Terrorist Use of Biological Weapons - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 303

they had not contained warnings, and if the amount of powder in each
had been too small to be obvious).
Fortunately, there is no evidence that any terrorist group currently has
the requisite expertise to obtain a lethal BW agent, prepare it in a suitable
formulation in quantity, and disseminate it via aerosol to cause mass
casualties. The Aum's failure on all three counts, despite its unusually
highly educated membership, and despite its expenditure of large sums
(estimated to be around $20 million), is consistent with this evaluation.
Nevertheless, the anthrax letter attacks remind us of the potential devas-
tation that could result from the combination of the expertise of the an-
thrax letter perpetrator with the motivation to cause mass casualties of
international terrorist groups.
It seems to us prudent to restrict the practical expertise of weapon-
ization to the greatest extent possible. Doing so would entail ensuring
that the expertise developed in the offensive BW programs of the coun-
tries described in earlier chapters is not available to terrorists. And it
would suggest that biodefense programs be sharply limited, especially
projects that entail activities which develop expertise that is useful for of-
fense.
Although we think that the threat of BW aerosol attack by terrorists is
exaggerated, we believe that the threat of attack via food contamination
may be insufficiently appreciated. The success of the Rajneesh in causing
(probably) thousands of casualties by contaminating restaurant salad bars
is grounds for concern. There is no reason why the same method could
not be used for some lethal BW agents, and it would avoid the necessity
for special weaponized formulations and for sophisticated aerosol-gener-
ating technology. Unfortunately, there is no way to address this risk effec-
tively short of prohibiting self-service restaurant facilities.
Regardless of the nature of potential attacks, no set of measures can en-
sure that a country is protected from bioterrorism. Every country will
need to learn to live with some measure of vulnerability, and will have to
balance the costs—financial, loss of openness, erosion of civil rights—of
biodefense measures against their modest contributions to security.