by Alok Jha
Global Pandemic
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In the winter of 2009, the world was on edge. A strain of swine flu had emerged out of nowhere in Mexico and was advancing fast. As the authorities battled to constrain it, a concern hung in the air: what if this bug was that nightmare, the global killer?
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The virus spread to the US, then reached Europe within days and, within weeks of the first detection, the World Health Organization (WHO) had announced a full-blown pandemic. There is a circulating strain of influenza every year but this one, a version of H1N1, seemed more virulent than most, quicker to spread.
Four years earlier, an even nastier bug, avian influenza H5N1, had done the rounds on the other side of the world. Health authorities had been on high alert and wild birds were watched with suspicion—any of them could have harbored the bug, which had started infecting and killing humans in east Asia.
What these and other global pandemics have in common is the speed with which they can travel. Both of the scares described above tailed off within months and the spread was contained without the whole world being placed in danger. But scientists, doctors and public health authorities are quietly worried about the big one, the nightmare virus that cannot be stopped and infects people with ease. The one that kills millions, or even billions.
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DEATH TOLL
1918 Flu Pandemic
50 million in 6 months
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In the end, swine flu H1N1 caused more than 18,000 deaths, according to the WHO, and by the end of 2005, H5N1 had killed 74 people. For reference, both these figures pale in comparison to the expected number of deaths from flu—between 250,000 and 500,000 every year.
What was worrying experts, in the months during which the virus was spreading, was the memory of the worst pandemic on record. In 1918, the world was recovering from four devastating years of war when the infamous Spanish influenza struck. Within six months, this virus had killed around 50 million people, with most of the dead aged between 20 and 45. The 1957 and 1968 Asian flu epidemics also killed millions. Today, travel is even faster and most people live in densely packed cities. A 1918-type pandemic would be devastating.
How diseases spread
You wake up with a mild headache, nothing serious enough to keep you away from work. Over breakfast you chat to your children about the day ahead and kiss them goodbye as they go off to school. On the train to work you can’t find a seat and everyone is jammed together. At the office, it’s a full day of meetings.
By the time the winter evening draws in, you’re shivering and your nose has been running all afternoon. The next day, you recognize the signs of flu and decide to stay in bed.
But how many dozens of people have you already come into contact with? How many did you infect? And how many of them then passed the virus on to others? And that is just in a single city: how many of the people you infected went to other cities or hopped on a plane to another country? Within a day, one case could have become a dozen. In a week, thousands could be infected around the world.
It’s not just death that causes problems
You might be forgiven for thinking that any modern anxiety about pandemics is hyperbole. There have been major pandemics throughout human history (the Black Death in 1348 killed a third of Europe’s population), but civilization did not end. And we have better drugs today too. Why the worry?
The reason is that modern life is so much more interconnected today than it ever has been in the past. We rely on global supply chains for everything from food to pharmaceuticals. Knock out any important part of that web, and you’re in trouble.
Take lorry drivers, for example. In a relatively mild pandemic, drivers might be laid up or have to look after sick family members. What if schools were closed too and they had to babysit their children? Remove a significant number of lorries from the roads and supplies do not go anywhere. In the past, shops might have kept warehouses filled with stock—everything from food to antivirals. But maintaining such a store is expensive, and improved information technology and logistics have meant that shops now rely on smaller, more frequent deliveries.
The US authorities recommend keeping three weeks’ food and water stockpiled in case of a pandemic: most cities around the world have only a few days’ worth of food.
What about hospitals? These need regular deliveries of drugs, blood and sterile supplies. Ambulances need fuel. And someone needs to transport fuel from refineries to petrol stations. What if none of the people required to move things around turned up for work?
What about the fuel needed for the national grid? Half of US electricity comes from coal-fired power stations, and if a pandemic stopped train drivers from moving that coal from quarries to the generators, the country’s lights would not stay on for long.
When the electricity is out, we get into a whole new slew of problems. Refrigerators cannot work, so food goes off. People will not be able to cook. Radio and TV stop broadcasting. Phones and computers have to be switched off, putting critical infrastructure (including financial records) out of reach.
In 2006, economist Warwick McKibbin of the Lowry Institute for International Policy in Sydney, Australia, modeled the effects on the modern world of a 1918-style pandemic. “The mild scenario, estimated to cost the world 1.4 million lives, reduces total output by nearly 1% or approximately $330 billion (in constant 2006 prices) during the first year,” he said. “In our model, as the scale of the pandemic increases, so do the economic costs. A massive global economic slowdown occurs in the next-worst scenario, with more than 142 million people killed and some output in economies in the developing world shrinking by half. The loss in output in this scenario could reach $4.4 trillion, 12.6% of global GDP in the first year.”
