THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Smallpox was deployed as a weapon against Native Americans by the British in the eighteenth century.10 During the French and Indian War, Sir Jeffrey Amherst proposed the use of this weapon in order to reduce the tribes hostile to the British. When smallpox broke out at Fort Pitt in 1763, a Captain Ecuyer gave blankets and a handkerchief from the smallpox hospital to Indians and recorded in his journal, “I hope it will have the desired effect.” A smallpox epidemic did follow, although it is impossible to isolate the cause.11

  The formulation of Koch's postulates12 and the development of modern microbiology in the nineteenth century led to the isolation and production of specific pathogens. In the ensuing years, many states attempted to develop pathogens and weaponize them. In World War I, Germany pursued an ambitious program using attacks on livestock in neutral countries and poisoning animal feed for export.

  Japan conducted biological warfare research from 1932 onwards in occupied Manchuria. Prisoners were injected with anthrax, meningitis, cholera, and plague. At least 10,000 are said to have died. Eleven Chinese cities were attacked using contaminated water and food supplies. Pathogen cultures were also sprayed from airplanes. Plague was developed by allowing laboratory fleas to feed on plague-infected rats; these fleas were then harvested and were released by aircraft over Chinese cities. Fifteen million fleas are reported to have been released per attack.

  During the same period, the British experimented with weaponized anthrax off the coast of Scotland. It was the discovery of the Japanese program at the end of World War II, however, that galvanized research in the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR. Japanese scientists were granted immunity from war crimes prosecution in exchange for extensive debriefings. During the Korean War the U.S. program expanded, and full-scale production of pathogens for weapons began in 1954. As part of a biological countermeasures program, American cities like New York and San Francisco were surreptitiously used as laboratories to test aerosolization. The offensive program was unilaterally terminated by President Nixon in 1969, and in 1975 the United States ratified the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. This treaty prohibits the development, production, and retention of microbial or other biological stockpiles in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic purposes.

  Unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention, however, the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention has no provisions for verifying compliance. It is now widely conceded that several signatories have violated the Convention's provisions. For example, the KGB weaponized the lethal toxin ricin by producing small metallic pellets that were cross-drilled, filled with the poison, then sealed with wax that would melt at body temperature. The pellets were discharged by a spring-loaded weapon disguised as an umbrella. By this means the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London in 1978 and at least six other persons were murdered. In 1992 President Yeltsin disclosed that the Soviet Union had pursued its biological warfare program in violation of the Convention and confirmed that an outbreak of anthrax in 1979 had been caused by an accidental release of spores from a biological weapons facility.

  The scope of the Soviet program, as described by a defector, 13 embraced more than 55,000 scientists and technicians. Yeltsin promised to suspend these activities; a 1995 report, however, concluded that between 25,000 and 30,000 persons were still engaged in various related programs.

  The Iraqi program, while on a different scale, is known to have been extensive, and may have produced up to ten billion doses of anthrax, botu-linum toxin, and aflatoxin. UNSCOM, the UN agency set up after the Gulf War to discover and dismantle Iraq's programs of weapons of mass destruction, concluded that biological agents had been weaponized in considerable variety, including 155 mm artillery shells, 122 mm rockets, aircraft bombs, missile warheads, and aerosol tanks. UNSCOM was unable to determine, however, whether these weapons had been destroyed.

  Today, it is thought that China, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Taiwan, Israel, and North Korea have active biological weapons programs.14 Public sources have estimated that between 10 and 25 countries possess or are seeking biological weapons. Unlike nuclear and chemical weapons, biological agents are easy to make and conceal and they are inexpensive. They can be produced in facilities that are also involved in legitimate scientific and pharmaceutical activities. These programs can flourish despite rigorous export control regulations because the same agents that furnish lethal weapons are also naturally occurring microorganisms and toxins. Similarly, the dual nature of biological agents makes verification of treaty commitments against weaponizing these agents virtually impossible. Finally, the advanced nature of the Soviet program and the temptation to market its fruits to other states presents a scenario every bit as disturbing as that involving Russian nuclear devices.

  This duality of use—biology as medical science/war weapon—that so bedevils control regimes also, however, holds the possibility for at least tempering the problem. The Soviet program turns out to be readily convertible to peaceful uses, in a way that its nuclear weapons program is not. One commentator has asserted that many of the Russian biological weapons facilities can be readily converted to biomedical research work and vaccine production, providing employment to a large number of scientists and technicians.15 In a highly creative approach, another commentator has argued that trade regimes and nonproliferation regimes can be carefully crafted in order to attract and enmesh a new tier of states that have been recently endowed with advanced technological capabilities, including the capacity to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.16 This approach plays on the new market-state and its intertwining of security and commercial links among states such that the transparency so crucial for market development can also be used to prevent clandestine military development.

