An event as savage, theatrical and unexpected as the attack on the World
Trade Centre has inevitably generated a deep sense of fear. The failure of
anyone to claim responsibility for the assault; the fact that (despite the
targeting of Osama Bin Laden) nobody really knows who was responsible for
organising and financing the action; and the possibility that other terrorist
cells may still be at large have all exacerbated that sense of fear.
Yet the apocalyptic terms in which politicians and commentators have responded
to the events of 11 September speaks of a fear much more profound than simply
a natural reaction to a terrible terrorist attack. 'It has become terrifying
clear how close the "Barbarians" are, perhaps in reality always
have been', warns the writer (and New Yorker) Sasha Abransky. The destruction
of lower Manhattan revealed 'a symbol of our age can be destroyed in a moment,
much as the fierce greatness of Rome was overrun by hordes lacking science,
literature, art, but fuelled by a fanatical hatred of an urban, cosmopolitan,
commercial culture and civilisation far grander than their own.'
Freedom is under attack, runs the mantra. Civilisation is under threat. The
Barbarians are not simply at the gates, but inside them too, terrorists with
bagfuls of nuclear material, or deadly toxins, just waiting to strike. As
George Bush warned a gathering of American clergymen at the White House: 'Another
crisis could hit us much more terrible than this one - biological, chemical
or plutonium.' The World Health Organisation warns people 'to take the risk
of biological warfare seriously and recognise that it might be easier than
the use of other forms of potential terrorist warfare.'
Inevitably, such warnings have generated a sense of panic among the public.
Stores run out of gas masks, there is a stampede to buy nuclear shelters and
the chatter among parents waiting for their children at the school gates is
about how to protect against anthrax or smallpox. 'No more sense of security
in skyscrapers or airplanes; no more carefree days at the Super Bowl; no more
driving on a bridge or through a tunnel without a frisson of fear that the
truck ahead may be driven by a suicidal maniac', as journalist William Safire
summed up the mood in the New York Times.
'The world will never be the same again', is the constant refrain. And perhaps
it won't - but not because of a terrorist attack in Manhattan. Rather, if
the world is changing, it is changing because of our perceptions of what that
attack has done to our lives. There has been much talk over the past three
weeks about the need for a proportionate response to the assault. A good place
to start would be by injecting some proportionality into our understanding
of it. Over the past century the world has faced two world wars, a Cold War,
Nazism, and the Holocaust. There were times when the Barbarians did indeed
appear to be at the gates. But the world survived. So, why do we feel so threatened
by a single criminal act, albeit a particularly monstrous one?
Terrorism is not new, even on the scale that was visited on lower Manhattan
(though, from the firebombing of Dresden, through the devastation of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki to the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, terror on this scale has usually
been the work of those nations that are now leading the fight for civilisation).
What was new about the attacks was their arbitrary, nihilistic brutality.
What was also new was the way that they exposed vulnerabilities, not just
of the USA, and not just in a physical sense. The hijacked planes tore into
the fabric not simply of the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, but of the confidence
and self-belief of Western societies. And into that gaping hole have marched
a whole host of demons. 'If a flight full of commuters can be turned into
a missile of war', observed the New York Times, 'then everything is
dangerous'. It is in giving focus to this sense of dread, to the belief that
even the ordinary may be hazardous, that the attacks may have had their most
devastating impact.
Take, for example, the idea that around every corner might lurk a terrorist
armed with a weapon of mass destruction. It's an idea that inevitably fosters
a climate of distrust and paranoia, atomising society further and undermining
possibilities of social action. It facilitates attacks on civil liberties,
from the introduction ID cards, to tighter controls on immigration and asylum
seekers, to new police powers to hold 'terrorists' indefinitely - none of
which will have much impact on the prosecution of terror, but all of which
will curtail the freedoms of ordinary citizens. And it eases the way to Western
intervention abroad - think of how fear of Saddam's 'weapons of mass destruction'
has been manipulated to help maintain support for economic sanctions against,
and continued bombings of, the Iraqi people.