The relatively small SARS outbreak of 2002, for example, spread across 26 countries in just a few months, infecting more than 8,000 people and killing more than 700 with a pneumonia-like illness. However, it had disproportionate knock-on costs, as flights were canceled, schools shut down, and panic gripped Asian markets; it cost the world $40 billion. “Investing in poverty reduction and healthcare in developing countries are the keys to managing pandemics in the long term,” said McKibbin. “For now, we will have to live with a world where a relatively minor flu outbreak in Mexico City can send markets reeling in Tokyo.”
The diseases to worry about
The reason the H5N1 virus of 2005 was not as dangerous as feared, despite its virulence, was that it could not pass easily between humans. Those who died lived in close quarters with poultry. But it would not take much for the virus to mutate or combine with a human flu virus, and things would get deadly very quickly.
And flu is not the only thing that should be on our list of worries. Spotting the next big problematic virus requires monitoring of wild animals and the people who come into contact with them. “We believe such eavesdropping may provide the early warning needed to stop pandemics before they start,” says Nathan Wolfe, a biologist at Stanford University and director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI). “Spotting new threats can happen only if scientists know what viruses are circulating among the species most likely to give rise to new pandemic viruses—birds and pigs. And whereas surveillance in the former has improved over the past five or six years thanks to concerns about bird flu (the H5N1 virus), scientists know too little about the viruses that infect the estimated 941 million domesticated pigs around the world.”
Had scientists been watching how hunters were interacting with wild animals 30 years ago, they might have been able to catch HIV early, before it reached the pandemic state, says Wolfe. The question now is, how can we prevent the next big killers? Wolfe proposes listening to what he calls viral “chatter”—the pattern of transfer of animal viruses to humans—in the hope of sounding the alarm about an emerging infectious disease before it becomes deadly.
Scientists with the GVFI already follow people and animals in Cameroon, China, the Democ
ratic Republic of the Congo, Laos, Madagascar and Malaysia—all hot spots for emerging human infectious diseases. More than half of such diseases, past and present, including influenza, SARS, dengue and Ebola, originated in animals. Analysis of blood from hunters and hunted has already revealed several animal viruses not previously seen in humans, including one called the simian foamy virus, which is in the same family as HIV.
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Influenza was the 20th century’s weapon of mass destruction, killing more than the Nazis, more than the atomic bomb, and more than the First World War.
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None of this, by the way, takes into account synthetic viruses created by people hell-bent on terror. Genetically modified organisms bred to be virulent and also resistant to drugs might be difficult to make and disseminate today, but that will not always be the case.
What can you do?
A few months after the H1N1 pandemic died down, Peter Sandman, a riskcommunication consultant from Princeton, wrote a commentary in the journal Nature on the lessons people could learn from the outbreak: “For the ordinary citizen, the US government has so far recommended only hygiene. It has told people to stay at home if they are sick and to wash their hands. It hasn’t told people to stock up on food, water, prescription medicines or other key supplies,” he said. “Here is a secret of preparedness that is easy to forget: it is calming to prepare. Having things to do gives people a sense of control. It builds confidence, and it makes them more able to bear their fear.”
Because you can be sure that a virulent pandemic will happen again one day. “Influenza was the twentieth century’s weapon of mass destruction, killing more than the Nazis, more than the atomic bomb, and more than the First World War,” says John Oxford, a virologist at the Royal London School of Medicine and Dentistry. “We would do well to dwell very seriously indeed on this fact. Nature is the greatest bioterrorist of our world, and we should concentrate and expand our efforts in public health. Emerging viruses could do for us all, as easily and as quickly, or even more so, than the Great Influenza of 1918.”
The Doomsday Machine
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The Cold War was the closest the world ever came to a man-made Armageddon. In the decades after the Second World War, the United States and the USSR built thousands of missiles bristling with nuclear bombs, and aimed them at each other’s major cities. Letting one loose would have been a disaster; firing all of them would have destroyed the world.
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Both sides knew the consequences of an all-out nuclear war. And it is clear now that neither of them had the appetite to start proceedings. But at the time, they had to remain defiant and strong in the face of the enemy, seemingly ready to strike in response to any transgression. It was a time a time of bluff, counter-bluff and deep paranoia.
Any nuclear strike would, of course, have come as a shock to the other side. A radar operator might see a red dot on a screen, moving steadily closer to their country’s capital. They would then have only a few minutes to make a terrifying decision. Is this a real attack? Do we strike back? What if we launch all our missiles in retaliation and the red dot turns out to be a flock of geese?
The Soviets thought hard about the problem of retaliation and came up with a system that bought them extra time in the event of seeing that red dot on their radar screens. If, for whatever reason, they could not confirm whether or not they were under attack, they would transfer their missile-launching power to an automatic system called the Perimeter, also known as Mertvaia Ruka (Dead Hand). This doomsday machine was designed to wait until an attack had been confirmed, and then, even if all the Soviet leaders had been wiped out, to initiate a devastating retaliatory strike. It would be the end of the world as we know it.