  At present, however, it is hard to get security analysts to pay much attention to biological weapons. To persuade them to pay more, we must first answer the question: if these weapons are so easy to deploy and so lethal, 17 why haven't we seen more of their use?*

  The two sets of consumers for such weapons are military commanders and terrorists. For commanders, biological weapons are too slow to affect operations at the front (it may take days or weeks for an enemy soldier to sicken, during which he can do a lot of damage) and too unpredictable18 (because the wide diffusion of virulent agents can infect one's own troops).† For terrorists, the same features of biological weapons cut the other way: delay allows perpetrators time for escape, and an agent like smallpox is terrifying to the public because it is unpredictable owing to the fact that it is communicable. Communicability poses its own threats, however; it may be some time before the terrorists know whether they are themselves infected and are infecting others (their colleagues, for example) unintentionally. Accordingly, many biological weapons programs have mainly focused on anthrax spores that enter the lungs and hatch bacteria that multiply rapidly within the body but don't infect anyone else.

  Genetic engineering, however, may be able to make biological weapons far more useful to both the commander and the terrorist. It should be possible to design a virus that would disproportionately afflict members of a particular ethnic group, giving safety to attackers from a different group.19 Genetic engineering could also match a particular virus with an effective vaccine so that the aggressor would be immunized; or piggyback two agents, one quick and confined and the other latent and communicable. This sort of engineering will allow for the cloning of vast quantities of both traditional pathogens and new designer agents; these could be created quickly and cheaply, while their antidotes might take decades to develop. Such frightening prospects also hold within them some hope: the revolu-tion in genetics might also provide framework vaccines and antidotes that can be quickly modified and rapidly produced.

  If biological weapons were used today against a civilian population, the public health systems of any of the major countries would be quickly overwhelmed. Our best strategy lies in recognizing the new and distinct nature of this threat and strengthening the public
health surveillance systems,* as well as the intelligence collection capabilities, that can quickly detect and possibly thwart such attacks.

  IMMIGRATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS

  THE GLOBALIZATION OF CULTURE

  Progress in international communications that occurred during the Long War—beginning with the radio and culminating in the satellite-borne signals of global television—was decisive for that war. It may be unlikely that forces of the size that invaded Normandy, vastly larger than anything in the past, will ever be marshaled in an amphibious assault in the future, but it is also clear that only modern telecommunications could have made such an enterprise possible. The great naval campaigns of the Pacific were enabled by a communications network of staggering complexity, involving the coordination of distant fleets, air assaults, and landings combining all arms of the American forces. And, too, it is difficult to overestimate the role of Churchill's stirring addresses to the British public or Roosevelt's Fireside Chats in rallying public opinion, which is a crucial element in mobilizing the popular resources of the nation-state necessary to execute strategies of mass warfare and to withstand mass civilian suffering. The most critical role played by these technologies, however, came at the endgame of the Long War. It was the irrefutable comparison between life in the West and in the Soviet bloc, made possible by modern communications, that utterly demoralized the communist leaderships and so alienated their peoples.†

  Nor did this communication go in one direction only. Dissident groups in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere were able constantly to expose the actions of the police states under which they labored. The Helsinki Accords gave dissidents an international standard of human rights against which to measure the acts of the Soviet bloc; modern communications made it possible to report these evaluations. An equally important line of communication was the limited travel to the West accorded citizens of the Warsaw Pact states. The bloc actually began to hemorrhage with a mass migration of German citizens through Hungary in 1989.

  These two phenomena—immigration and human rights—that are connected to innovations in communication also pose two major challenges to the society of market-states. Immigration on a scale never hitherto seen in peacetime bears a relationship to the market-state different from that it bore to the nation-state. The nation-state could effectively seal its borders because it had the duty of protecting the ethnic nation for whose benefit it was constituted.20 The market-state is more ambivalent about such matters because it can so usefully employ the lower-cost labor of new immigrants to increase the productivity of the society. Moreover, in its multicultural form—like the United States—the market-state must deal with new immigrants who can call upon political groups to whom they are ethnically allied, as well as upon an American political consciousness that is wary of policies favoring exclusion.

  It is global communication, both logistically and in images, that drives this immigration. As the market-states of the developed world increase their wealth, they become the target of immigration for peoples of the Third World whose demographic dynamics could quickly overwhelm the capacity of any state to assimilate them. Furthermore, the abandonment of the integrative function of the nation-state, which sought to transform immigrants into versions of the pre-existing national group of the country to which they had come, means that large, unassimilated ethnic groups are now without the resources of the State that would enable them to be assimilated. Maximizing the opportunities of its citizens means that the market-state must leave it to those citizens to determine what cultural attachments they wish to form. Even market-states that do not embrace the multicultural variation chosen by the United States may still face the reality of large knots of unassimilated immigrant communities within their midst, and thus face also the choice of according them full democratic privileges—and risking the loss of civil cohesion—or denying them the right of equal democratic status.

