It would become clear in the days and weeks to come after the terrorist attacks that the book would become a 2001 bestseller. The anthrax that would appear throughout Florida, Washington, and New York would make the book required reading in this new war.
The authors, all experienced reporters for the New York Times, have spent much of the last few years investigating the emerging threat of biological weapons. They begin the book by looking at an interesting dilemma. “In December 1997, six years after the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon announced that it had decided to vaccinate its 2.4 million soldiers and reservists against anthrax.”
Why was it that two years after Iraq’s biological weapons program was exposed did the US suddenly do this? It turns out that the US government was becoming increasingly worried over the emerging threats from these weapons.
Germs begins with an unsettling account of the 1984 use of crude but effective biological weapons in Dalles, Oregon by followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. This little remembered episode was evidence of the growing threat that the combination of technological proliferation due to the biotechnology revolution, the relative inexpensive nature of biological weapons, and the nature of motivated groups could do. Luckily the use of biological agents was only a deliberate use of salmonella that affected 751 people. No one died, but the threat was now a clearer reality.
The narrative continues through the eyes of characters like Bill Patrick. Patrick had done two-decades of research at the US Army’s biological research center at Fort Detrick, Maryland and had seen the program from the inside. He helped the program go from black to white, but not without reservations. He tells us that, “It takes eighteen months to develop a weapons-grade agent and ten years to develop a good vaccine against it.”
The difference between the US’s Germ program was that after 1969 it was strictly defensive. It was the Nixon administration that actively promoted a treaty banning germ warfare. Part of that desire was the direct interest of the US. Biological weapons are the weapons of the weak and, “when war was costly and military action required tons of advanced equipment and nuclear arms, only the wealthiest countries could play the game. Cheap arms of devastating force leveled the playing field.”
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