Letting the machines take over
In Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, a rogue US nuclear bomber decides to attack the USSR. In the course of the story, the Americans are told by the Russian high command that if the bomber is successful, there is nothing they can do to prevent an all-out retaliation from the automatic Soviet doomsday machine—50 hydrogen bombs positioned around the globe that will explode if they detect an attack on Russian soil. These would release enough deadly cobalt fallout to render the Earth uninhabitable for 93 years. And no human, not even the Russians, would be able to stop it.
In the 1964 Stanley Kubrick classic, Dr. Strangelove, the world is on the brink of nuclear war. Peter Sellers (right) plays President Merkin Muffley, as well as the title character of Dr. Strangelove, who is Muffley’s scientific adviser.
No one would build such a thing for real, would they? In fact, they did. Perimeter was designed by the Soviet military to ensure the launch of all its nuclear missiles if its commanders were put out of action during a war. If the Russians were attacked by surprise and their command centers compromised, they would still be able to wreak revenge.
“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” said Valery Yarynich, a former Soviet colonel and a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and General Staff, speaking to Wired magazine in 2009. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.”
David Hoffman, a former journalist for the Washington Post and the paper’s Moscow bureau chief, wrote about Perimeter in a book called Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy. He said the machine created “an alternative system so that the leader could just press a button that would say: I delegate this to somebody else. I don’t know if there are missiles coming or not. Somebody else decide.”
In this scenario, military leaders would flip on a system that would send a signal to a deep underground bunker where three duty officers sat. “If there were real missiles and the Kremlin were hit and the Soviet leadership was wiped out, which is what they feared, those three guys in that deep underground bunker would have to decide whether to launch very small command rockets that would take off, fly across the huge vast territory of the Soviet Union and launch all their remaining missiles.”
How would it have worked?
Perimeter monitored the ground and air around the USSR for signs of a nuclear explosion, using seismic, radiation and air-pressure sensors. If it determined that a nuclear weapon had exploded on Soviet soil, it would first check to see if the communications links to the Soviet General Staff were intact; in other words, whether anyone was still alive and in charge. If the lines were dead, it would assume that the country was under attack and that no one was left to launch a retaliatory strike. It would then re-route command of the Soviet arsenal of missiles to a secret bunker, deep underground, designed to survive an all-out nuclear attack. In that bunker, a duty officer would have complete control to launch missiles, bypassing the normal layers of command.
If the duty officer, who might be someone senior (though that was not guaranteed), decided that the USSR had been overrun by nuclear weapons, he could launch a set of control missiles that sat in armored silos around the country. These would rise high into the sky and send down signals to the remaining Soviet nuclear missiles that the USSR had survived the wave of US nuclear warheads. They would also beam down orders to initiate the automatic launch of the Soviet warheads and rain down destruction on the US aggressors.
Perimeter was designed to lie dormant until someone high up in the military switched the system on, during a time of extreme emergency. Many former members of the Soviet military have confirmed its existence: in the 1990s, members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party gave representatives of the American defense company Braddock, Dunn & McDonald details of the Soviet preparedness for a nuclear attack.
General Varfolomei Korobushin, former deputy chief of staff of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, said that the country’s biggest fear in the Cold War was of a US first strike, so their main objective was to design a system that was capable of launching as soon as an attack was detected. “Right now we have a system in place which would automatically launch all missiles remaining in o
ur arsenal even if every nuclear command center and all of our leaders were destroyed,” he said. “This system, called the Dead Hand, would have been triggered by a combination of light, radioactivity, and overpressure, and would cause several command rockets to be launched into orbit, from where they would send launch codes to all our remaining missiles.”
Vitalii Kataev, senior adviser to the chairman of the defense industry, explained that with the Dead Hand mechanism, the decision-maker at the center simply unblocked the no-fire mechanism, thereby releasing launch control to local automatic triggers associated with each command missile. “The triggers, fed by numerous sensors, will launch its local command missile and, in turn, its associated cluster of ICBMs once the sensors are excited by the light, or seismic shock, or radiation, or atmospheric density associated with an incoming nuclear strike.”
He added that the system was “definitely operational by the early 1980s. It is important to understand that unblocking of Dead Hand assumes the scenario of a situation that is extremely threatening to the political and military leadership of the state. That basic expectation is that all decision makers are dead when the command missiles automatically fire.”
Why was it built?
It is a horrifying idea that something like Perimeter might have existed, ready to wreak further havoc even when its country had been brought to destruction. But it became operational at a time when the Soviets seemed convinced that the US would attack first.
