Step One. Announce that its an Isolated Incident.
Step Two: If someone got exposed at a Mall, DO NOT RUN TESTS ON MALL AIR. WAIT ONE WEEK. THEN CHECK MALL FOR CONTAMINATION.
Step Three: Repeat Step One
Thank you for the honor and privilege of addressing you. I have spent the past six years researching and writing about viruses and biological weapons, first for my nonfiction book The Hot Zone, which was about an outbreak of Ebola virus near Washington, D.C., then for my fact-based novel The Cobra Event, which describes a bioterrorism event in New York City, and which I understand President Clinton, Defense Secretary William Cohen, and Speaker Newt Gingrich have all read with interest, and finally a recent New Yorker article, "The Bioweaponeers." In the course of learning from a wide range of experts, I have become an expert myself.
Biological weapons are among the most dangerous weapons in the world today. They are infectious diseases, living organisms. Some are very contagious. Unlike any other weapons, biological weapons are alive and know how to replicate. They can make copies of themselves inside the human body. A bioweapon can copy itself endlessly in people. A nuclear bomb can't make copies of itself. From a small point of release, a bioweapon can jump from person to person in a explosive chain of lethal infection. A bioweapon makes no distinction between soldier and civilian, rich and poor, ordinary people or national leaders: we are all equally vulnerable.
The Soviet biological-weapons program was known as Biopreparat, or "The System" by the scientists who worked in it. Biopreparat was founded in 1974 by a special state directive to carry on with a clandestine bioweapons program, shortly after the Soviet Union signed the Biological Weapons Convention, which bans the development, stockpiling, and use of bioweapons.
Biopreparat was like an egg. The outside part was devoted to peaceful medical research. The hidden inner part, the yolk, was devoted to the creation and production of sophisticated bioweapons powders-smallpox, black plague, anthrax, tularemia, the Marburg virus, and certain brain viruses.
At its height in the late 1980s, Biopreparat employed around 32,000 scientists and staff. It was scattered in about fifteen major biowarfare facilities across the Former Soviet Union. The sites included a huge virus-research facility called Vector, in Siberia. Biopreparat was staffed by scientists, but it was controlled and funded by the Soviet Ministry of Defense. The military was responsible for developing the weapons delivery systems, while Biopreparat made the hot warhead material. The scientists and military people didn't get along with each other, and there was a lot of mutual suspicion and dislike. Biopreparat was an inefficient bureaucracy. It resembled the Soviet space program or the Soviet hydrogen-bomb project. The system was flawed, but it had some very definite successes.
For example, Soviet scientists developed in an airborne, powdered form of the Marburg virus-a close cousin of the Ebola virus, which causes people to die by hemorrhage from the openings of the body. The weaponized Marburg virus was reportedly so potent that monkeys (and presumably people) would die after exposure to a single particle trapped in the lungs. They also discovered a way to mass-produce Marburg virus using a simple technology that is available to any country.
The powders were stockpiled by the ton for quick loading into ICBM missiles and special weapons systems. Biopreparat was required to stockpile no less than 20 tons of freeze-dried smallpox powder, which was stored in bunkers near missile-launching silos. The smallpox was targeted on the United States. We were a so-called "deep target." This means that since the United States was in a different continent, it was presumed that smallpox would rage in North America but not get back to Russia. The smallpox and the other agents were produced to be loaded into special MIRV biological warheads designed to be mounted intercontinental ballistic missiles. Twenty tons of smallpox would fill a large number of strategic bio-warheads. The capacity of these biowarheads was roughly 100 pounds of dry smallpox. This implies the Soviets had perhaps 100 to 400 smallpox warheads. They probably had an equal number of Black Death warheads. The Soviets could have easily hit the 100 largest cities in the United States with devastating combined outbreaks of strategic smallpox and Black Death-an attack that could easily kill as many people as a major nuclear war.
At the time, there was a general belief among leading American scientists that biological weapons were not a problem and would not even work effectively as weapons. I say that no country would deploy strategic warheads without thorough testing. Those warheads worked. Furthermore, some very influential American experts in biological weapons were insisting that the Soviet Union was not and could not be violating the Biological Weapons Convention. Today, few leading American biologists know anything about biological weapons, and many still seem to believe that bioweapons don't really work and are not much of a problem. I leave you to conclude whether the American scientific leadership has served the public and its government well in this matter.
I have no idea where those biowarheads are now. I don't know if they're still launchable. Are any of them still targeted on the United States? Who knows. The Russian government has never admitted to having them in the first place. Russian military people have never said these warheads were destroyed. One can wonder if other countries, such as Iran or Iraq, have obtained examples of the biowarheads, for use as study models for their own missile programs.
The biowarhead had special cooling systems to keep a virus alive during the heat of re-entry. It was meant to drop down over a city on a parachute. When the warhead reached a certain height over the ground, it burst apart, and bomblets full of smallpox would fly off all directions. The bomblets were egg-shaped and made of aluminum, and were about the size of small melons. They would pop open with soft sound, and powdered smallpox (or Marburg, or Black Death) would disperse in the air over the city, almost instantly becoming invisible. The powder is very fine. It's treated with plastics and resins to increase its potency and longevity in the air.
A weaponized bioparticle is very small, about 1 to 5 microns across. That's the size that lodges best in the human lung. To get an idea of the size of a weaponized particle, you could think about fifty of them lined up side by side: they'd span the thickness of a human hair.
They are invisible in the air, and they can travel for miles.
I'll give you a demonstration using harmless baby powder. This illustrates what a bioweapon really looks like in the air-it disperses and becomes invisible and undetectable.
There is a time lag after the release-people have become infected, and now they're incubating the virus-and then people start to die. Respectfully, I want to show you some photographs of real human victims of natural smallpox virus. These photographs were taken in the 1970s by doctors fighting natural outbreaks. Bear in mind that smallpox is fantastically contagious-it spreads through coughing and droplet infection, like the common cold, and one human with smallpox can infect 20 or 30 more people. Most of the human population of the earth has little or no immunity to it today, because the vaccine wears off. Even those of us who've had shots are no longer immune.
I know that these photographs are shocking, but many people have the mistaken idea that smallpox is like an exaggerated form of chicken pox. It isn't. There's a bloody, hemorrhagic form of smallpox which looks like the crash and bleed-out that happens with Ebola virus. Blistering and bleeding occur inside the body, in the stomach and intestines. As you can see, the skin seems to blacken and shrivel. This is called blackpox. In a military release of smallpox, the victims would be receiving extremely high doses of smallpox, far higher than in a natural outbreak, and we can suspect that many of the victims would be developing blackpox and having smallpox bleedouts. Blackpox is even more contagious than so-called ordinary smallpox.
Smallpox virus is easy to make in large quantities. I'm not going say exactly how to do it, but basically you can grow it in glass bottles the size of wine bottles. A room full of these bottles constitutes a national biological-weapons laboratory. Virtually any nation can have such a facility, and hide it easily. All you need is a master seed strain and a few Ph.D. scientists and perhaps $200,000 worth of equipment, which can be bought on the open market.
Have scientists left Russia bringing their expertise and master seed strains of smallpox with them, or other bioweapon seed strains? We would be foolish not to presume so. In 1990, about 4,500 scientists and researchers worked at Vektor. Today, only about 1,000 to 1,500 people work there. The rest have gone elsewhere: into other jobs, other labs, or they're unemployed. Some, I do believe, have left Russia. I have been told by American scientists who've visited Vektor that the security around the smallpox storage area is pathetic- "one pimply-faced kid holding a Kalashnikov that may not have any bullets in it," in the words of one American scientist.
This underlines the need for the United States to stockpile the smallpox vaccine. There are currently only 7 million usable doses on hand. Experts believe that in any terrorist release of smallpox, even a small one, the virus is so contagious that it would be necessary to vaccinate at least 20 to 30 million Americans to stop the outbreak. The U.S. Army has a new way to make smallpox vaccine very cheaply and in large quantities, but it needs to be tested and approved. Enough smallpox vaccine for every citizen-270 million doses-could be stored in a small building the size of a garage, and the vaccine would remain potent for decades. By having plenty of vaccine ready, we effectively remove smallpox as a good weapon from the arsenal of a would-be terrorist. It would also take smallpox out of the hands of Saddam Hussein far more effectively (and cheaply) than bombing his laboratories-for the American vaccine could be offered to any country threatened by smallpox, thus making the virus much less credible as a menace or a weapon.
To this day, the Russian government and leading Russian biologists have never clearly admitted to the world that they had a large bioweapons program. They have not disclosed its extent or its basic work. They've never owned up to what they did. Instead, to this day, we continue to hear evasions, doublespeak, and outright lies. American experts who've been to Russia and inspected the biowarfare facilities have nagging suspicions that bioweapons research and development still continues in Russia. Biological weapons are an ethical and scientific abomination, a disgrace to biology. Leading American scientists should come out and say so, loudly and clearly. It's time for our scientific leadership to makes its voice heard.
Biological weapons are exceedingly dangerous, but some sharp thinking and some wise planning right now can make us much safer. As a citizen and a parent of children, I thank you for this hearing and for your concern.
No that's step two...step one is to send Tommy Thompson out to tell us that the victim caught whatever he has by drinking from a mountain stream in NC.