Of all the imagined weapons in the terrorist arsenal, biological warfare appears
the most terrifying: a silent, invisible killer, gnawing away at a population
from the inside, it is a perfect metaphor for Western vulnerabilities. Such
fear of bioterrorism has been accentuated by the peculiar relationship of
contemporary Western cultures to biotechnology. There has built up, over the
past decade, considerable unease about technologies such as cloning and the
genetic modification of organisms because they seem to corrupt the relationship
between Man and nature by dissolving the boundaries that appear to maintain
order in the natural world. In an age in which social and moral boundaries
appear so fluid, our social anxieties often get relocated into the natural
world, creating apprehension of what might happen if we begin to tinker with
nature.
This is one of the reasons for the shift in focus, over past decade and a
half, from the threat of nuclear to that of biological terrorism. This shift
is an expression of changes not in terrorist strategy - terrorist groups no
more possess biological weapons now than they possessed nuclear warheads a
decade ago - but in social anxieties. After the break-up of the Soviet Union,
what politicians and strategists feared most was that the chaos that prevailed
in Eastern Europe and the Third World would spill over into the West. This
gave rise to the image of the fanatic with a nuclear bomb in a suitcase, built
with the expertise of unemployed Soviet physicists. Today Western values and
freedoms appear under threat as much from the inside as from the outside,
a sense strengthened by the knowledge that the hijackers on 11 September were
not stereotypical Islamic fundamentalists, but Western educated, highly integrated,
fluent in English and German, and given to vodka-binges at the weekend. So
now we imagine that same fanatic but with a bagful of bio-engineered germs,
corrupting society from within.
According to the American writer and anti-biotechnology campaigner Jeremy
Rifkin, 'All you need is a beer fermenter, a protein based culture, plastic
clothing and a gas mask' to ensure 'bacteria and viruses raining down from
the sky over populated areas, infecting and killing millions of people.' Wilder
still is a claim by George Poste, chairman of the US Defence Science Board's
panel on bioterrorism. The Defence Science Board is a federal advisory committee
established to provide independent advice to the secretary of defence. According
to Poste, terrorists may be creating genetically modified organisms that are
integrated into a target's genome but which only become activated 'when you
presume that the political ideology of your opponent has become sufficiently
offensive.'
In reality, however, bioweapons are both difficult to produce and their effects
are not as devastating as many imagine. Take, for instance, anthrax, which
the US Defence Department describes as '100 000 times more deadly than the
deadliest chemical weapon'. The World Health Organisation estimates that 50
kilos of dry anthrax used against a city of one million inhabitants would
kill 36 000 people and incapacitate another 54 000.
Anthrax is a rod-like bacterium that normally affects grazing animals such
as cows, goats and deer that ingest bacterial spores naturally occurring in
the soil. It rarely infects humans, but the illness can be contracted in three
ways: through bacteria infecting wounds, through eating infected meat, and
by inhaling sufficient numbers of anthrax spores. For many years anthrax was
called 'woolsorters' disease because workers at woollen mills were most at
risk from naturally occurring spores. The danger, however, was relatively
small. A 1960 study in a Pennsylvania goat hair mill showed that workers inhaled
more than 500 spores per 8-hour shift, and yet there were no cases of illness
among the workers. Indeed, in the whole of USA only 18 cases were reported
between 1900 and 1978.
The US Defence department estimates that an individual must inhale between
10 000 and 50 000 spores for the disease to take hold. This will only happen
if huge numbers of spores are dispersed in the air and kept there (the natural
tendency of anthrax spores is to drift to the ground in the absence of wind).
Technically this is extremely difficult to accomplish.
First, anthrax spores need to be converted into a powder. Only the USA and
the Soviet Union, both of whom expended millions of dollars in developing
bioweapons during the Cold War, have refined the means to do this. Iraq was
supposed to have a well-developed anthrax programme. UN weapons inspectors,
however, only discovered anthrax in liquid form, which, according to one expert
'is almost as safe as candy'.
Having turned anthrax into powder, a potential terrorist would have to find
a way of dispersing it in the air. Again, this is much more difficult than
might be imagined. There was much alarm when the FBI revealed that some of
the hijackers involved in the World Trade Centre attacks had previously made
enquiries about crop-dusting planes. According to Barbara Rosenberg, director
of the Federation of American Scientists' chemical and biological weapons
programme, 'a crop duster would be very useful for a chemical and biological
attack - if you wanted to attack crops.' But it would not be that useful in
attacking humans. To get spores to lodge deeply enough in the human lung to
cause damage, they must be extremely small - less than 10 microns in size.