  Thus again the ironic intertwining of immigration and human rights: the communications media that bring glamorous images of the developed states to those living in wretchedness also bring to those in comfort images of the suffering and cruelty visited on the less fortunate. Perhaps this latter development is really a benefit: the states of the developed world must welcome the opportunity to deploy their resources in ways that benefit the oppressed and the poor—this, after all, can justify our good fortune. But polities that are emotionally whipsawed by the most affecting shows of suffering are ill-equipped to devise long-term policies to help anyone. One month's poster child gives way to another. The Kurds had languished under oppressive and genocidal rule since the seventh century until CNN* brought attention to their plight in Iraq, but soon thereafter attention shifted to the suffering of Muslims in Bosnia.

  Lacking the political focus that enables sustained attention to a problem, the publics of the developed states must soon grow disillusioned with humanitarian efforts altogether. Sooner or later there will be analysts who will explain that any help will create dependency, that aid, however well intentioned, actually makes things worse, and so on. In a world of suffering, the dimensions of which are necessarily beyond complete cure because they are essentially comparative, fed by international communications that so vividly and increasingly display the contrast between rich and poor, the society of market-states is ill-suited for helping. Each state is, after all, competing for the skills of learned castes who, unlike the individual bearers of capital under the nation-state, can take their knowledge with them (or withhold it). To become either the most welcoming refuge for the poorest or the chief ministering angel to the Third World is to consign one's state to a steadily degenerating competitive position vis-à-vis other market-states. We can expect moves among some members of the society of market-states to require others to take immigrants, provide aid, or change their human rights policies, thus breeding conflicts among states.

  To simply ignore suffering and the denial of human rights in other states, however, is also destructive, depriving states of their moral basis. Of course it may be that the citizens of such states will wall themselves off psychologically, in much the way they can wall themselves off architecturally, from the unassimilated poor in their own countries. This renders the market-state an attractive target, however, to civil disorder as well as to international terrorism.

  There are many other problems created for the State by the explosion in communications technology: the privacy interests of individuals and the protection of the family from offensive intrusion are examples. Immigration and human rights, however, are different because they do not admit of single-state solutions. Only coordinated action within the society of states can treat these particular problems effectively and with an attention to their interconnection. These problems bring unusual strains to market-states because they are called upon to devise cooperative solutions even though the salience of the market—which is indifferent to such concerns and hostile to the transaction costs such solutions impose—is especially high within such states.

  THE LIBERALIZATION OF TRADE AND FINANCE

  ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENT

  The introduction of the computer21 and the mathematics on which high-speed computation is based played a decisive role in defeating fascism and communism in the Long War. No history of the Second World War can give anything like an accurate account if it was written before the revelations about Allied code breaking that began to appear in the 1970s. Nor can any political history of the Cold War omit the phenomenal growth of the developed economies, especially Japan and the United States, that occurred as a result of the introduction of microchip technology. Although, as observed above, the percentage of the American workforce devoted to manufacturing has dropped with the precipitousness that earlier occurred with respect to agricultural workers, the percentage of U.S. GDP contributed by manufacturing has not changed in a significant way. The enormous growth in productivity that accounts for this fact can be largely attributed to the products of the computer revolution. It is not t
hat computer operators have replaced clerk-typists, or even that new computer-based products have given a shot of adrenaline to consumer demand comparable to that of the automobile in an earlier period. Rather it is that a new source of wealth has been discovered: the application of vast amounts of information rapidly applied to the tasks of work. Not only did this greatly enrich the United States and Japan, but it created explosive markets for the products of an entirely new list of economic players on the world scene—Korea and Taiwan, among others—as well as enabling the renovation of the Western European infrastructure that had begun the Industrial Age.

  The introduction of the computer was a strategic innovation* that was productively married to the American doctrine of containment. This doctrine proposed that communism would collapse of its own steadily increasing deterioration if it could be prevented from actually seizing other states (by invasion or subversion). This required that the noncommunist states be made strong through increasing prosperity and effective alliances. It proved to be an effective strategy for the noncommunist society of nation-states, and yet some of the innovations that made it succeed were ultimately destructive of the power of the nation-state itself. But for the development of the computer, George Orwell might well have been right about the power of communications technology to observe and control national populations. Instead, this technology decentralized the power of institutions, including the State, so that the objects of control slipped out of the hands of governments altogether. George Gilder gives this example: