to successfully release sarin outside an apartment building in Matsumoto in June 1994; this use was directed at a few specific individuals living in the building and was not an attack on the general population.

Sucessful dispersal of chemical and biological agents is tough. Government funded programs have not been very effective, what makes anyone think that terrorists could come up with an effective delivery system.

Some info not in the wikipedia blurb

[patio11]

I wrote a research paper on Japanese responses to terrorism a couple of years ago. Here's what I remember from it. No warranty that any of the following is correct but, hey, do you get that warranty from Wiki?

* The major failure with the attack was the lack of time to develop a good dispersal mechanism, as the attack plan was moved ahead of schedule because of the cult's impression that the authorities were going to act on them imminently. They had this impression on the basis of penetration of Japanese military and police sources. They eventually settled on liquid in bags getting poked with umbrella tips.
* The "specific targets" at Matsumoto were judicial magistrates whom the cult thought had a hand in the investigation against them. Seven died in that attack, incidentally.
* Aum was fricking scary with the amount of resources they had at their disposal. I remember a $300 million chemical weapons factory (operating completely above-board in Japan in broad daylight, just another chemical factory, had all its permits), and them staging a parachute raid on a JSDF facility using turncoat JSDF forces. Sounds like a bad anime, I know.

I wouldn't be sanguine about this. If you can get weapons grade sarin you can certainly develop a delivery system for it. Its not trivial but, hey, $300 million dollars has a certain way of making non-trivial problems seem a whole lot less daunting. We lucked out in a major way, in that with everything designed right for the attack (high-profile target with hundreds of thousands of people in an enclosed space) the cult made multiple errors (impure toxin, dispersal surface area the size of an umbrella puncture, etc) which minimized the casualties. There were other lucky incidents, too -- two Japanese station attendants soaked up the chemical in one car with newspapers, sealed it in plastic, and took it to the station room (I don't know if they had any idea that they were dealing with anything worse than a liquid mess, but both of them died for their troubles, which many people from exposure to that portion of the attack).

And, incidentally, remember the anthrax attack on the US and how the postal system and much of the East Coast essentially *shut down* with less casualties? Its difficult to overstate how much of the Japanese economy/government/everything is dependent on Tokyo and how dependent Tokyo is on their mass transit system. If you hit one car in Tokyo's inner loop with a lethal nerve agent tomorrow and then followed it up with a successful strike once a week for, oh, I don't know, two weeks? Three? That would be about as effective at causing economic damage in Japan as driving an airplane into a tall building of your choice in New York City.