Crop dusters are fitted with much larger dispensers meant for insects and
plants. It would certainly be possible to modify them, but such modifications
would require considerable expertise. 'You can't go down to store and buy
one off the shelf', observes Rosenberg.
There are similar problems with another imagined terrorist favourite - smallpox.
Smallpox is a virus that can cause bleeding and lesions all over the body,
and used to devastate large parts of both the developed and the developing
world. Unlike anthrax it is highly contagious, but it is also very fragile
and difficult to manipulate. It is also almost impossible to obtain. The virus
was officially declared eradicated by the WHO in 1979. Only two laboratories
in the world still possess supplies of live smallpox virus - the Centre for
Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the high-security Russian installation
at Novosibirsk. Neither is likely to provide handouts for terrorists.
According to the FBI, there has only been one known case of bioterrorism in
the USA. It involved the Rajneeshee, a religious cult, who had established
a large commune in Wasco County, a rural area east of Portland, Oregon. In
1984 the cult decided to take political control of the county by manipulating
the results of elections in November of that year. They planned to bus homeless
people into their commune and register them as voters, while at the same time
make opposing voters sick by infecting them with salmonella. Cult members
contaminated food in ten salad bars with the bacterium Salmonella typhimurium
which causes diarrhoea. 751 people became infected, though none was seriously
ill. Two members of the cult were eventually convicted for their involvement
in the plot. The election results remained unaffected.
The 751 people infected by the Rajneeshee, in a plot more comic than tragic,
are the only known victims of bioterrorism. The only other group known to
have attempted to use biological agents is the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan.
Despite spending millions of dollars, and having a large number of biologists
on its payroll, the attempts proved to be as bizarre and as unsuccessful as
in the Rajneeshee case. In April 1990 the group tried to covert a car to spread
botulism through the engine's exhaust. Three years later it attempted to spread
anthrax by using a sprayer system on the roof of a building in eastern Tokyo.
Neither incident resulted in a single casualty.
In the end the group abandoned its plans for biological warfare and turned
to chemical weapons instead. In March 1995 it released sarin, a nerve toxin,
into the Tokyo subway. The group was estimated to have spent $10m dollars
preparing this attack. Thankfully just 12 people died. This still remains
the most devastating non-military chemical attack ever.
All of which is why, according to a report produced for the Washington-based
National Defence University Strategic Forum on 'The Threat of Bioterrorism'
'few terrorists have demonstrated real interest in bioterrorism and fewer
still have made an attempt to acquire biological agents.' Even if terrorists
do develop a bioweapon it is unlikely to be as deadly as we imagine it will
be. As the attack on the World Trade Centre revealed, terrorists can be just
as devastating using low-tech methods. The fear of bioterrorism is likely
to be far more debilitating than bioterrorism itself.
So why does the terrorist with a suitcase full of plague or anthrax remain
such as potent image? Partly because he speaks to so many of our contemporary
anxieties, from the dangers of messing with nature to the sense of the fragility
of Western values. At the same time the image presents the authorities with
a bogeyman to trump all bogeymen. Compared to traditional bogeys, such as
the mugger or the crack dealer or the paedophile, the faceless terrorist who
might yet be your neighbour is a far more sinister figure. Like all bogeymen,
it is an image rooted in reality - you only have to look at the Manhattan
skyline to recognise that. But, like all bogeymen, it is also a mythical creation,
the aim of which is to make palatable draconian and illiberal measures that
might otherwise have been unconscionable. And so much more sinister is this
particular bogeyman that one can wheel him out to justify policies that are
that much more draconian and illiberal, from the demolition of civil liberties
at home to the prosecution of war abroad.
'No passion', Edmund Burke once wrote, 'so effectively robs the mind of all
its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.' Rarely has this been more true
than it is today. Before fear drives out all reason, we need to take a measured,
rational, proportionate view of what actually happened on 11 September.